Apple PowerBook Titanium

5owners with an opinion

100%of verdicts positive

4/0positive/negative since 2024

20 yrslongest happy owner

1happy after 3+ years

Praised for repairability and reliability; criticized for performance and display.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 20 yearsStill going

> a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have a 20yro TiBook. Both the RTC and the main battery are dead, and there's a tiny screen defect, but the machine is otherwise perfectly usable (if relatively slow). And by usable, I mean the desktop experience of Mac OS X 10.5 often feels more polished than that of some of the modern OS's... The big bummer is that the modern web keeps raising a wall that's getting too tall for these machines to climb. TLS, JavaScript, and the firehose of new standards are making a lot of resources inaccessible. (If you're in charge of maintaining a web server, please consider allowing unencrypted traffic on port 80 (rather than unconditionally redirecting to HTTPS), unless the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests[1] is present. Coupled with HSTS[2], it allows these "living museum pieces" to stay alive, while not compromising on security.) [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Up... [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St...

Likes it

> Amazes me they don't just sell it like that everywhere because it sounds a lot like a product improvement... I'm not so sure. The first laptop I bought, a Titanium Powerbook, had replaceable batteries. And even better than that: you could hot-swap them while the laptop was running on battery power, and the laptop wouldn't even shut off. It felt leagues ahead of even modern replaceable battery functionality, and honestly? After owning that laptop for years, I felt like I just wasted my money with that additional battery. Part of it, I'm sure, was that I didn't have an external charger to charge the battery not currently in the laptop. But on the whole, it just didn't feel like it was actually worthwhile, and when Apple stopped shipping replaceable batteries, I've never missed it. (Hot swapping the batteries really was awesome, though)

Likes it

Damn, the number of these that I've had. Hardest choice for me: Apple Extended Keyboard 2 vs TiBook. Had both, Used AEK2s for a decade or more, still have the TiBook with Myst on it.

Likes it

My first Apple laptop, a Titanium PowerBook, you could sleep the machine and swap the battery and not have to reboot.

Likes it

Purely anecdotal: I worked at an Apple VAR when the TiBook was released, but I honestly can't remember any real controversy. They were a big hit. Quite easy to repair too. I wasn't there for the plastic Intel MacBooks, but the biggest complaint I remember hearing about was that the black one collected fingerprints like crazy and, later on, some overheating issues. They were also a pain to repair, though not as bad as the iBooks before them.

Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it

As far as I can tell your only argument against adding a touchscreen is that Apple has previously taken the stance that they would not do it, so that I what I was responding to. But of course yes, Apple has vaguely and generally declined and their products are flops. Unlike the good old days of the first versions of Mac OSX, the G4 Cube, the iPod HiFi, the flaking-paint Titanium Powerbook, the bendy iPhone 6, or of course Ping, the revolutionary music social network.

Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it

I still don't understand we are comparing a brand new company's engineering to Apple, who have been making laptops for what, 40 years now? Apple's GPUs used to over heat a fry the laptop. They used to make keyboards that would fully break because of a piece of dust, but they were riveted down so they were irreplaceable. Titanium powerbooks had hinges that would break in a year.