I never was a fan of the 12" PB when they were current, I was a 15" user and thought they were a dressed up iBook. However, I picked up on this year and it is a pretty nice machine. Mine is also a 1GHZ. Nice size for casual use.
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Thinking of picking up a 12" iBook G4 1.2GHz
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Exactly my thoughts. I had a 15" and an iBook and felt at the time the little PB was a compromised machine - too small and crippled (RAM and GPU) to use as a main machine and too delicate and expensive to use as the sofa browser.
I ended up with the 1.5Ghz PB but it runs cooller than I thought. In fact, my iBook feels toastier.
Another update
The bonuses keep stacking up with this little guy. Turns out, the owner both maxed out the ram (1.25 GB) AND installed a 100GB 7200rpm Travelstar!
My new 'Book performs quite well in Tiger. I've been using it for torrenting today and it's quite speedy with multi-tab browsing in WebKit. CS2 performance is nice as well.
Most of all, though, I LOVE the feel of the keyboard. It's much more elegant and precise than the TiBook's keyboard, which I found to be disappointing. It's also a lot more comfortable and nice-feeling than modern chiclet keyboards.
Apple should seriously revive and update this form-factor! Perhaps as a sub-Air budget laptop.
The bonuses keep stacking up with this little guy. Turns out, the owner both maxed out the ram (1.25 GB) AND installed a 100GB 7200rpm Travelstar!
My new 'Book performs quite well in Tiger. I've been using it for torrenting today and it's quite speedy with multi-tab browsing in WebKit. CS2 performance is nice as well.
Most of all, though, I LOVE the feel of the keyboard. It's much more elegant and precise than the TiBook's keyboard, which I found to be disappointing. It's also a lot more comfortable and nice-feeling than modern chiclet keyboards.
Apple should seriously revive and update this form-factor! Perhaps as a sub-Air budget laptop.
I bought my wife a 12" PB a few years back. Guy from New York managed to roll it down a flight of stairs. Only thing wrong with it was a broken LCD. I paid $50 and $25 for a new screen. He was pretty unhappy to find out that that was all that needed to be done.
He had removed his hard drive so I put my wife's 250GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue in it. My only issue was that the guy had said it was 1.2Ghz with less than 1GB ram. Turned out it was 1.0Ghz with 1.25GB ram. So, that didn't bother me as much.
After futzing with the damn thing three times and after breaking a key and the sleep light (and replacing those parts) AND after dealing with thermal shutdown several times (turns out the Mac needs that heat sink over the processor) I finally got the thing working fine.
My wife's had zero issues with it for the last few years and it's been rock solid on Leopard 10.5.8. Nice little Mac, but the form factor is not for me. And if I never see the inside of that 12" PowerBook ever again it will be too soon!
Heh. I ripped mine apart to replace the HD with an SSD. I took it super slowly so as not to damage delicate stand offs, plastic logic board connectors, strip any screws or to bend any part of the housing. All in all it took 6 hours start to finish.
Never again. The iBook was easier and quicker to do even though there are more parts to dismantle and screws to remove.
Funny how that is, because I've seen the iFixit guide for the iBooks and to me as much as I hate it, I'd rather go back into the 12" PowerBook than deal with an iBook.
Of course, I'm not a fan of the iBooks anyway so that may be part of it. The other part I guess is I'm getting to damn old to be messing around inside these things anymore without getting some kind of payoff. Getting tired of dealing with old, prone to break, Mac parts, doing all the work and then finding out the damn thing's broken in the end.
LOL. Didn't realize it'd become a speech!
It is funny how much you dislike iBooks!
