I had a Pismo and it was great, but IMHO the greatest of that generation was the 2400c which was the smallest powerbook, great for anyone who spent a lot of time flying around.
It was designed and built by IBM Japan, which was lucky for me when I spilled tea into mine...while I was in Tokyo. I was able to get a same day repair by walking it over to some random shop in the Akihabara (apple sent me there) where some guy repaired it while I watched.
While massive by today's standards, it was svelte for its time, and attracted stares whenI would pull it out. Great for operating on a plane too.
Came here to also praise the 2400c. I finally restored mine to working condition just last week after finding a donor screen from a parts machine.
Excellent build quality thanks to IBM Japan who thankfully incorporated the inverted T arrow keys, a first for an Apple notebook, which still persists to today's MacBooks. The 2400c excellent build quality also doesn't suffer from poor hinges like the PowerBook 500/5300/1400c models.
The processor is on a daughterboard allowing the 2400c to be upgraded to a G3, and the modding scene out of Japan has brought a ton of interesting upgrades like translucent cases and keyboards.
The main problems the 2400c suffers from are leaky PRAM batteries and other issues causing the dreaded Green Light of Death (GLoD), where the machine won't boot without hardware replacements like a new processor card.
Random trivia, this is the last model where the Apple logo on the back of the screen is oriented to be right side up for the user when they close the display.
Their next laptop was the G4 titanium, which rotated the logo to be right side up when looking at the back of the screen while it's open.
The fact that they made it glow when open is what made the decision just so weird. The only way it would glow was when it was open. So the fact that they made it not glow when they did flip it was just all sorts of whathehuh? kind of logic.
I think the best PowerPC based apple laptop was the Powerbook G4 titanium. It's pretty much a design classic, was lightweight, and ran OS9. It was I think the first Mac that didn't feel like a massive compromise when running a laptop vs a desktop machine. It introduced widescreen displays, and the 1Ghz model even came with a DVD writer if I remember.
It struggled with some design problems, notably that the hinges failed, and the display ribbon rubbed causing display problems after been opened/closed too many times.
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 disc 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 until it clicked into place. All told, a couple of seconds.
One notable, unavoidable downside to the machine was its weight—put it in a laptop bag of that era along with a power cord and weight was going to be at least 10 pounds all in, to say nothing of other things one might want on the go. This wasn’t outrageous for its time, but it shows how much bulkier and heavier things were then. And while the keyboard was well-designed for accessing the machine’s innards, it wasn’t a particularly good keyboard to type on because it was a thin plastic that had a lot of flex to it.
In Apple behavior that continues to this day, the default memory capacities were on the low end. It was officially capable of 512 MB of RAM (unofficially 1 GB), but shipped with 128 MB. Hard drives were either 12 GB or 20 GB.
For its time in the Mac world, the machine was great (I can’t compare it to Windows notebooks of that era). But things have changed, as they usually do. That screen looks pathetic today, it’s loud and easily louder from being taxed, there was no MagSafe, plastic is less pleasant in long-term use, etc. But for the capabilities most users wanted at the turn of the century, it was a great machine if you were a Mac user.
With modern batteries of that size you are likely to get more like 30 hours. The last set of NewerTech batteries I had in my Pismo lasted effectively forever. And 15 years of battery technology have passed since then.
My favorite Mac laptop was my first one, a 12" G4 Powerbook. Perfect in every way. I still miss that laptop, used it up until OS X Tiger went EOL, and even a little past that with TenFourFox browser.
The 12" MacBook was in a lot of ways the spiritual successor to the 12" PowerBook and was hard to beat for portability. It's a shame it was hobbled by the hot and weak Intel CPUs of its era and butterfly keyboard… if they resurrected that form factor with an M-series CPU and improved keyboards of modern MacBooks it'd be a wonderful little machine.
I love the old G4 aluminum macbooks, but man, aluminum was a bad choice for the hinges. You won't find one in 2023 that isn't broken off. Sort of like how you can't find certain models of beige PowerPC Macs that haven't had their outer plastic crumble to dust.
