For my first entry to my collection log, I feel its only right to document the machine used to make this site.

Backstory

A while back while at a yard sale, I had noticed what looked to be an old ibook in a pile of junk, after looping back on it, I checked the machine out further and found it to be in pieces with the bottom cover being pulled off, battery in a box across the way and the screws all being stuck to the magnetic hinge latch.

Despite this, I still bought the machine, and after giving it power by jerry rigging a A1181s battery into its mobo, it sprang to life and worked perfectly.

Specs

Now enough talk about how i got the machine, the specs for mine are as follows:

600mhz PPC G3
384mb SDRAM
20GB IBM HDD
ATI Rage M2 (Think thats right)
1024x768 LCD

Overview

The iBook G3 Snow was apples main entry level Macintosh from around 01' to 02' with it basically being a suped up version of the clamshell that predates it.

Screen

All iBook G3 snows came standard with a 4:3 1024x768 panel, Now i can only speak for my panel however its pretty decent for the era.

With it not only being bright, but clear, having decent contrast, black levels and etc, ofc its not as good as a new laptops panel with something like the panel in my 2019 Razer Blade blowing it out of the water, but for its era its definately nothing to scoff at.

Repairability

In my experience the machine has also been decently easy to work on, however this is probably because i also have a lot of experience working on much harder to dissasemble machines, making this machine light work to strip and reassemble, on that note, general upgrades are really easy to perform with one of the ramslots being under a door behind the Airport card and Keyboard.

However, the HDD is not so easy to swap with it requiring the entire top case plastics to be stripped off in order to remove it (From what i can tell this is what the previous owner gave up trying to do on mine, as they had formatted the drive before leaving it in the state i found it)

Battery life

Surprisingly I actually have a working battery for mine, and can confirm that battery life is actually pretty decent with the machine running on for about 3h of use on my 90% health battery.

Performance

In my experience, performance on the iBook varies massively between OS9 and OSX with OSX noticably being the slower of the two, however thats not to say its unusable on OSX.

Now personally on my machine I have OS 9.2.2 and OSX 10.2.8, however these machines can run up to 10.4, although i would expect this to massively slow the machine down due to how much harder 10.4 is to run.

Just to note, this machine when on OS9 is very speedy with it being able to load and juggle quite a few things without slowing down in my experience.

TLDR; Your milage may vary.

Notes

On a side tangent, these machines seem to have had a facelift mid lifespan, with later models having case plastics that look to be taken from a ibook G4 resulting in them having a more flat look than the earlier models which were done up in a more flashy fashion with them having a metalic finish on the KB and LCD surounds instead of the polycarbonate finish.

Fun fact

This entire webpage was designed on the machine covered in this article with no assistance from anything else.