After having played around a bit with a Mac mini G4 (1.42 GHz and 1GB RAM) with Tiger I figured the PowerBook G4 will be slightly faster, but nothing really noticeable. It came with OS X Tiger (10.4.11) installed, but no installation disks. I went for it and 5 days later it was mine for not even 100 bucks including shipping. The display was in perfect condition as well and the display hinges were in pretty good shape, too. The optical drive was dead, but the keyboard was in great condition even though it had a very odd layout I have never seen before. The battery reached its end of life a couple of years ago, but it had a new power supply. It looked good on the photos, only some minor scratches. 15” PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD. Two weeks ago I found one on Allegro, the polish equivalent of eBay. Other than that I don’t really care much for the rest like installation disks, manuals, original power supply or state of the battery. I want the keyboard and its background lighting to be in good condition as well.
I want the display to be in great condition, I want the body to be in good shape without dents, but I don’t mind a minor scratch here and there, especially on the bottom.
I figured getting one in a non-mint condition, but cheap, would be quite a good idea (no, this is not the place to discuss my sanity…or rather lack thereof). Participating in that auction did have some consequences: now I wanted a PowerBook G4 15” or 17”, preferably one of the last models from 2005 with 1.67GHz. That’s just way too much for me as a hobby, not to mention you can get a new MacBook for that kind of money. Unfortunately the auction spinned out of control and ended at almost $1000. While looking for a titanium PowerBook G4 I came across an auction for an aluminum 15” PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz, mint condition, in perfect shape including the original box and all that it originally came with. Finding a titanium PowerBook without major scratches, dents all over the place and especially those ugly paint scrapes is quite a challenge. As it seems, titanium isn’t the best material to make notebooks out of after all. How cool is that? I started looking into titanium PowerBooks in the summer, but these machines are quite difficult to get these days. The PowerBooks G4 are actually quite interesting in that regard, especially the earlier ones made out of Titanium. For some reason, when thinking about good candidates for a vintage Mac I focused on desktops and forgot about notebooks.