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.
yeah, it's oft-remarked but it's extremely silly how much memory and CPU usage have been inflated over the years. 256MB was just fine for gaming in the early days of XP. windows 98 or windows 2000 could run pretty nicely on like, 64MB - a lot of people ran windows 95 on 16mb even. that's a modern, multitasking desktop OS!
and today you can't boot shit on 16MB.even raspbian or something is going to croak even with XFCE and the lightest-weight setup you can do (short of raw terminal - I did get ubuntu server with fbdev running on a thinkpad with 256MB, although the mach64 driver is in an absolute state at this point).
(menuetOS is a fun regression along this line - a full multiprocessing OS with all the fixings, in x86/x64 assembly, that fits on a 1.44 inch floppy disk)
I know that a lot of that power and memory has been spent on isolation and security, but part of the reason we need that security is because we've turned the browser and OS into a sandbox running untrusted code loading off the internet. It is interesting to watch this video of linus getting a xserve running (challenging due to cert expiration, discontinued services, etc), and part of the OSX Server Tools suite is things like time machine backup host, ichat host (self-hosted XMPP chat server!) and so on, and the point linus makes is that apple saw the way the wind was blowing and decided it would be more profitable to sell the service than the hardware. And writ large that's the tradeoff we've made from the macos 9 era to the modern one. Slower, browser-based and cloud-based applications instead of self-hosted or local applications.
Anyway yes, I have done the same thing as you and original OP and put a mSATA drive in an IDE adapter to get an old machine running, and used a SATA SSD to juice up a cheap laptop when my nice one died in grad school, etc, and a SSD and maxing out the memory (if possible) does make a substantial difference.
People usually tend to think like "it's an old machine, it is running slow anyway" but actually I think it's the opposite and you should think "it's an old machine and it needs all the help it can get". It has little enough processing power already, at least let it progress at the rate of processing and not spend 3/4ths of its cycles waiting for disk!
I am nostalgic for this former age too, but I don’t want it back. I don’t lack for ports, swappable bays, or removable media. Sure, the Pismo could be upgraded via a new daughter card and the hard drive was easy to access but that’s because you needed to upgrade every year. Before my new M1 Macbook Air I had a 2012 Macbook Pro that lasted me about eight years. On another note: In the early 2000s I had a Lombard, 2400c, and Thinkpad 600. There is no doubt the 600 was the best built of the three. Both of the Mac’s felt cheap by comparison mostly due to their plastic (though, the Lombard screen was nicer than the 600.) I remember picking up the first aluminum unibody Macbook and thinking “finally something that is as nice as the 600!”
I had a Wallstreet that broke (the hinges were crap and broke, and then broke on the first replacement from Apple. Also the rubberized texture on the middle of the top case flaked) so it got replaced with a Lombard, which shared the clear brown keycaps with the Pismo. I always missed the black keycaps from the Wallstreet.
The Wallstreet also had a rainbow Apple logo under the screen like a proper Mac laptop. ;)
But if you're looking for a retro one, the Wallstreet ones had some major reliability issues that they improved in the Lombard and Pismo.
A bit silly to talk about how fast installing OS 9 on an SSD is, though. The original HD would be way slower.
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.
The Wally does have one advantage over the Pismo: it runs Rhapsody the best of any laptop (which is to say merely acceptably). If you're into system archaeology and don't want to allocate an entire desktop to that purpose, the Wally is a good fit. Rhapsody is neat, sort of OS X but where Platinum never died.
Pismos are handy with the built-in USB and Firewire but the Wallstreets make better "bridge" machines. They have SCSI that can be booted from with a BlueSCSI or PiSCSI, and the old serial ports which work with Localtalk.
I was gifted a Wallstreet that included working PCMCIA USB and Firewire cards. With floppy and CD in the expansion slots it's a great bridge machine.
My mother-in-law gifted me a Wallstreet that she used in the 90s. I was almost tempted to buy a spot welder to build my own PRAM battery for it since at the time I looked there were no aftermarket ones available.
Mostly OT, but the SuperDisk (LS-120 and LS-240) were the best of the super-floppies:
- Over 100MB is useful for a lot of things
- Backwards compatible with standard 3.5" floppies (though I'm a PC user; they were apparently spotty with old-school 400/800K Mac GCR formatted floppies)
- Eventually could store up to 32MB on a cheap 1.44MB floppy (but required writing all 32MB in one go; kind of like a very limited SMR)
They were just far too late to the game, as Zip had established itself and affordable CD Burners were hot on their heels.
