Apple PowerBook G3

I never owned one of these while they were contemporary (though did own a somewhat comparable iMac) but picked a 500Mhz model up a couple years ago. Running OS 9 on modern storage (SSD), it's surprising how responsive it is for most tasks with a single core sub-gigahertz CPU and RAM capacity below the on-disk size of many apps these days. Much of any impression of slowness in day-to-day use when it was current was almost certainly a result of its mechanical HDD.

this was my first Apple laptop. i even had an orinoco gold wifi pcmcia card, a pringles can, a bit of all-thread, and an antenna cable, and away my friend and i went on wardriving expeditions. back then, wifi wasn't nearly as established yet, and it was fun to a couple of knuckleheads to map out locations. if only we could have known how mapping would evolve.

I have one of these PowerBooks, the 500 MHz Pismo. I bought it the day it was discontinued (intentionally), using a friend who could get it with a student discount. My memory is it cost me $2,000 between the end-of-life status and student discount. I keep it around to have an OS 9 machine and the occasional urge to play Descent (the only computer game I’ve ever played). Pretty certain I have mine set up with OS X 10.4 Tiger along with OS 9. In truth, I haven’t booted it in years. For its time, it was a speedy Mac. Sure, the spinning hard drive wasn’t ideal, but that was the norm back then. As others have noted, getting inside to replace something like RAM was easy, by little more than just lifting up the keyboard. Built-in Firewire proved beneficial since I got an external burner as the machine didn’t have one natively. Likewise, I later got the add-on Airport card (802.11b), which was my first exposure to WiFi internet and felt liberating, no longer tethered to a modem. Installation of that Airport card is another example of how the flip-up keyboard made this upgrade easy. The big feature I think most users appreciated were the hot-swappable bays. By default on my machine, one had a battery and the other the CD/DVD drive. There were plenty of useful capabilities with these, notably a second battery—maybe you’d get 10 hours unplugged—or things like a ZIP drive. To swap an item in a bay was as simple as pulling a small lever to eject an item, and merely inserting another item…

I have still it and it was ahead of its time. With whopping 196MB upgrade and MacOSX 1.0 was a great laptop

I used to use (and still own) one of those PowerBook G3 laptops where you could swap the media bay for a CD-RW, a floppy, or a Zip drive, or just more batteries. With modern Li-ion battery technology in both the main battery and the media bay, that thing ran for 20+ hours. It was amazing.

The Apple Powerbook G3 PDQ is by and far the best laptop ever, indeed. Modular, easy to repair and even the CPU is on a swappable board. A breath of fresh air in the world of soldered in components!

Sad thing is, Apple used to make keyboards that were even easier to replace than Thinkpad ones: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/PowerBook+G3+Pismo+Keyboard+Rep...