Bong! . . . :-) . . . Welcome to Macintosh!
I hope everyone had a safe and blessed Thanksgiving!
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!