However, other than the speedy OS upgrade, and maybe a lot of ports, I'm not sure what the "better 20 years ago" parts were, but maybe that was more of a random line / opinion type thing.
Either way fun read and visually that laptop is still pretty pleasing. I love my MBA but ... wouldn't mind if it was a bit more organic looking like the G3.
Imagine a modern MBP letting you turn one screw and release a couple of latches to lift out the keyboard for upgrades...
I had a Pismo, which I got with my student discount (and it was still crazily expensive I remember, but not quite how much). It was a good machine, being able to swap batteries / drives / PC cards was slick (sure, now we have usb-c, but where's the clever engineering in that?)
better 20 years ago: doesn't spy on you, doesn't auto-update and wipe your external drive, doesn't have constant UX regressions in every new version, doesn't harass you to sign up to cloud services, doesn't hit a network service to validate every application you run, can actually be repaired yourself, can actually be upgraded yourself... etc.
The difference in interface speed and responsiveness is tremendous. I have a few G4 machines, os9 on them is absolutely nuts in terms of speed compared to my mid-road M2 macbook with the latest osX.
Helps when you don't have to start up a dedicated web browser instance for every single application you have.
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
It was designed and built by IBM Japan, which was lucky for me when I spilled tea into mine...while I was in Tokyo. I was able to get a same day repair by walking it over to some random shop in the Akihabara (apple sent me there) where some guy repaired it while I watched.
While massive by today's standards, it was svelte for its time, and attracted stares whenI would pull it out. Great for operating on a plane too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_2400c
[+] [-] JeremyHerrman|2 years ago|reply
Excellent build quality thanks to IBM Japan who thankfully incorporated the inverted T arrow keys, a first for an Apple notebook, which still persists to today's MacBooks. The 2400c excellent build quality also doesn't suffer from poor hinges like the PowerBook 500/5300/1400c models.
The processor is on a daughterboard allowing the 2400c to be upgraded to a G3, and the modding scene out of Japan has brought a ton of interesting upgrades like translucent cases and keyboards.
The main problems the 2400c suffers from are leaky PRAM batteries and other issues causing the dreaded Green Light of Death (GLoD), where the machine won't boot without hardware replacements like a new processor card.
[+] [-] atdrummond|2 years ago|reply
I’ve recently settled on using an iPad Pro 10 inch. I would prefer a proper OS but 95% of what I do I can do with iOS.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|2 years ago|reply
Their next laptop was the G4 titanium, which rotated the logo to be right side up when looking at the back of the screen while it's open.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MenhirMike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingemote|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theodric|2 years ago|reply
Out: YOU have a Macintosh
In: $$ THIS GUY $$ has a $$ Macintosh $$
[+] [-] cesaref|2 years ago|reply
It struggled with some design problems, notably that the hinges failed, and the display ribbon rubbed causing display problems after been opened/closed too many times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4
If we head back to 68k days, then the Powerbook Duo was awesome. This was definitely a compromised machine for portability vs a desktop though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo
[+] [-] justinator|2 years ago|reply
They never were able to deliver a G5 laptop. And then Apple went Intel, one of the greatest WTFs in recent memory.
[+] [-] NaOH|2 years ago|reply
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 disc 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 until it clicked into place. All told, a couple of seconds.
One notable, unavoidable downside to the machine was its weight—put it in a laptop bag of that era along with a power cord and weight was going to be at least 10 pounds all in, to say nothing of other things one might want on the go. This wasn’t outrageous for its time, but it shows how much bulkier and heavier things were then. And while the keyboard was well-designed for accessing the machine’s innards, it wasn’t a particularly good keyboard to type on because it was a thin plastic that had a lot of flex to it.
In Apple behavior that continues to this day, the default memory capacities were on the low end. It was officially capable of 512 MB of RAM (unofficially 1 GB), but shipped with 128 MB. Hard drives were either 12 GB or 20 GB.
For its time in the Mac world, the machine was great (I can’t compare it to Windows notebooks of that era). But things have changed, as they usually do. That screen looks pathetic today, it’s loud and easily louder from being taxed, there was no MagSafe, plastic is less pleasant in long-term use, etc. But for the capabilities most users wanted at the turn of the century, it was a great machine if you were a Mac user.
