iBook G3 Clamshell

This was my partner's very first laptop, a hand-me-down from their mother. They used it for a few years before it was eventually replaced by a hand-me-down aluminum Powerbook, at which point it ended up in storage for years until we dug it up together to indulge our love of funky old computers. To my immense surprise, the original hard drive still worked fine, just a bit noisy, though the battery is completely dead.

The iBook was originally designed to be a portable iMac, and was aimed mainly at students, with other home users being somewhat secondary. The distinctive curvy, clamshell-shaped casing was designed to absorb impacts while still looking stylish. The colors were chosen to match the contemporary iMacs, and the whole thing has a very late-90s tech look that I really love. The keyboard is reasonably comfortable, and while the trackpad is absolutely tiny by modern standards, it's not bad for the time and the oversized, color-matched button is clicky just like a desktop mouse, and is quite comfortable to use. The single speaker is rather muffled, but not bad for a late-90s laptop speaker. It even includes a surprisingly sturdy folding handle on the back. On the whole, I'd say it succeeded at it's brief as a student laptop.

This particular model is the second generation, designed for improved multimedia performance. To this end it incorporated a Firewire 400 port, a composite video out, and an optional 4x DVD-ROM drive. The Firewire and the video out turned it into a capable home video editing machine, ingesting footage off your camcorder, edit it using the included copy of iMovie, and then spit it out onto a TV using the video out jack. The DVD-ROM isn't a burner, so you can't burn your movies to disc, but you can still use it as a DVD player, and the screen is just big enough to fit widescreen DVDs as well.

This computer is currently my only OS 9 capable machine, and so I mostly use it currently for messing around with OS 9 and the various programs available. I didn't get a lot of chance to use the OS when I was younger before my family upgraded to OS X, so I've really been enjoying using something that's very different but also rather familiar. It doesn't hurt that it runs a bunch of old games I haven't played in forever, but I've even been enjoying just using it as a computer.

Admittedly it's uses are somewhat limited day to day, being a laptop that's tethered to it's charger, with no real way to connect to a modern wireless network, and very little support for video codecs and not enough disk space to rip disks. As such it's mostly relegated to a retro games machine, though it's so dependent on external devices that it's really more of a portable desktop machine, and I have more capable retro desktops, provided my uses don't require OS 9. This all sounds pretty negative I suppose, but I really am happy when I find a good reason to pull the clamshell out of storage, such as to write this webpage. I'll try to update this page if and when I figure out other things to use this for, but for now that's all I've got.