I’ll say it now, as I’m very into speculative assets (although unlike my other ventures these Macs are very much permanent). Things like the clamshell and probably this black MacBook will be going for thousands easily in my lifetime…
This is just me, but from what I've seen, the black MacBook hasn't quite reached Key Lime/Graphite clamshell levels yet -- on Kijiji in my city, and on eBay, prices on black A1181s are about $100-300; the only outlier was a was
Japanese black MacBook in average condition being sold in Australia.
While the black A1181s were far less common than their white counterparts, I don't think they were rare enough to necessarily qualify as high-value collectors items, unless they'd be sealed BNIB, with a non-standard foreign keyboard and/or with the case plastics in original condition (i.e. without chipped edges, or discolouration). If you've got your hands on such a unit, congratulations!
My introduction to buying from Apple back in ’99 gave me that same pre-taste of nastiness when my pending order for a 400MHz G4 got downclocked to 350MHz back in mid-October that year. So anytime when Apple tries to create exclusives or make it so that one can buy an item from one constrained source only (both are variations on the “Mac taxes”), it gets a bit annoying. The key lime iBooks were only sold on their online store as an exclusive, at a time when e-commerce was the exception, not a norm. This is why, years on, they command such a premium: they were never easily available in general and were completely unavailable at Apple authorized reseller brick-and-mortar retailers.
I'd forgotten that the Key Lime iBook was an online-only exclusive; I think the same was true for the Graphite iBook SE? (Which I drooled over back in the day!)
As for the 1999 G4 fiasco, yeah, I clearly remember that! I told my dad about it (including the rumors circulated by AppleInside at the time surrounding PPC 7400 CPU yields at Motorola and the Yikes G4), shortly after he ordered our
450 400 Mhz Sawtooth, and he was
really pissed. But there wasn't much we could do, since our Performa 6320/120 CD was getting a little long in the tooth...
The "stealth" MacBook5,2 is somewhat of an exception to this rule IMO given the GeForce 9400M isn't bad (certainly much better than Intel's offerings of the day!) and allows running newer versions of macOS - annoyingly, it kept the Mini-DVI port of the earlier models so you can't take advantage of the GPU's ability to run an external 2560×1440 or 2560×1600 monitor at 60 Hz.
The GeForce 9400M, and the ability to run OS X 10.11 is the reason why I love the MacBook 5,2 so much. That and the optical drive runs on SATA too, which means I can use more-readily available SATA-SATA optical drive bay caddies to add an additional hard drive or SSD to them. It's also amazing that I can boot it from Leopard, all the way up to El Capitan. And the parts most commonly prone to failure -- the top case, LCD/LCD assembly, or display inverter -- are interoperable with all prior MacBook models (and even if I run into the issue of a 3-wall vs. 4-wall connector, swapping cables is relatively easy).
That all being said, the GMA graphics on the MacBook 1-4 series is actually a lot more capable than most people realize. I've been able to run a lot of early 2000s first person shooters and third person action games on even a Core Duo MacBook 1,1 through WINE (like System Shock 2, XIII, Soldier of Fortune 2, and F.E.A.R, among others), and they're all quite playable and enjoyable. Heck, I've even been able to play
Ion Fury on my GMA X3100-equipped MacBook 4,2 through eDuke32, and it's surprisingly playable (albeit, with the settings turned way down...)
