Welcome to Macintosh

An Indigo iBook: My First Modern Notebook Mac

- 2007.12.04

Bong! . . . :-) . . . Welcome to Macintosh!

I hope everyone had a safe and blessed Thanksgiving!

iBook After another hiatus, Welcome to Macintosh is back - this time with Low End Mac's very own Clamshell iBook in hand. Thanks to Dan Knight, LEM's publisher, I've had in my possession the official Indigo Clamshell iBook from LEM's headquarters for about a month now.

I love the little bugger. The hard drive tends to whine, and with 128 MB of RAM, it's not exactly a speed demon under Mac OS X 10.3.9, but it's convenient. Ya just gotta love the thickness and the handle on it. This was one of the more cool and practical designs Apple came up with for a laptop. I'm all for thin, but give me something durable. The Clamshell screams durability.

This iBook is my first modern Mac laptop. I'm very impressed with it so far.

One drawback was that it suffered from the infamous power plug problem. For those who aren't familiar with it, the power plug on the motherboard isn't soldered on very well, and over time one or more of the "legs" will come loose, in which case you'll have to have it resoldered, which is a repair I did on this one. If you have a clamshell that has this problem, it's a somewhat challenging repair, but it can be done. (If you don't feel comfortable doing the repair yourself, email me, and I can do the repair for you. If you'd like replacing a hard drive or CD drive yourself, I can do that for you as well.)

There will be more on the Clamshell as time goes along. In the meantime, if you have any stories about your Clamshell iBook, send them to me at thomas (at) lowendmac (dot) com.

I'll be cranking out more reviews this month as part of the Low End Mac Reviews section, stay tuned for the next Welcome to Macintosh, and stay safe out there this holiday season!

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Recent Welcome to Macintosh articles

Welcome to Macintosh (Again), 2012.01.03. Tommy Thomas returns to Low End Mac with big plans.
IBM Model F: A Great Old Keyboard with an Outdated Layout, 2009.11.19. Although it used a different technology than the revered IBM Model M keyboard, the Model F was a great keyboard in its own right.
IBM Model M: The One True Keyboard, 2009.05.12. Many consider the IBM Model M keyboard the finest computer keyboard ever made. Here's why.
More in the Welcome to Macintosh index.

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Mac of the Day: Mac IIfx, introduced 1990.03.19. This 'wicked fast' 40 MHz Mac trumped the 33 MHz DOS world.
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