12" Powerbook

I'm looking at getting a used 12" powerbook G4. I'd like to use it mainly for checking email while travelling, downloading pics from my D70, and maybe some light photoshop editing.

Is any of this beyond the old powerbook? I like the portability of it, but I want to make sure it can handle the job and maybe more if possible. If anyone has one of these, can you give me examples of what kind of software you can comfortably run?

Thanks!

 

No, none of it is beyond the old PowerBook; the big downside as I see it is that it's sort of a dead-end, and as things continue to move to Intel-only software it will become more and more irrelevant.

But plenty of people use the PowerBook G4 for Photoshop, e-mail, web browsing, etc. so you should be fine.

 

Yup, the G4 powerbook will certainly handle those tasks fairly easily... Apple hardware ages more gracefully than PC hardware, and has a much longer lifespan.

That being said, Zadillo's point is quite valid. As Apple moves further away from the PPC architecture, you risk being left behind.

 

The 12" powerbook is a great machine. The problem is that you will likely pay a premium for it since there is no replacement as yet. And as the two previouse posts have said, its a dead end.

 

I looked into this option a few months back as well, but I actually found it quite hard to find a 12" pb at a reasonable price, in fact many were selling for almost as much as a new macbook. Unless you happen to find one at a bargin price I would look at a a new or referbished macbook, its a bit bigger and heavier but for about the same money you get a much better laptop that isnt a dead end.
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That's simply not true.

 

It's not completely untrue; it's generally widely known in the industry that Macs seem to generally stay in service for longer periods of times relative to PC's, and have longer replacement cycles.

I can say that personally, I am currently running Mac OS X 10.4.9 on a pretty old Power Mac G4 Cube with a 450 MHz G4 processor with 768 megs of RAM. OS X still actually runs somewhat decently on it; I've also got a comparable IBM NetVista with XP on it, and it is much more of a chore to use (but still useable, to be fair).

-Zadillo

 

While the lifespan part may be debatable, Macs do tend to age more gracefully for one major reason, it's a closed system. Since Apple knows all of the hardware OS X will run on, and it is a limited amount of hardware, they can go to greater lengths to ensure compatibility and speed where Windows can't. It's not a knock on Windows, it's a product of Apple's closed system.

 

Only because a sizable number of their customers view them as museum pieces to be dusted when not used for term papers, and not business machines to be upgraded or discarded when faster equipment comes off the line. It's also less expensive to upgrade PC systems by the part when speedier or more useful components are available, because they are all commodities in the real sense of the word.

 

Are you just trolling at this point?

There are plenty of Mac users for whom older Macs simply serve their purposes just fine - for plenty of people who do just e-mail, web browsing, etc. a much older Mac continues to work just fine. It doesn't have anything to do with viewing them as museum pieces, etc.

As it is, there's actually a pretty healthy market for aftermarket upgrades for many components of older Macs, even including CPU's, and I know a fair number of people who extend the life of their Macs further this way.

I'm really not sure what your point is. There are also plenty of PC users who continue to use older PC's (although often keeping with older Windows releases) for the exact same reason.

 

Because it's a closed system.

Because it's not a closed system.


If you upgraded parts on a PowerBook, would you be running Tiger on it? I know if I wanted to, I could install XP or Vista on a 10 year old notebook; it might run slowly, but it would run.

Look, no trolling, but a comment like "Apple hardware ages more gracefully than PC hardware, and has a much longer lifespan." can't be abided.

 

Yes, generally speaking, OS X upgrades continue to work on older hardware, either with or without aftermarket CPU upgrades.

Aside from that though, Mac OS X Tiger still supports some fairly old PowerBooks like the 500 MHz PowerBook G3 with the bronze keyboard.

Either way, I wasn't even talking about how well these things go. Some of those things are subjective, while the actual lifespan of Macs is a bit different.

I'm not sure though what exactly it is you're complaining about. As I already said, there are PC users who squeeze a lot of life out of their systems too; but at least generally, it seems more common for older PC's that are still in service to continue running older versions of Windows (I can definitely tell you, for example, that on one of the old PIII-based Sony Vaio laptops we have at our office, I'd much rather run Win98 on it than try bothering with XP). Whereas Mac OS X Tiger actually still runs somewhat decently on systems like a 400 MHz iBook G3.

