#powerbook g4

[thisischeri]

Apple PowerBook G4, 2001

instagram: cheri.png

[grrlmusic]

Apple

[krjpalmer]

Macworld March 2001

The G4 moved into a portable form factor (even as a news item in this issue complained about Motorola's lackadaisical speed bumps to its chip). Andrew Gore's editorial was quite impressed with the titanium-cased PowerBook G4 (including how the big Apple logo on the "lid" now faced up when the portable was open and in use), and also with Apple's MP3-playing, CD-burning program iTunes. David Pogue's back-page column complained about amazon.com meddling with its book-selling section as if to "make us subsidize the struggling departments—the ones that sell cars, patio furniture, and shaving cream."

[neutron669]

Powerbook G4 Titanium (USA, 2001)

Pic by Antonio Moro Itomi

[digitalesleben]

Tag 20: Mächtige Laptops

Dies sind die Vorgänger der wirklich kompakten Laptops wie das MacBook Air oder die Ultrabook-Klasse im Wintel-Bereich. Das Ti Book und das Sony Vaio Subnotebook sind wunderschöne Beispiele für mächtige Laptops in kompakten Gehäusen.

Der zwanzigste Beitrag in meiner Reihe von Beiträgen zur Neugestaltung der Ausstellung in meinem Computermuseum. Heute und an weiteren 13 Tagen stelle ich die Zusammenstellung meiner Ausstellungsstücke vor. Was ihr hier seht sind zwei sehr mächtige Laptops. Das große ist das berühmte Ti Book. Nein, es gehört nicht zur Familie der TIE Fighter, wie man sie aus Star Wars kennt. Es ist das erste…

[defiantdreemurrs]

i should have girls falling all over me begging because i opened up an ibook g3 and replaced the hard drive and thats like among the more difficult things to do with an apple device

[fishmech]

Late 2003 to May 2006, Apple PowerBook G4 12" (you can tell by the placement and shape of the shift key and the use of a Mini-DVI port next to the USB 2.0 port being abused)

Specific further narrowing of model unclear due to restricted view area.

Guhhhhh… 🤤🤤🤤

[quicktimeeventfull]

L's Apple Computers

death note is now twenty years old & the anime replaced the logos with generic knockoffs so it's no longer visually obvious that L's computers are macs but he is canonically an apple user. i've decided to gather up all this incredibly vital information about which specific devices he uses. his computers his laptop is a powerbook g4 titanium. his desktop is the powermac g4 mirrored drive doors version.

his operating systems for some reason, he is using a different OS on his laptop and desktop. both his computer models came pre-installed with Mac OS and macOS (then called OS X) in a dual-boot configuration. Mac OS is the classic line of operating systems; macOS is the current one. on his laptop, he's running one of the the classic Mac OS systems. this would most likely have been OS 9, as that was the version installed on the g4 laptops. macOS/OS X was the default option, so this was an active choice he made. he has his language set to japanese.

on his desktop, however, he's using the more contemporary macOS/OS X in english. (this also suggests english is the language he's more comfortable in, since the desktop is the one no one else sees.) these are a bit more difficult to visually distinguish, but it's probably panther, which would have been the contemporary one, since previous versions didn't have borders around their windows. he's got the dock collapsed, which was a built-in option.

[fuckableobjects]

Fuckable Object #5 PowerBook G4 Titanium (2001)

[smorbee]

iBook Pyramid Behind the scenes!

This is a long one. Also keep in mind we made this a year ago so were going completely off of memory at this point BUT we do have the files. Unfortunately we didn't save specific versions of it really early into its creation so all the blender files close to being finished.

We have an intense appreciation for funky old computers. People correctly identified inspiration from the Thinkpad 701C. Less obvious in the final design but something that almost certainly influenced us as well was the 12-inch powerbook g4.

There is something very satisfying about nearly-square shaped laptops.

Others mentioned the JVC 3100R pyramid TV which, you'll be surprised to learn, we had never actually seen until after working on this project. The resemblance is uncanny and yet, entirely coincidental. Honestly if we had seen this thing, it probably would have had an effect on our design because the way that hinge is set up is beautiful. Our thought process was simply just comically emulating the form factor of a modern laptop but with a giant CRT.

We're pretty sure the idea started out as simply wanting to design a full profile keyboard into a macbook-like laptop because funny, and at some point the butterfly keyboard came to mind and we said Screw it and implemented that into it as well. Heres the keyboard separated into the different sections.

Sorry to say that the keyboard does not actually contain any switches. (You'll see that this computer was modeled to be viewed a limited angle)

Heres the keyboard from the top.

