I’ve finally gotten around to prepping my iBook to go back to Apple for a turn under the knife. Good thing I decided to splurge for AppleCare back in the day, as it means I still qualify for the logic board extension program through July. No time like the present, eh? (Also, my power adapter shorted out last week, and the battery won’t hold a full charge, but who’s counting.)

After a lot of hard drive shuffling and data rearranging, I’m back on my old faithful friend, my vintage PowerBook (FireWire), aka Pismo. It’s a 500 MHz G3 which I bought in February 2000 and served as my main computer for over three years, before I caved and bought the iBook.

It’s been interesting going back to my old friend after so long. For one thing, the keyboard and trackpad button are more responsive, since they had different spring rates then the iBook (and are a little more broken in at this point). I’m still trying to remember that the Pismo doesn’t have a command key on the right-hand side, where I’ve come to expect it on the iBook. Since the PowerBook is six years old, the screen has faded quite a bit and the backlight isn’t nearly as bright as the ibook’s. The screen also has a much more yellowish tint to it, again thanks to age. At least it’s the same 1024×768 resolution as the iBook, so my desktop isn’t all screwed up — I’m one of those “organize everything on the Desktop” kind of people, though not proudly.

The Pismo has two battery bays, which back in the OS 9 days would let me use it for close to eight hours. Of course, both of the batteries I own are also six years old, and as a result they drain so fast that the OS can barely keep up with the drain — I keep seeing the “Calculating time remaining” message every time I check the levels. The PRAM battery is equally old, so it doesn’t always remember what time it is when the computer’s left unplugged with no batteries installed.

It still plays DVDs of course, and I flashed the drive’s firmware long ago to make it region-free. The 8 MB ATi Rage 128 is a step down from the 32 MB Radeon 7500 in the iBook, though, so DVD playback is a little choppy, as is QuickTime playback. I won’t be doing a lot of gaming (ha) on the Pismo, and neither Exposé nor Dashboard perform with anything close to their previous speed. On the plus side, I do pick up a minor speed boost by popping in a 5400 RPM hard drive, compared to the iBook’s 4200 RPM unit. (It’s a hell of a lot easier to replace the drive in the Pismo too.) The Pismo also holds more RAM than the iBook, up to 1 GB vs. a max of 640 MB. It helps a little in the speed arena.

Most of all, though, it feels like I’m coming home. Okay, so the infrared port cover is missing, and the sound goes in and out thanks to a loose headphone jack (a common problem on these models), and it’s even slower than the iBook, itself no speed demon when it comes to running 10.4, but there’s still no sexier shape in Apple’s portable history than the curvaceous “bronze keyboard” BatBooks. Maybe I’ll just hang on to the Pismo until the second-generation Intel PowerBooks ship. I could spring for a new battery, maybe a G4 upgrade card; it’d probably be enough to keep me going until then. Wouldn’t it?

(image courtesy IconFactory)