 

Yeah, that's a fair question. Forget for a moment the one part of that original statement (touching on the concept of construction). The answer is, if a poster is going to talk about something "aging gracefully," one must ask what the heck that even means.

A linear evolution in the PC for over 15 years has allowed it not only to run something like 98 (in order to best match an OS with its hardware), but also to run something a little beyond its design capacity at any given iteration in its development timeline without porting to a completely separate architecture.

Compare that with well now we're not running 68000, we're doing Power; wait, we're discontinuing the Power series, now it's Intel Core.

Conversely, if I want to run DOS on one of these things, or 98, I get a really freaking fast experience. Which isn't as successful when attempting pre 10 OSx.x on a Core. (If you'd even want to do that.)

I'll stop on this note: Is this aging gracefully?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/400000/images/_400464_imac_handle150.jpg

 

Fair enough, although from a practical standpoint it hasn't been that different. I mean, there is a pretty set group of hardware that Win95/98/ME runs acceptably on, and a different set that XP runs acceptably on. There's certainly some crossover, but that's about it.

By the same token, Apple has historically handled the CPU transitions pretty darned well, in terms of supporting older hardware.

Even after the PowerPC transition, Apple continued supporting 68k hardware. PowerPC systems arrived in 1994, but Apple continued releasing new OS updates for 68k systems through 1998, with Mac OS 8.1.

And since Mac OS 8.5 in October 1998, they still supported older 68k software through emulation. Similarly, the classic Mac OS continued to be supported on OS X based systems through 2006 (up until the switch to Intel). And with the Intel switch, PowerPC emulation is included, allowing similar support for older PowerPC-based software. This is generally a pretty good track record, and has for the most part given people plenty of time to continue using their existing systems while still getting updates, etc.

The big point I'd make is that for the most part this made a lot of the transition fairly seamless. As drastic as the changes from 68k to PPC and PPC to Intel were, they were handled in such a way that it was almost seamless from the end user perspective, and people weren't really left in the lurch.

I don't think this is all that different really when looking at the systems you would realistically want to run Win95/98 on and the systems you would realistically want to run WinXP on.

-Zadillo

 

one day i was looking for a wireless router cheap and my online buddy contacted me and said that he would give me a wireless router when i received the box it was a router and a 12 powerbook and all i paid was like 25 bucks for shipping. So i got my powerbook free.

 

Have a look at yongren's post history and judge for yourself... of course, he could just be playing devils advocate.

 

I don't get it, do you mean because the intel pc mac can support xp/vista so more programs will be created non osx based?

 

Well, that's another issue (and one reason why I think an Intel-based Mac is a better deal for the future, since you can run Windows stuff as well).

But what I meant is, right now, most developers are still making their software compatible both with the PowerPC chips in the older Macs, and the Intel chips in the newer Macs. But we're already starting to see some Intel-only releases (i.e. Adobe Lightroom), and I would expect to see more and more software become Intel-only (with no PowerPC binaries) in the future.

Granted, it will probably be a number of years before this happens, by which point the 12" PBG4 would probably have finally reached its usable lifespan anyway. But it's a factor to consider.

-Zadillo

 

The OP has probably been scared off by now, but here's my take on getting a used 12" PB...

As has already been said, if you can find one for a decent price, they are great for all the apps you named. You can even do a little gaming on one ... I played Star Wars Knights of the Republic and Neverwinter Nights on mine. The only downside to the 12" PB is the display is a little dim. I didn't really notice this until I put an Intel MacBook beside it. Now I have a hard time going back to the 12"PB, but I keep it as a back up for my office computer (email, photos, iTunes).

The 13" MacBooks really aren't that much bigger to carry than the 12" PB ... so I do think that might be the route to go.

There is something about the solid feel and look of the 12" PowerBook that is hard to beat. Plus the dedicated GPU is nice. I'm one of those who would buy a 12" MacBook Pro in a heartbeat...