Clamshell G3 iBook Upgrades!

[@johnw7602]

I was fortunate enough to nab a top spec lime green model when they were released and I found a nifty padded nylon carry bag, specifically designed for it with the same color scheme. It even has a little window to show off the green apple logo on the cover. Love that thing! Unfortunately, I don't have it with me atm, next time I fly home, I'll have to grab it. I'd like to do the ssd upgrade, looks fun!

[@geekwithsocialskills]

Not your first rodeo. Nice hat tip to your Patreon supporters. Thank you for going the extra mile on getting this video out for everyone. It's really appreciated.

[@snarfusmaximus]

"Dumb as dog shit" - one of my favourite phrases.

[@QUANTUMJOKER]

Very nicely done. I really enjoy your relaxed, good-humoured and methodical style of presentation. I recently acquired a 1999 clamshell iBook SE and upgraded it pretty thoroughly. The day I got the iBook, I installed a 64 GB Compact Flash card for an SSD (you can see the CF adapter's red LED blink through the translucent keyboard, which is awesome). About a week later, I replaced the stock CD-ROM drive with a DVD-ROM drive. Then, I transferred some better-condition donor parts from a dead blueberry iBook, including the top case and trackpad, the screen bezel, the Apple logo on the lid and the surprisingly good-quality battery (five of the eight cells still hold charge well). And over the last couple of days, I fixed some structural/case issues from my SSD install - every screw bar one is back in, and I aligned the screen assembly properly with those tabs at the back - and I performed the glowing Apple logo and transparent bezel mods. I'm so happy with how my iBook turned out. I'm proud of myself not only for these upgrades, but for returning to fix prior mistakes.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Bought both the Graphite and Indigo ones when they came out in 2000. Great machines for their time.

[@FrenchSquareDancer]

I'm extremely happy you posted this video. My old blue clamshell just recently had the hard drive fail on me. I don't often use it anymore but I took it out to check old software and the disk was shot. It is difficult and expensive to find a compatible drive these days. I was thinking of replacing with an SSD, but wasn't sure of compatible adapters. Just ordered one using your references. Hoping I can bring this kid back to life, even quicker than he was before.

[@viktormarcek]

I love it. I got one of these crazy looking space taking hardware at home and not upgraded. Recently bought it on eBay very cheap because it had no charger. I tried to play some old school games on it. The MOJO was the one I managed to play just like back in the teenage years and the best game when it comes to soundtrack was the HAVOC game. I don't remember being that happy for decades. The top 90ties stuff. Thanks for the video. It is on my mind now. I really feel like I have to upgrade this GODZILLA of mine right now!!!!

[@10MARC]

Informative as always! It's surprising how little improvement there is adding an SSD to one of these old machines.

[@hiroprotagonist1587]

I had a similar HDD capacity problem with an old ThinkPad years ago. I got round it by partitioning the drive into manageable sized partitions beforehand and this worked for me however as it was not a Mac YMMV.

[@TechTimeTraveller]

Good lord that was a process for a RAM and HD upgrade! I'm glad things got simpler with the modern MacBooks. I would have PTSD if I had to upgrade something like that on a regular basis. Nice work!

[@RandallCrook]

You mean modern macbooks that come with soldered on Storage and CPU integrated RAM. ;) I do remember upgrade the RAM on my White Macbook though and it was a lot simpler.

[@lbanting]

It's so absurd looking! that's exactly why I liked it too!

[@RudysRetroIntel]

Great tear down and upgrade! Thanks for sharing

[@CompComp]

I always wanted one of these. I picked up an (supposedly) untested one off eBay for "cheap" a year or so ago. But I've been to busy and afraid to mess around with it yet. Right now it's kind of a schrodingers iBook. It's both functional and non-functional until I test it.

[@CommodoreFan64]

Great video, but I find this insane, when most of my old thinkpads I can flip over, remove the bottom cover with a few screws, and have the whole thing including a RAM upgrade done in less then 15 minutes if I'm taking it slow.

[@another3997]

That's certainly not the case for many other laptops though. Many are difficult to upgrade, but that's the price we pay for squeezing a lot of technology and features in to a mobile device. Compromises have to me made.

[@hellion9547]

Man, this sucker makes the Quadra 800 design feel like a joy to work with...