Once we got going with it, the whole thing was turned into a big joke of course, clashing many different eras of technology into one. Such as this massive beige tank of a "laptop" having a single USB C port as its main I/O.

And same with the software. This is the texture for the display, Which was taken from our real (unfortunately not crt based) macbook setup at the time. Except not quite, as the original screenshot was 16:10. We simply edited the image to make it 4:3. This is running mac os 12 with a majority of the icons changed to early osx equivalents.

We'll be real and admit the animation is not very intricate, theres no real "rig" for the model, parts are just parented together because we did all this in about 2 days. That said, we had loads of fun animating it still, trying to imitate the motion of someone struggling to lift the heavy top up before it swings open with an inaudible, but easily imaginable "Thud". Making the whole body shake and the trackball jump slightly was the finishing touch to make it complete.

The wire for the trackball was made using a circle with the screw modifier and then applied to a curve. Here's what it looks like with each modifier applied sequentially.

And then making the trackball itself a handle for the curve, we can have the cable be dynamic. (Yes, we notice that the trackball in fact has no mouse buttons. No good explanation for that, I think we just forgot lmao.)

For the screen, we make use of a location transform on the UV mapping for the satisfying detail of the screen distorting from the impact, which we swear we've seen before but no matter how hard we (safely) bumped our CRT monitor we weren't able to recreate it. Nonetheless even if its not entirely realistic we wouldn't remove it for anything.

speaking of which, an utterly useless detail considering the resolution and distortion of the final renders and yet we added anyways just for our own amusement is that the display has a shadowmask, simply done by just multiplying it over the base screen texture.

Combined with a glass material over the inner part of the screen, it utterly destroys low sample count renders of the screen and makes the project at least 3x as prone to crashing so thats cool! (it crashed on us while we were writing this section)

We've learned since in future projects that trying to optimize polygon count and materials is still very important even for offline rendered content. We can never be truly free from the constraints of memory limitations 😔

the final step was getting a more authentic less "polished" look in the compositing. This step can get very complicated based on the specific look were going for, but for this render its really just basic color correction and some blurring and sharpening steps. We used the default fake jitter node in blender at the time, though in more recent stuff we use the non-denoised image with filters applied to it instead, so its less uniform between images and more uniquely degraded looking.

Though we'd do a number of things differently now were still pleased with the final result. especially in animated form.

Heres an overview of the scene:

This is the bezeled apple logo in polygon form. Its simply an alpha texture with a normal map:

Thats all for now! Thank you for reading!

[tevruden]

Sorry not sorry, 2001 Tev wanted a G4 PowerBook SO BADLY so whenever i see the one i got now, I'm gonna yell about it for several hours. (Unmute only if you wanna here a modem training... wrongly)

[mlobsters]

40 hours of drawing dean in a scene originally from s1e20 dead man's blood that i modified to (hopefully) work with the story that inspired it. i cut sam out of the scene, put the laptop on the table, made a little phone with the final painting cropped/blurred/made cooler toned that sam's holding. i used the powerbook g4 for the laptop (not the s1 one with the stickers that was in this scene), used the s2 phone, put the mystery spot pig 'n a poke sign on the front window, changed the across-the-street buildings a bit. kind of a mishmash.

this is the third time i've painted dean, and the third time i really struggled with his face. either a face comes together relatively easily, or it really really doesn't. this was the latter, yet again. anyway, i enjoyed all these details and not-face drawing, especially the pig illustration and the impala. i was really struck when reading that fic with this idea that i could make something happen that would be tied into the story, but also would work within my limited capabilities of needing a reference to draw from. and i really like the idea of drawing dean from the lens of what would moments sam would take a picture of.

art post here inspiration fic the archivist

song: you remain by william ryan fritch

[thegoldenfox64]

I will be supporting your knees for the time being

ty, ive been sitting on them while i totally disassemble a Powerbook G4 for parts and they are starting to hurt. at least i can get a fifth "monitor"!

[krjpalmer]

MacAddict January 2006

While the MacAddict issues on the Internet Archive only go so far, I do have copies of my own to scan (although I haven't committed myself to cutting them up and scanning the entire magazine yet...) In any case, while the PowerPC era was close to a close improvements to those computers did feature this month. The "hot new developments" that threatened inkjets still included "solid ink" and "dye sublimation" along with laser printers, and there was one how-to piece about how to make your Mac look more like Windows XP ("if you've got an Addams Family—style obsession with things that are ugly and gross").

[ne0ngenisis]

Let's talk about my BABIES

(in order of acquisition)

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Number One! ThinkPad T440p! (Not actually named)

This was a bit of an impulse purchase, as all of my laptops have been in the last threeish months. I knew of the trans girl stereotype of ThinkPads and Linux, and I wanted that. Especially because my laptop at the time was a crappy HP Stream (pictured underneath the ThinkPad) that couldn't run Windows without crashing constantly.

So I did some research and found out that this was the last model with socketed processors, and just kinda went for it! It arrived in much better condition than the pics suggested so I imagine the seller picked the wrong laptop out of the pile, but I'm not complaining.

It truly was nothing special when it was new, but I've upgraded it quite a bit since then! A 2C/4T 2.4GHz i3-4000M to a 4c/8t 3.7GHz i7-4800MQ, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD! It took me about five hours to install and configure Arch Linux on here, and that was with the guidance of friends who are a lot nerdier than me and I actually cried like, twice, out of frustration... BUT, it's been a solid performer ever since.

It cost me about $170 after everything I've done to it, but I still need to replace the screen on it with a 1080p IPS model, because the 768p TN panel is now literally the worst laptop screen I own. Apple seriously had better ones 12 years before this.

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Number two! 12" iBook G3/500, "Baby"

Baby features in my current profile banner, as it's the laptop I carry around with me all the time to write on the go. The battery life is still pretty fantastic for its age, and it's super cute and small (the same depth as my ThinkPad not including the thicc battery, but about 2" narrower due to 4:3 aspect ratio).

I also picked this one up on a whim, because I was taken by an Apple hyperfixation, and also the image of a coffee shop hipster writing on an iBook. This one isn't a clamshell, love it or hate it, but I love it.

It's the very earliest model from 2001, with a 500MHz G3, 64MB of built-in RAM, and a CD-ROM drive. The original 10GB hard drive was missing so I went through the painstaking process of digging down to where it belongs and installing a 40GB IDE laptop drive I LITERALLY found in the trash.

I also spent $17 on a pair of working batteries and ended up with one that lasts for a good 4.5 hours when all you're doing is word processing, which I was and generally still do. Very close to factory battery life. I also spent about $16 on a charger because I didn't have one yet.

At first, I put Mac OS 9.2.2 on here, because it didn't have enough RAM for OS X as far as I could tell. Once I got the RAM upgrade (now 576MB, 64MB built-in + 512MB module), I installed OSX Tiger on here as well.

It's got some old OS9 games like Diablo II, Quake, Warcraft II, and I actually still own a physical copy of Riven on CD, so those all work on there. And I'm also using it to write, of course. However! It could not run Halo: Combat Evolved. Which led me to more purchases, lmao. I have considered doing a logic board swap to a faster CPU but that would be a daunting task...

It ended up costing me about $90, after the laptop, ram upgrade, charger, and working batteries.

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Number three! 14" iBook G4/1.07, "Ghost"

Ghost is a funny one. Also driven by impulse, in this case, to have an old Mac laptop that could play Halo. I actually received it on the same day as the next one on this list. This is a 2004 1.07GHz 14" iBook G4 with 256MB of built-in RAM and a 256MB module for a total of 512MB, and a combo drive, I believe. This one actually came with a 1GB module in it, and an Airport card, but I swapped some parts around to make my G4 PowerBook more usable.

It was incredibly cursed, including weird freezing and crashes, refusing to install updates and to mount USB devices, and then it just stopped seeing the hard drive all together. I took it apart twice, once to take the hard drive out to discover it was the original 40GB Apple branded hard drive, and another to put it back in once it started booting in my PowerBook G4 (number 4 on the list), and all the cursedness went away somehow!

I still named it Ghost in honor of the cursedness.

I don't have a good battery for it at this time. Right now the only working 14" iBook battery I have (which I paid like $35 for) lasts about an hour, and the 12" battery I have in there now dies at a seemingly random percentage around 60% because the battery isn't reporting its capacity correctly. I did design and order a 3D printed adapter bracket thing so maybe I can stop using fucking masking tape to hold the battery in. It may become more used than my 12" once I get the battery, entirely due to the larger screen and faster processor.

I did have to replace the F12 key, because the original one was missing. This was made a lot easier by having the PowerBook G4 which we'll go over next. Now it's like an accent escape key for a fancy mechanical keyboard, or a gold tooth!

This one actually cost me the least out of all of them, at $69, including the battery I'm not even using, and it came with a second charger, which is good! Though, I guess with the 3D printed battery adapter you can up that price to $80. Or lower it to $44 if the battery doesn't count!

