The unicorn is a mythical creature that doesn't quite
seem to exist outside the realms of fantasy, yet the ancients were
convinced of its existence based on third-hand reports. Unicorn
upgrades are those that either never made it out of the prototype stage
or had a very brief, low, single production run.
The Pismo PowerBook
is now a 12-year-old machine and has seen better days in terms of
usefulness. iPads with Bluetooth keyboards and other mobile devices
have greatly exceeded it from a "consumption" standpoint and can
provide a similar experience, but they are still not as versatile from
a creative/multitasking standpoint.
The iPad can essentially double as a full featured notebook, albeit
using touchscreen
input vs. the standard trackpad and clicker button found on notebooks
like the Pismo.
But what if you could greatly increase the power of the Pismo from
its ancient 400 MHz or 500 MHz G3? What if there was some kind of
voodoo magic that would allow it to be powerful enough to handle some
of today's tasks and even boot into OS X 10.5 Leopard without much
difficulty?
Something like that once existed, but it never got into the hands of
consumers. There was a 900 MHz G4 Pismo upgrade prototype from
PowerLogix, but it never hit the production line.
Yes, you read that correctly - a 900 MHz G4 Pismo (not the more well
known 900 MHz G3 upgrade). I discovered this about four years ago in
the Apple forums with a poster pointing to a real auction that was
active with pictures of the card. Too bad I didn't do screen grabs of
the auction, as they would have been very interesting for archive
purposes.
At any rate, a 900 MHz G4 Pismo would seemingly have no issue
booting into and installing Leopard. No unsupported install would be
necessary. It would be screaming fast, but maybe too hot and would
still not avoid the bottleneck of the limited 8 MB of VRAM with no
Quartz Extreme/Core Image support that limits the Pismo for today's
Web.
It's a shame that PowerLogix never put this into production, since
the G4 is fundamentally not much different than the G3 aside from
AltiVec. If they would have, FastMac and/or Wegener would likely have
been selling them even today in place of the 550 MHz G4 upgrade
currently sold.
Speaking of the 900 MHz G3 processor, which is much better known
than the folklore of the 900 MHz G4 upgrade prototype I described, I
would like to refresh the minds of those who may not remember that a
1 GHz G3 was once sold for the Pismo as well, and it is likely one
of the rarest commercially sold upgrades ever made for a Mac, since it
was so quickly pulled from the market. Charles Moore, a fellow Low End
Mac Pismo aficionado, once wrote an article about the 1 GHz G3 Pismo
upgrade and compared it to the more commonly available 550 MHz G4.
The one thing that perplexes me is that the 1 GHz G3, which was
quickly halted, had a full 1 MB L2 cache like the stock 400 and 500 MHz
G3 processors (and G4 upgrades), while the 900 MHz G3 upgrades had a
smaller 512 KB cache. It leads me to believe that although the
1 GHz G3 may have had a couple of stability issues, it was
probably much faster than the 900 MHz upgrade thanks to its increased
cache size.
If only the Pismo could have had an upgradeable GPU like so many
Windows laptops do, rather than it being soldered in place. We could
very well have had Pismos with 900 MHz G4 upgrades still doing many
tasks on the Web with overall performance similar to that of a late
Titanium PowerBook.
In the case of the 1 GHz G3 upgrade, performance would have been
significantly better than the 14" 900 MHz iBook G3, and likely
still less problematic despite the claimed flaws of the upgrade that
halted its production. At the original retail of $1,499, the 900 MHz
iBook would have had some interesting competition from an upgraded
Pismo. Besides the simple fact that the 1 GHz G3 was 100 MHz
faster than the iBook G3, the 1 GHz G3 upgrade (offered at $399
before being quickly pulled) would have had many other compelling
reasons to justify the upgrade vs. a new model purchase.
While the 900 MHz iBook G3 can also boot into OS 9, the Pismo has
many more connectivity advantages, such as CardBus, an open expansion
bay, and more I/O ports. In addition, upgrades to critical components
are able to be completed with great simplicity by even a novice
tinkerer. Thus, upgrading a Pismo with a fast processor would have been
very justifiable at the time - unless you needed the much better Radeon
7500 graphics in the 900 MHz iBook for gaming or other purposes.
The 1 GHz upgrade, as mentioned, also had the full 1 MB L2 cache,
while the iBook had the 512 KB cache found on the 900 MHz G3 upgrade.
This extra boost the 1 GHz G3 upgrade provided would surely have
made the 1 GHz upgrade the ultimate for OS 9 operation in
most cases, but alas - at least we still have the 550 MHz G4 upgrade
today, which is much more practical for OS X operation.
This may have been one of the rare occasions where a stock 400 MHz
Pismo picked up on the used market with a fast upgrade would have been
a much better value proposition than a brand new model (guessing that a
used Pismo could have been had for about $1,000 in early to mid 2003).
It's too bad that as times have changed, upgrades have all but gone by
the wayside (except for memory, storage, and optical drives) on
portables. At the same time, it makes you appreciate the Pismo even
more for what it had going for it at one point and is why it can still
be useful today (albeit for lighter work), more than 12 years after its
release.
One final interesting fact about the last 12" and 14" iBook G3s,
which were released in early 2003 (and were the last G3 Macs ever
produced by Apple): This was occurring during a time when the G4 was
being phased out of desktops in favor of the G5. It's hard to believe
that the Apple "consumer" notebook market was once more than a full
generation behind its desktop counterpart at one point.
So there you have it - the "unicorns" of Pismo upgrades. I guarantee
if you ever find one of these ultra rare upgrades for sale in an
auction, it will likely go for well over $500 (maybe even exceed
$1,000) just for the sheer scarcity and collector's value. I haven't
even seen the 900 MHz G3 or 500/550 MHz G4 upgrades on auction for
quite a long time, so it leads me to believe that the 550 MHz G4
upgrades from FastMac and Wegener will be your only way to squeeze a
bit more life out of your Pismo until they run out of inventory, so get
them while they last (but always be on the lookout for those rare
"unicorns")! 
Dan Bashur lives in central Ohio with his wife and children. He uses various PowerPC G3 and G4 Macs running Tiger and Leopard. Besides finding new uses for Macs and other tech, Dan enjoys writing (fantasy novel series in the works), is an avid gamer, and a member of Sony's Gamer Advisor Panel. You can read more of Dan Bashur's work on ProjectGamers.com, where he contributes regular articles about the PSP, classic gaming, and ways you can use Sony gaming hardware with your Mac.