[@KAPTKipper]

Sometimes I'd like to kick the designers at Apple for taking the approach that requires so much work for a simple upgrade. Actually it's not sometimes, it's all the time.

[@RKelleyCook]

WTH were Steve's minions thinking by putting the component most likely to fail (the 2" rusty disk spinning around at 90 times a second) underneath a dozen other components all with teeny tiny easy to break cables???

[@another3997]

That's what happens when you cram loads of cutting edge technology in to a relatively thin chassis. Apple weren't the only ones doing it like that, and they certainly weren't expecting customers to do repairs or upgrades on them. Repair centres would have the process down to a fine art, and customers don't care if it takes a technician 2 minutes or 20 minutes to disassemble, as long as it comes back working.

[@eveypea]

Good ol' Oak Classic Chocolate milk. Gotta love seeing that in a video 🤤

[@silvestronsbitsandbytes]

Mr Clammy is such a great name for this guy... The only thing this vid is missing is an appearance from the overly long screw drivers!

[@T3hBeowulf]

User Replaceable batteries on an Apple product. Amazing. 😏 Neat guide! Can you drop a link to the iFixIt teardown in your description for posterity?

[@Nerdistmaximus]

OMG, I so want that Indigo. So perfect. AMAZING condition. If you sell it, I would love to have it!

[@cla3d]

You could make multiple partitions and have os 8, os 9 and os x on the same drive with multiple partitions

[@sausage5849]

Gee, not even one screw leftover! 🙂 You certainly seem to know these devices inside out.

[@pipp33]

Sweet hoodie

[@Renville80]

Gee, but that was a task and a half! Like others said, can you partition the drive to make the rest of the space visible?

[@garyhart6421]

WOW !!! What a palaver !

[@brianandrews5084]

There's a podcast called "20 Macs for 2020" and the host and guest refer to this design as "the tail fin era". If you were to take out a laptop that looked like this in a business setting, people wouldn't take you seriously, unless your business was art or advertising, etc, and that people weren't willing to sacrifice the space these took up on their desks and in their bags. Apple didn't even have a portable with colors beyond grey or white until the M1.

[@another3997]

Apple had different colour portables before the M1... this video contains one of them. As for being taken seriously, that's a gross exaggeration. Businesses don't generally make decisions based on the colour of the laptop someone brings to a meeting. That laptop is clearly from Apple (a well known company who aggressively marketed these and original iMac on TV), is/was blazingly fast, and has everything built in. A talking point maybe, but nothing more.

[@drphilxr]

The full version link to that song would be much appreciated - respected Sir! :D

[@lemagreengreen]

That iBook is in extremely good condition, the plastics in so many of them have degraded to sometimes very strange colors... maybe there were different formulations? green/brown tinges seem common in many with no obvious way to fix it. It's interesting how serviceable laptops have become though, this type of complicated disassembly was so common back then and well into the 2010s! most modern laptops are extremely simple to open and constructed so differently.

[@Jean-lr4hv]

Have you had any luck finding batteries for these clamshell iBooks? I just got one with a dead battery and haven't been able to find any on the internet.

[@MrLurchsThings]

Action Retro has a video on repacking them. Gonna try it someday.

[@TheMacGeek]

Great video ❤ I always wanted one of these. But I do find my M1 MacBook air more practical in daily use (working browser, fast WiFi, current application compatibility). Cool laptop though

[@elephystry]

I wonder if partitioning the SSD would curb the storage issue.

[@lbanting]

Now, it’s ready to run MorphOS!

[@another3997]

Even as a long time Amiga Fan, I have to say the last time I looked, MorphOS had even less software than 25+ year old PPC Mac OS. As impressive as all the "new" Amiga inspired OSs are, having been built from the ground up, they really don't offer anything you can't already get in other mainstream OSs, even really old ones. Unless you're using DOS and Windows 3.x, in which case ANYTHING is an improvement. 😁

[@lbanting]

@@another3997 I do agree with you to an extent. however MorphOS does run classic Amiga software fairly well, so that being said. for the still diehard Amiga fan, its a great machine and OS combination.

[@MrLurchsThings]

I wouldn’t mind trying to get my hands on a G4 Mac Mini for this purpose.

[@lbanting]

@@MrLurchsThings I heard that even some G5 desktop and laptops will also run MorphOS. I had a G4 Mac Mini running it. It worked great!

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@lbanting I've played around with Debian and various BSDs, but hadn't considered putting Morph on my G4 iBook. Good shout

[@GarthBeagle]

You make it look so easy! 😁 Nice job!

[@ballistik_coffee_boy]

Great video

[@daverhoads22]

I’ll be doing this upgrade soon. Thanks for the overview. I’m not looking forward to it!

[@aurthorthing7403]

Can you partition the drive into smaller pieces to make the machine think they are not all the same?

[@minty_Joe]

Yes. One thing to remember is that the IDE controller has a limitation of up to 120 gigabytes maximum and can't boot from a capacity that big. In the case of this SSD, set up the first partition for around 7 gigabytes and the remainder partitions of 120 gigabyte sizes.

[@UpLateGeek]

I was going to say it wasn't as bad as my old 12" Powerbook G4, but perhaps it was more fiddly. It would've taken me a full day to tear that machine down and reassemble it, if I hadn't have run out of time and had to split it across two days. Although I did have to replace the screen assembly and bottom shell, so literally everything had to come out of the machine before I put it back together. But I can definitely say upgrading my 15" Powerbook G4 was much better. I really should get around to swapping out the European keyboard with the slightly more normal US American one though. I can almost never hit the bloody enter key first time on that thing!

[@bandiras2]

As a PC guy, just looking your fight against this cursed design gives me a headache.

[@RetroReviewYT]

The later G3’s should do larger drives… I might be wrong though.

[@UpLateGeek]

Ahh, good old Oak. Used to be my beverage of choice when I was a youth. I mean how do you do fellow youths?

[@neilthomas6042]

An interesting video; I am cacky handed and wish I could do this. I did try and swap a hard drive in a used laptop and found I could not load a Windows OS.

[@tigheklory]

It is one of the most jerky designs I have ever seen! The hard drive should be removable with one screw. I have a Pentium 100 Sharp laptop from before that laptop existed and you don't even need a screw to take out the hard drive, just push in 2 clips. I would love to see you do some content on the very interesting Coleco Adam computer. It has some really cool modern accessories like the Fujinet card and a brand new MIDI card.

[@another3997]

The question is, does your old Sharp laptop have all the same features built in as the later G3 iBook? When you integrate faster CPUs, faster memory, better GPUs, modems, removable wi-fi cards, a faster CD rom drive etc, the design and layout have to change to accommodate everything. This is before the commonly used SOC designs we have today. The more things you cram in, the more complicated it becomes to design without making it too big... hence more compromises have to be made.

[@tigheklory]

@@another3997 the processor is socketed, it has PCMCIA card slots and you can change the memory modules so yes.

[@Edsshed]

Hi, hope you can help me, I'm desperately looking for a spectrum plus keyboard. I'm working on a new mobile spectrum next and need a keyboard to use with it, and am looking for a decent one to use. Do you by chance have one or know someone who does. Willing to pay for it. Also looking for the full tape system for a +2. If you can help I'd be grateful. UK based. Final product will be shown on my youtube when complete.

[@TheBasementChannel]

Great work. To be fair to apple, they really did make these machines to last. And no fragile hinge issues.

[@muttBunch]

This is awesome. But makes perfect sense why they always charge a trillion bucks for these because of all that's involved during assembly.

[@reboxtherapy]

I wanted yo buy AAPL stocks when nobody else did, however this wasn't the reason

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

120GB not 128GB. Use an external drive for apps and files.

[@50ShadesOfBeige]

iToliet Seat

[@SAerror1]

Absolutely absurd procedure to replace a simple harddrive, I really wonder what the designers were thinking. Maybe they secretly hated service technicians and wanted to make their lives miserable. On my own clamshell ibook I cut a hole in the metal shield large enough to get a CF card in and out of the adapter I installed just by lifting up the keyboard afterwards.

[@brennonr]

so easy to service haha

[@jjohnson71958]

the clam shell design was slow flawed and not so easy to open to service the components

[@jowi_24seven43]

I feel so bad for the low paid factory workers having to assemble this monstrosity back in the day

[@gowron277a]

Does anyone still make batteries for these or are we just using them as weights now?

[@CommodoreFan64]

No, and the same for a lot of older Thinkpad models as well sadly that are still very usable with a RAM, SSD, and Linux install, but there are some videos on YT on how to repack the G3 Batteries if you're adventurous, and have the skills.