PowerBook G4 17" 1.33

this is Mica, my 1.33GHz Powerbook G4. she's another one that started out being owned by my partner's mom, but this one went directly from her posession to storage, until me and my partner dug her up years later. she's in original condition as far as i can tell, even has an original battery and charger, and she's in surprisingly good condition for her age.

for a long while, when the internet was still just about useable for her, i would bring her home and set her up next to my gaming pc to use for notes or reference or to just play some dvd or something. i haven't been able to do that in years tho, due to the bloat of the internet and a lack of space on my desk now that i have more monitors. nowadays she mostly gets used for ingesting footage from one of my miniDV camcorders, or to play early os x games, as she's the fastest PowerPC portable in the collection. she handles a good chunk of what i wanna play on early os x, but she really does need a mouse for a lot of those games, as her trackpad is rather innacurate, and unreliable on right clicks. i'm sure it wasn't that unusual when she was built tho. the 17" screen is lovely tho, and it's had me wanting to own a 17" laptop for more general use for years. haven't got there yet tho. the only real issue with the screen is that it's a widescreen, and a lot of the older games i play on her don't really understand that, so i end up with a lot of stretched games with no way to change them.

i was never too taken with the looks of this machine, as my first laptop was a hand-me-down macbook pro from 2006 that looked almost exactly the same, but she has a few details that are changed and that i have always enjoyed, like the extra vents on bottom or the way the screen springs open when you press the latch. that said, it is awful to get inside for anything more than a ram swap, and i'm not looking forward to one day putting an ssd in her. i maxed her ram last time i was in there, so hopefully i won't have to do any more surgery until then at least.

something else that's really nice is that she's new enough to be able to connect to the wifi still, and with her PowerPC processor i feel reasonably safe browsing some sites, so i can just download programs and things for her, instead of having to rely on flash drives to transfer stuff from newer computers, like with some of my old windows rigs.

overall, she is still one of the easiest vintage computers to actually use. lots of things run happily, software is still readily available and easy to get onto the system, and she's easy to grab for a quick task or just to kill some time. i may prefer desktop machines still, for the cooling potential and for the input devices available, but it's lovely and convenient having such a nice laptop to run old things.

update 10/05/25: it's been about a month since i typed this and i've been using mica as my primary laptop this whole time. she's been startlingly useable and v fun to use, and while most modern sites are beyond her capabilities, enough works to do most of what i need, and i've found most applications to be quite snappy, some moreso even than modern equivalents. she does rather badly need a bigger drive, potentially even an ssd, but that's mostly because she hasn't been wiped since at least 2007, so there's plenty of files built up. i was confused for a while cuz every finder window says that there's 160gb total space on the drive and almost none free, which confused me cuz there was nowhere near 160gb of stuff taking up space. turns out it's just a software error, the part number on the drive shows it's an 80gb drive. it does make me kinda nervous tho, i will be replacing that sooner rather than later i think. otherwise she seems to be in fantastic shape, incredibly capable, and more than happy to keep going.