PowerBook G3 In Retrospect

512 Pixels’ Stephen Hackett says that like the iMac G3, the PowerBook G3 line of notebooks helped revive Apple in the late 90s and the first year of the 21st century, during which Apple took the power of the G3 processor and put it in a mobile workhorse. Hackett takes a retrospective look at exactly what the company did with these machines, profiling the four and a half PowerBook models that were powered by the Power PC 750 G3 CPU.

Hackett observes that In retrospect, it’s obvious just how important the PowerBook G3s were to Apple, bridginh as they did the gap between old-school and modern Macs, with each generation reflecting significant progress in Apple’s mobile technology.

He also observes that when it comes to expandability, nothing beats these machines, which is one reason why an amazing number of Pismos in particular are still in service a dozen years after the last one was made. With two upgraded and tweaked Pismos still in active daily service, I couldn’t agree more, and will add that the Pismo is almost absurdly easy to open up for service and repairs.

With two after-market batteries in its dual bays, Pismo users can also even enjoy up to 16 hours of battery life – longer than any current Mac laptop or even the iPad, and that there’s just a charm about these machines that current Apple notebooks lack.

You can check it out at:
http://512pixels.net/2012/12/powerbook-g3/