This Old iBook

Receiving an old Mac is like going back in time, using a product with a unique design Apple discontinued long ago. It can also make you appreciate the Mac you already have.

My last old Mac was an iMac G3 running at the insanely fast speed of 350 MHz. Sure it’s not much, but it did everything I needed to do, from blogging to emailing. It lasted a while but eventually died from the power supply going bad. That old iMac did teach me a few things. It showed me how reliable Macs really can be and to never take their design for granted. It was almost like going back in time and revisiting a new era of Apple design made obsolete long ago by thinner and faster hardware. What may be hip and well-designed one day is trash the next.

I went on the hunt for a reliable old Mac and my search covered a wide spectrum from PowerMacs to PowerBooks. However, every possible purchase I threw at my parents always ended with a no, almost like when asking for a new a pet and being denied. I was told it could break, it could explode, it could do anything but work because it was old and had no warranty or any guarantee it would work longer than a few seconds. It wasn’t the greatest response but I could see their logic behind it and alas, I had to wait for my dad to come across any old Mac, which would eventually pay off.

And pay off it did! Recently I received a new, old iBook purchased by my dad from a close friend in the liquidation business. I was shocked actually. Not because the original battery still retained 6 hours of battery life, but that after being denied buying an old Mac myself, my dad would go behind my back and buy one for me. Nonetheless I was thankful and began tinkering with the iBook. It was previously listed on eBay by my dad’s friend or rather, business associate. I knew that something would be wrong, something would break on me, but it booted into a non administrator user account. I looked through the files and came to the conclusion that whoever owned this Mac was, for lack of a better word, a total idiot. It seems he was a senior in high school and left all files in the trash can but, wait for it, forgot to delete them. This should have been the job of whoever listed it on eBay but they decided to leave that out. Their spelling reflected their intelligence in the form of barely legible sentences in term papers and emails. However, one good thing the previous owner excelled at was iMovie. I suppose he liked to show off his “badass-ness” by cursing frequently and drinking extensively. However it did prove one thing: even an idiot can use a Mac, it’s just that simple. I cleaned up everything and made sure no private data was left.

It got me thinking though. I am literally holding a piece of history in my hands; the iBook was the first 14-inch notebook, the Operating System was 10.1 (which might I add is uglier than the Fisher Price abomination of Windows XP). It just goes to show how far Apple has come—simple apps no longer take minutes to load, the GUI isn’t butt ugly, etc. I upgraded to 10.3 and the performance increase was comparable to taking steroids except with no side effects and it was easy to use. But the general upgrade path is usually via CDs or DVDs. And what does one use to use the discs? An optical drive of course! Unfortunately mine is broken. It cannot be opened by hitting the eject key, instead I get a loud beeping sound. What I must do is stick a toothpick in a small hole to manually eject it. No biggie but I just saved my dad’s business associate, who conveniently forgot to mention the state of the optical drive—massive scratches and cracks most likely from being used as a weapon in a fit of stupidity by the previous owner and trust me, it’s something a teenager would do. If you can’t imagine someone using an iBook as a weapon then please stop reading this post and watch MTV for a bit.

I do have some complaints about this old iBook, however. When in use for an extensive period of time, the entire left palm rest gets hot. Sometimes it becomes very uncomfortable to use. I wonder why only this side gets hot and apparently the exhaust port is on that side.

But in all it’s a very good machine, and would I recommend someone getting this? Possibly, but it depends on what your needs are, and one should be wary, as laptops get more wear and tear than desktops, which increases their risk of failure.