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Number four! 15" PowerBook G4/1.33G, "Alice"

Alice was purchased just days later than my iBook G4, but showed up on the same day. And boy, she was a basket case. I have named her Alice because of "Al" being the elemental symbol for Aluminum, as she's a 2004 Aluminum PowerBook G4, with a 1.33GHz processor and 1.5GB of RAM. It originally came with 512MB of RAM in two modules, but I put in a 512MB stick I found in the trash, plus the 1GB module and the Airport card from the iBook G4 to make it a more usable laptop in the modern day.

The problems were immediate when I got it plugged in for the first time, as there was seemingly no display, until I noticed the dark screen started to change colors. There was a picture... there was just no backlight. To my surprise, the sketchy looking aftermarket battery actually worked fine still, and it was good for about 3.5 hours of use.

Getting it hooked up to an external display, I started to notice that the trackpad button didn't work either. It's a good thing these parts were cheap.

I actually tried fixing the backlight inverter myself, as the issue was there was a coil that had detached itself from the board. My jank soldering work lasted about 15 minutes before it made a buzzing sound and one of the little wire stubs came detached from the side of the coil. RIP.

A week or so later, the backlight inverter and trackpad cable show up, and me being able to actually use the laptop properly shows even more problems. It won't sleep when it's plugged in. But only when it's plugged in. I can't get into the boot picker. Five of the keys on the keyboard also don't work. As it turns out, all of these problems are keyboard problems, and that fixed all of them.

Basket case-ness is different from cursedness. I knew what parts needed replacing on the PowerBook. The iBook just misbehaved until it suddenly stopped misbehaving.

It cost me about $95, including the laptop itself, the backlight inverter board, trackpad ribbon cable, and a glorious (pure sex to type on) new-old stock keyboard.

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Number Five! Late 06 15" MacBook Pro, 2.16GHz C2D, "Dolores"

My MacBook Pro. As with the others, it was an impulse purchase, though it's required the most extreme repairs of any of these laptops so far. It's a Late 2006 15" model, with a Core 2 Duo T7400, and pre-upgraded to the maximum of 3GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD. It came with all sorts of goodies, including an 85-watt MagSafe charger, copies of iWork and iLife 2009, the original recovery DVDs for 10.4.8 Tiger, and a hard copy of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. What it did not include was a battery.

Initially I tried booting it up from nothing, and it would get stuck on a white or blue screen sometime after the Apple logo disappeared, and the same would happen when I put the Snow Leopard DVD into the drive. When I put the Tiger DVDs in, it would install the OS fine, but the resulting install wouldn't boot either. And then I noticed the artifacting.

I knew that this was a possibility with basically any model of pre-unibody MacBook Pro. All of them have graphics issues, though the '07 and '08 models have it a lot worse than the '06 models. I end up complaining about this on a Discord server, and another queer nerd tells me that the boot failure is probably because of the GPU being marginal, and since it's an ATI Radeon GPU instead of an Nvidia GPU, a reflow might help it.

So... I take it apart for the second time that day, after the first time to repaste the CPU, Northbridge, and GPU, and I bathe the GPU in 350°C air from my rework station for about 6 minutes, letting the board rest for 20 minutes before I reapply thermal paste again and reassemble it. Now it boots into MacOS fine. I installed Snow Leopard and updated to Lion, and it's been fine since, though the 32-bit EFI firmware has caused some issues with attempts to get Linux working on the damn thing, though I'm told the GPU could just be playing nice with MacOS but still not good enough to work in Linux.

I tried getting a battery off of eBay, a cheap replacement battery, but it only half works. It powers the laptop, but it won't show up in the OS to show any percentage or capacity, and it won't charge either. So I bought a single-use battery. I'm trying to message the seller and get my money back right now.

It has cost me about $74 including the cost of the crappy essentially single use battery. I'll probably get an actually good one from OWC eventually, because I want to be able to use this laptop as a daily at some point.

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Well, that's it! For now. I also have my eyes set on a mid 2009 white MacBook but that will be a later kind of thing. Not right now, while there's still work to be done on my other laptops.

[jdyf333]

"Because It was Stapled to the Chicken" by Davivid Rose Via Flickr: (I used a Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera + fx lens to make a photo of a small ceramic figure of a cat [imported from China]. I then altered the photo with an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop.) (BEST VIEWED LARGE!) (This picture very much reminds me of some of the visual images I saw the first time I took LSD. It was at a small music festival at a remote beach in California near Big Sur in 1969.) A randomly-edited selection of approximately 700 of my pictures may be viewed by clicking on the link below: www.flickr.com/groups/psychedelicart/pool/43237970@N00/ Please click here to read my "autobiography": thewordsofjdyf333.blogspot.com/ And my Flicker "profile" page may be viewed by clicking on this link: www.flickr.com/people/jdyf333/ My telephone number is: 510-260-9695