Things from the end of the internet

Machine I was waiting for a while.

Snow G3 iBooks seem to be not in demand in retro-tech circles. Weaker Clamshell is way more desired from what I observed for a longer time. Nostalgia plays huge role in it for sure. Quality is better than any snow iBook, which were riddled with plethora of issues and Snow G3 had failure rate as high as 73%.

I decided to get one anyway. It was more of money related choice, since I don’t have means of typical old Mac hoarder which keeps them just as props. Local sellers love to inflate prices of acient Macs, especially PowerBooks are going for inflated prices, usually in bad shape. International shipping is out, high costs and I don’t really trust sellers with packaging. Bad packaging can easily kill it, had this happen to me twice.

After longer time I found a Snow G3 in decent price which came with charger and was complete and immediately I got it. It didn’t boot, wasn’t reacting to charging, tried to troubleshoot it but I did more damage with disassembiling it (damn, these small connectors). In frustration I went on Ebay to get one from UK seller. Around 18 pounds, lack of keyboard, battery or even charger was no problem. I wasn’t even sure if it will even work after shipping from the UK to my place, though it was better packaged by my family who sent it there.

After almost 6 months of waiting I finally got it in my hands. Plugged in charger and it booted. Drive sounded bad, but it works. Which is really good thing.

It booted into Mac OS 9.1, wasn’t really changed from time it was taken out the box. It turned out to be very first 500MHz model, configuration with Combo Drive (CD-RW/DVD-ROM) which is a blessing. Being stuck with CD-ROM would be painful, especially if I’d like to install Panther or Tiger. It didn’t had anything interesting inside software wise. Dual booting with Mac OS 10.0 which is complete trash (Finder was relaunching when I was trying to click anything, was really unstable). Except for music notation software and bundled programs, I found some mostly uninteresting data of previous owner. Lot of e-mails and some photos, a bit of writing.

It mostly needed some cleaning to look decent, though lid and bottom case are heavily scratched. I’m going to try polish them instead of replacing. Top case has some signs of attempt of opening it, but I don’t mind this a lot. Some epoxy putty will fix this. RAM was already expanded to 384MB which will be decent amount for me now, I’d prefer to put 512MB stick though when I’ll have money. Drive is first thing that needs replacing for sure.

For now it’s mostly in use as CD player, later I’ll dump some MP3s I can find. My music collection is mostly in AAC, which isn’t supported until 10.2.8 and iTunes 4. I’m planning getting more software for it to make regular use of it. As for OS X, Jaguar will be best option for it since OS9 isn’t entirely sufficient for me. 10gb drive is too small. I want to get at least 60GB drive. I’m still looking for options, but CF adapter seems to best. I don’t really want to waste money on SSD for it or try to squish 2,5 HDD drive and adapter.