Apple iBook PPC G3 500 MHz - 12.1" TFT > Reviews > Ibook G3

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Look & Feel	Excellent
Comfort & Portability	Excellent
Robustness & Durability	Good
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Lightweight, Durable .
Disadvantages:	Lack of software and connectivity .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The iBook G3 is a very small laptop (12.1" screen) designed simply to be lightweight and durable. This it accomplishes with flying colours!

The iBook i am reviewing is a 500MHZ PowerPC G3 iBook with 192MB of RAM and a 10GB Hard disk with Mac OS X 10.3

The OS comes with a bundle of software such as TextEdit, iTunes and iPhoto. These all prove to be useful bits of software. Unfortunatley this is the full extent of the software. Because of the lack of processing power, hardly any Mac applications will run on the iBook. I personally tried playing a few game demos, non of which would run because of the 4MB graphics card that is in the laptop.

For the processor speed (500MHZ) the laptop performed very well indeed with menus loading almost instantly and never any lag between switching programs, even with all of OSX's effects on.
Another problem is that the laptop is not really futureproof, as the maximum RAM that it can support is 640MB.

I found the hard disk space sufficient only for a few mp3s and a few documents as OS X takes up most of the 10GB...

I found the laptop to be very durable however. It had been dropped numerous times and barely had a scratch on it. Brilliant feature for the clumsy among us ;)

The lack of connectivity on the laptop also proved to be a problem. All i had was a firewire port, 2 usb and a network port. Not really sufficient for regular use where you may need an external display.

The battery life of the iBook was one of the best i have ever seen. It lasted me an 8 hour flight somehow playing music all the way! The charging time is a bit long but it is well worth the wait.

I paid around £250 for the laptop, just over 18 months ago from eBay. I believe the laptop was well worth the money, but really could do with extra features.

Another feature i found quite amusing (sad i know) is the white apple that glows on the back of the screen just to let everyone know that you are using a Mac.

I decided to purchase this iBook simply because of the operating system and battery life. I have always been a fan of Macs but after using this laptop it seems to have put me off a little.

Overall i believe this laptop is great value for money and would be fine for anybody only wishing to do word processing or for people that require a long battery life. Other than that i wouldn't really reccomend the laptop to anybody that wishes to play games of any kind....