Ever wondered how old/cheap a Mac you need to buy to get the real Mac Experience? My suggestion: a dual-USB iBook G3.
My one dates from 2002. I still use it occasionally. It's quite capable in some areas. I've maxed the ram up to the full 640MB and it's running Tiger 10.4.11. It's a useful machine if you choose your software carefully. There's plenty of software and some of it is even current, including at least two browsers. And it's so cheap that you wouldn't mind losing it. Let's have a look.
Things to like
Design. The minimalistic white look is really appealing and seems to keep its pristine look for a long time. The iBooks are pretty silent (in contrast to my MacBook, which always seems to be humming or whirring quietly to itself). The 4:3 screen (1024 x 768) is a nice shape for writing. Getting at the ram slots and the Airport card is a 5 minute job. They're not cold to the touch, unlike the MacBook, which always feels cold in winter.Things not to like
The USB ports are on the left side, which makes attaching an external mouse a little awkward. The iBook G3's maximum ram is 640MB. The processor gets overloaded by most browsers. It rarely feels quick online.Other downsides? USB 1.1. Moving anything through USB 1.1 takes a while. However, it's quicker than Bluetooth and there are two ports. If you have a high quality camera (10 megapixels and up) and you take a lot of photos, be prepared to wait. Ditto anything else that needs USB. Syncing a recent iPod or iPhone won't work work without USB2. Check the specification of your iOS device for compatibility. Don't forget, though - you can use Firewire 400.
Lastly, it doesn't support WPA2, so if you use wifi, your router will need to be set to WPA/WPA2, if it's not already.
What software will it run?
Using the Web
An iBook G3 with Tiger 10.4.11 will run the latest versions of TenFourFox and Camino. A hot tip is to make your browser self-identify as a mobile browser, which will then cause many websites to serve you up the mobile "lite" versions; there are plugins for this. This tip is great for reading newspapers and for sites like Facebook as well. As browsers tend to grab most of the G3 processor, though, don't plan on doing much else when you go online.Writing
I mostly use TextEdit in ascii mode for initial work. Keeping the drafts in ascii means there's full compatibility with my other Macs using Dropbox. Yes, Dropbox works on iBook G3s with Tiger, as do Simplenote apps like Notational Velocity, which is excellent. LibreOffice and NeoOffice are sloooww. The originally-supplied AppleWorks 6 (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, database, presentation, drawing and painting tools) runs well. Appleworks looks old but it's fast on this machine (perhaps because of the maxed-out RAM), deceptively powerful and files can be exported to older MS Office formats or printed to PDF, same as anything else. Older versions of MS Office should work. There are some standalone word-processors (Bean and older versions of Nisus Writer Express, among others). Older versions of MySQL and FileMaker should run, if you need a powerful database and the AppleWorks database is quite useful for basic work. SQLite also works.Multimedia
iLife '04 was the last version to fully support the G3, so far as I know. I haven't tried it. DVDs play well, although the built-in speakers are not great (headphones are way better, as are powered external speakers). This is assuming your iBook has a DVD drive, which mine does; but not all do. iTunes 8.2.1 is still available for download and mostly works. It doesn't display the iTunes Store but you can search it successfully.Networking and Connectivity
The iBook has an ethernet port. It also does wifi, using original Airport (wifi) card which only supports 802.11b and, as mentioned, offers WPA-level security but not WPA2. There's even a dialup modem. The USB 1.1 ports really limit syncing and connecting, but at least there are two of them. There's no Bluetooth either, although a dongle might work.However, the iBook has a FireWire 400 port - I've connected an old miniDV Sony HandyCam and external Firewire hard drives and everything worked fine.
You can hook up a VGA screen via a VGA adapter but only up to 1024x768 and there's no screen spanning (unlike the G4, which has a hack).
Alternative Interfaces
This is a Mac OS X machine but it's worth noting that there are two other interfaces and therefore software options.There's a Terminal app in the Utilities folder, offering a pretty standard bash command line. Terminal apps run well: it's a highly capable little Unix box for anyone who likes command line Unix without installing Linux somewhere. You can try classic Unix tools like top, head, tail, cat, emacs, pico and vi. You can install classic Unix terminal apps like pine and lynx.
You can install an X11 server to run for graphical Unix software. Apache is preinstalled and Tiger comes with gcc, Perl and Python as well as Applescript and Xcode.
As it's a G3 mac, the iBook will also run Mac OS 9, if you want to see what 1990s Macs looked like.
What won't it run?
Anything that needs a G4 and/or Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". Anything designed purely for Intel. So, no App Store, Microsoft Office 2008 or 2011, Kindle, Evernote or Google Chrome. There are plenty of old Mac games online, but with only 8MB of video ram, this machine will never fly. Later G3 iBooks had 16MB of video ram and the last ones had 32mb, same as the iBook G4.Flash-based sites won't work. You can forget about HD video and even miniDV can be a bit jumpy. Quicktime's not great. To be fair, the iBook G4 is also generally very poor at flash too, but the G4 will run the very awesome Mactubes, which gives the iBook G4 excellent access to Youtube and some other flash sites.
Support
Keyboards, memory, batteries and power units are all commonly available on Ebay and elsewhere. Airport cards for wifi are harder to find now. It helps that the iBook G3's successor, the iBook G4, used many of the same parts (excluding the Airport card).Is an old iBook G3 worth buying, or upgrading, in 2013?
White dual-USB iBook G3s with twelve-inch screens sell online in the UK for about £50-150, depending on vendor, model, condition, software and specification; fourteen inch iBooks sell for a small premium although screen resolution is the same. If you already have an old dual-USB iBook, you can push the RAM up to 512MB or 640Mb and add Tiger cheaply for £100-120. That's half the price of a netbook. However, that's probably only worth it if you already own an iBook or see a good deal on Ebay. It's probably cheaper to buy one that's already been upgraded. Watch the deals for a few weeks and see what comes up. Get a feel for the market. Go for the fastest G3 you can find. The newer ones have better specs.If you can afford it, aim for a machine with Tiger and at least 512MB of ram. If you're forced to choose between an average machine with Tiger or one with extra RAM, buy the one with Tiger, especially if the seller is supplying the discs. Tiger discs for PowerPC are expensive and hard to find; RAM isn't. And lastly, Tiger only comes on a DVD. So if you're buying, go for an iBook with a DVD drive. There are workarounds, but none is easy for a beginner.
Taking iBooks apart (for example, to change the hard disk) is an extremely time-consuming process for engineers and is uneconomic. However, adding RAM and/or a wifi card are both easily done in about five minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment