I have this old Apple PowerBook G4, with a 867MHZ PowerPC CPU. It’s one of the first Apple aluminum laptops from several years back. This one came with OS-X 10.2 Panther OS installed. By default it came with 256 MB of RAM and a 40 GIG hard drive. Not bad for the times.
My son bumped the RAM up to 640 MB, the supported maximum amount you’re supposed to be able to upgrade to. He also did video editing on it, amazing at the time. But then, the iMovie program was used to working on this level of machine.
But as time goes on, software increases in its feature set and increases its demand on CPU and memory resources. It seems that back then, web video would play just fine on this little machine. But what is happening, is that with the increasing speed and capabilities of new CPUs, the software is using this additional horsepower to perform improved presentation speed and compression into smaller file sizes. In fact decoders like the Flash decoder and many H.264 MPG decoders all require more CPU horsepower. And since most of the media players you download today, use these more improved codecs, it’s harder and harder to play video on older or inadequate machines.
So these older computers get pushed aside in favor of faster ones. But looking over the specs, these old computers are not much less than some of the brand new netbooks being offered today. So what we must do is look over the landscape of the applications available for the netbook arena and pick and choose efficient applications to revive the older laptops to at least perform as well as a typical netbook.
Netbooks are not targeted at video editing or heavy game playing, but usually web browsing, email and word processing. As I’ve written before, these tasks are routinely performed in the cloud, using a single browser application. Recently Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome have been updated with faster rendering engines and quicker Javascript execution. Which means that the same web applications run faster. This cannot but help slower machines keep up with today’s demands. As we focus on using lower powered netbooks and pushing the cloud to do most of the work, our old computers can be placed into service once again.
Which brings me back to the 12-inch Apple PowerBook. This laptop came in 3 speed versions, 867MHZ, 1 GHZ and finally 1.5 GHZ. I also have a 15-inch PowerBook that runs at 1.5 GHZ and use it every day. If you have any of the 1 GHZ or better PowerBooks, they still have some life in them. So the question was, does the lowest end of the PowerBook G4 laptop have the guts to still be a cloud contender?
First up was to see if it could run the latest software from Apple. Sure enough the specs are enough to allow Leopard OS-X 10.5 to be loaded on it. And if so, then many applications I like to use can also be loaded on it. The latest Safari 4 browser, which claims to be the fastest out there today will run. There are a few plug-ins I like to use with Safari, (see previous posts here) and so Leopard had to be used for that.
From my searching across the web, I realized that this laptop could in fact be upgraded with a 1 GIG RAM module to bump the total to 1024+128 MB or 1.12 GIG of RAM. (Seems Apple didn’t tell us that the hardware supported a full 1 GIG memory add-in.) This now matches the normal amount installed in todays netbooks. Since Leopard used more RAM to run than Panther required, the RAM boost put Leopard back in the game, performing as good or better than the original OS did.
Now the 867MHZ CPU speed is slower than todays usual 1 GHZ CPUs, but not by much. With some wise configuration and settings, I think it performs just fine now. I still can’t watch most YouTube video at full speed, but neither can some of the netbooks out there. So for the basics, it fills the need.
Since I love the keyboard on these aluminum PowerBooks and can’t get them any longer on any Mac nor find from any third party source, I’m determined to keep the two I have working for as long as I can. Since Apple’s statement that the next version of OS-X, dubbed Snow Leopard will only be for Intel-Based Macs, it seems that 10.5 is the end of the road for this little guy. But maxed out with over a gigabyte of RAM and running the speediest browser to date from Apple, I think I can get a few more years out of it. Especially if the Cloud-based computing fad stays strong.
Long live PowerPC based applications!
– Keith
I’ve got an old eMac in my basement that I keep around for the same reasons. Great old-skool keyboard, and with a gig of RAM it runs Leopard just fine, I must say.
That said, I absolutely adore my black Macbook, and while it’s far from being obsoleted, I suspect I will be able to continue to use it for web browsing, basic word processing, and all my usual online nonsense for a good long time to come. Certainly well past the day I invest in one of those new iMacs they recently rolled out…
I liked your article. I recently picked up the 867 MHz “little Al” on Ebay for just over $200. I think it’s a great machine. Mine only is running Tiger, but adding an Airport Xtreme card and some more RAM makes it a viable machine today. They get a little warm on the bottom, but not so much as to worry.
Long live Apple!
-Kit
How did you get the 12″ to read the 1g of ram? I popped a (good) 1g stick of ddr ram in there and it didn’t take, says the slot is empty.
I ordered one that was officially recommended for the PowerBook (it was actually a PC2700 even though only a PC2100 was needed) and it did not register the first time I put it in either. I removed and reinserted very carefully and it finally worked. Seems it is a bit picky about insertion alignment.