ibook

5 Articles

Restoring Apple’s Terrible But Awesome IBook Laptop

June 1, 2026 by 16 Comments

Before the Apple MacBook there was the Apple iBook, fruity 1999 colors included. These PowerPC-based laptops targeted low-cost PC-compatible laptops much like the iMac did, albeit it the latter with more success. That said, these laptops are said to be a nightmare to repair, so when [This Does Not Compute] got his hands on a shiny first generation, 300 MHz PowerPC powered, tangerine-colored one, he somewhat dreaded trying to fix it.

Aside from some relatively minor cosmetic issues such as typical cracks in the plastic and a missing optical drive door it seemed in good condition. The first issue came on boot, when MacOS 9.0 would throw up an error message about an issue with cache memory. After booting into the OS this cache memory did indeed show up as missing. Next issue was the optical drive doing absolutely nothing and restarting leading to the system locking up and not starting until plugging in the power adapter.

Fortunately the optical drive started working after addressing a software issue, but the power and cache issues were concerning. Cue a long troubleshooting and repair session that involved purchasing a ‘parts unit’ from Japan to merge both into a single iBook with hopefully a working system at the end.

Along the way the reason why people dislike maintaining these systems, as to do something like getting to the hard drive requires removing the entire display. The cause for the first iBook’s problems also seemed to be due to a liquid spill of some type, as on boot there was no chime either, indicating a wider board-level issue. Unfortunately this was left further undiagnosed and the Japanese mainboard used instead. It’d be interesting to see the deeper cause, but most likely the mainboard will be used for components.

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Rebuilt Batteries For The Cutest Clamshell At The Cafe

August 3, 2025 by 22 Comments

Keeping retrocomputers going can be tricky enough, but when you’re talking retro laptops, the battery packs add an extra challenge. While one could simply live without the battery, that’s not going to give you the full retro experience. Replacement batteries are long out of stock, so what can one do? Well, one can check out this excellent tutorial by [lazd] on rebuilding an iBook G3 Clamshell battery.

Even if you don’t have this particular laptop, the general process is likely to be similar for PC laptops of similar vintage. (Which we still can’t believe is a whole quarter-century ago.) Luckily for retrocomputer enthusiasts, even Apple used standard 18650 cells in those bygone, halcyon days when computers were allowed to be more than a few atoms thick. They do need to be unprotected, flat-top cells, but that’s easy enough to source.

So it’s really a matter of carefully prying apart the casing (apparently it needs to be Apple-branded; aftermarket cases can’t survive being opened), removing the old batteries, and welding nickel tabs onto the new cells in the proper configuration. One thing that surprised us is that, apparently, Apple did not go in for balancing in those days — so make sure your cells are all in perfect condition and all equally charged before you start, or things won’t end nicely.

As always, battery orientation matters! The cells are welded into two sets in this Clamshell iBook battery.

Assuming you can pull it off (and your battery pack’s control chip has lasted the 300 moons since its manufacture), you’ll get a not-insignificant 5-hour battery run out of what’s sure to be the cutest clamshell computer at the cafe.

If you are repairing an iBook, while you’re at it, why not upgrade the RAM? You might even be able to fix the screen if it’s succumbing to the sadly-too-common vinegar syndrome.

Game Dev On IBook G4 With NetBSD

July 23, 2025 by 6 Comments

What can you do with a laptop enough to drink even in the Puritan ex-colonies? 21 years is a long time for computer hardware– but [Chris] is using his early-2004 iBook G4 for game dev thanks to NetBSD.

Some of you might consider game dev a strong word; obviously he’s not working on AAA titles on the machine he affectionately calls “Brick”. NetBSD includes pygame in its repositories, though, and that’s enough for a 2D puzzle game he’s working on called Slantics. It’s on GitHub, if you’re curious.

Slantics: possibly the only game written on PPC Macintosh hardware this year.

Why NetBSD? Well, [Chris] wants to use his vintage hardware so that, in his words “collecting does not become hoarding” and as the slogan goes: “Of course it runs NetBSD!” It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s been two decades since the last PPC Macintosh. After that long, PPC support in Linux is fading, as you might expect.

[Chris] tried the community-supported PPC32 port of Debian Sid, but the installer didn’t work reliably, and driver issues made running it “Death by a thousand cuts”. NetBSD, with it’s institutional obsession with running on anything and everything, works perfectly on this legally-adult hardware. Even better, [Chris] reports NetBSD running considerably faster, getting 60 FPS in pygame vs 25 FPS under Linux.

This is almost certainly not the year of the BSD Desktop, but if you’ve got an old PPC machine you feel like dusting off to enjoy a low-powered modern workflow, NetBSD may be your AI-code-free jam. It’s great to see old hardware still doing real work. If you’d rather relive the glory days, you can plug that PPC into a wayback proxy to browse like it’s 2005 again. If you get bored of nostalgia, there’s always MorphOS, which still targets PPC.

Hackaday Links: January 17, 2016

January 17, 2016 by 19 Comments

The BBC has commissioned a new series of Robot Wars. This is not Battlebots; that show was revived last year, and a second season will air again this summer. Robot Wars is the one with the ‘house’ robots. We would like to take this opportunity to remind the BBC that Robot Wars is neither Scrapheap Challenge nor Junkyard Wars, and by virtue of that fact alone is an inferior show.

[Fran] is a favorite around these parts. She’s taken apart a Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer, visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum warehouse, and is the occasional host of the Dinosaur Den with [Bil Herd]. Now, she’s relaunching her line of guitar pedals. ‘Boutique’ pedals are a weird market, but with the help of a few manufacturers, [Fran] is bringing her Peachfuzz pedal back to life through Kickstarter.

Want to be an astronaut? Here’s the application.

Here’s your monthly, ‘WTF is this thing on eBay’ link. It’s a clamshell/toilet seat iBook (c.2000), loaded up with an Intel i5 Broadwell CPU, 128 GB of Flash storage, 4 GB of RAM, a 12″ 1024×768 LCD, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and runs OS X El Capitan. I might be mistaken, but it looks like someone took the motherboard out of a 2015 MacBook Air, crammed it into a sixteen year old computer, and put it up on eBay. I’m not saying that’s what it is; this is from China, and there are people over there making new improved motherboards for a Thinkpad x61. Weirder stuff has already happened.

In the last installment of the Travelling Hacker Box, I asked if anyone can receive mail in Antarctica. A person with friends in the British survey team emailed me, but nothing came of that. It’s summer, so if Antarctica is going to happen, it needs to happen soon.

Make An Apple Tablet Before Apple Does

December 18, 2009 by 20 Comments

[Andrew] wanted a tablet computer but is tired of waiting for Apple to come up with one. eBay and Craig’s list to the rescue, he picked up some parts and built his own tablet. You can take a look at the video tour of it after the break, or peruse parts one, two, three, and four of his work log.

The unit is assembled from a 500 MHz iBook. [Andrew] picked up a touchscreen from ebay and canibalized a USB joystick in order to add some buttons to the keyboard-less design. The end product is quite nice. We’ve wanted a tablet computer to hang on the wall for a long time and this may be the inspiration that gets us there.

Do you find this didn’t satisfy your Apple tablet fix? There’s more to be seen in our mac tablets roundup.

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