[+] [-] easeout|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwells89|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdavbdav|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwells89|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulmd|2 years ago|reply
and today you can't boot shit on 16MB.even raspbian or something is going to croak even with XFCE and the lightest-weight setup you can do (short of raw terminal - I did get ubuntu server with fbdev running on a thinkpad with 256MB, although the mach64 driver is in an absolute state at this point).
(menuetOS is a fun regression along this line - a full multiprocessing OS with all the fixings, in x86/x64 assembly, that fits on a 1.44 inch floppy disk)
https://menuetos.net/
I know that a lot of that power and memory has been spent on isolation and security, but part of the reason we need that security is because we've turned the browser and OS into a sandbox running untrusted code loading off the internet. It is interesting to watch this video of linus getting a xserve running (challenging due to cert expiration, discontinued services, etc), and part of the OSX Server Tools suite is things like time machine backup host, ichat host (self-hosted XMPP chat server!) and so on, and the point linus makes is that apple saw the way the wind was blowing and decided it would be more profitable to sell the service than the hardware. And writ large that's the tradeoff we've made from the macos 9 era to the modern one. Slower, browser-based and cloud-based applications instead of self-hosted or local applications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4
Anyway yes, I have done the same thing as you and original OP and put a mSATA drive in an IDE adapter to get an old machine running, and used a SATA SSD to juice up a cheap laptop when my nice one died in grad school, etc, and a SSD and maxing out the memory (if possible) does make a substantial difference.
People usually tend to think like "it's an old machine, it is running slow anyway" but actually I think it's the opposite and you should think "it's an old machine and it needs all the help it can get". It has little enough processing power already, at least let it progress at the rate of processing and not spend 3/4ths of its cycles waiting for disk!
[+] [-] Bradlinc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majormajor|2 years ago|reply
The Wallstreet also had a rainbow Apple logo under the screen like a proper Mac laptop. ;)
But if you're looking for a retro one, the Wallstreet ones had some major reliability issues that they improved in the Lombard and Pismo.
A bit silly to talk about how fast installing OS 9 on an SSD is, though. The original HD would be way slower.
[+] [-] Mainan_Tagonist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwells89|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] immy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classichasclass|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoistbypetard|2 years ago|reply
Also, I kinda miss control strip.
[+] [-] ralphc|2 years ago|reply
I was gifted a Wallstreet that included working PCMCIA USB and Firewire cards. With floppy and CD in the expansion slots it's a great bridge machine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/13l7tyd/some_...
[+] [-] some-guy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DookieBiscuit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|2 years ago|reply
* Apple's PowerBook reinvented the laptop thirty years ago | AppleInsider || https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/21/apples-powerbook-...
[+] [-] aidenn0|2 years ago|reply
- Over 100MB is useful for a lot of things - Backwards compatible with standard 3.5" floppies (though I'm a PC user; they were apparently spotty with old-school 400/800K Mac GCR formatted floppies) - Eventually could store up to 32MB on a cheap 1.44MB floppy (but required writing all 32MB in one go; kind of like a very limited SMR)
They were just far too late to the game, as Zip had established itself and affordable CD Burners were hot on their heels.
[+] [-] yankput|2 years ago|reply
Looks very modern, not really like a “classic” old-style PhpBB with tons of annoying icons and signatures.
[+] [-] nvy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|2 years ago|reply
However, other than the speedy OS upgrade, and maybe a lot of ports, I'm not sure what the "better 20 years ago" parts were, but maybe that was more of a random line / opinion type thing.
Either way fun read and visually that laptop is still pretty pleasing. I love my MBA but ... wouldn't mind if it was a bit more organic looking like the G3.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|2 years ago|reply
I had a Pismo, which I got with my student discount (and it was still crazily expensive I remember, but not quite how much). It was a good machine, being able to swap batteries / drives / PC cards was slick (sure, now we have usb-c, but where's the clever engineering in that?)
[+] [-] amatecha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slackfan|2 years ago|reply
Helps when you don't have to start up a dedicated web browser instance for every single application you have.
[+] [-] FiddlerClamp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daitangio|2 years ago|reply