Clamshell G3 iBook Upgrades! 

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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!

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

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.

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

Great tear down and upgrade! Thanks for sharing

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.

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.

You make it look so easy! 😁 Nice job!

WOW !!! What a palaver !

Sweet hoodie

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

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

Great video

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

Great video thanks! Sounds like Apple must have gotten a massive job lot of screws for $10 million and needed to use them!

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???

Now, it’s ready to run MorphOS!

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

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.

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

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?

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

so easy to service haha

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

iToliet Seat

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.

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

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