is there a way to bring back the Apple Bong + Happy Mac icon when you boot up ? I am still using an old 13" mid 2010 Core 2 Duo MBPro. Cheers indeed to all the old Apple stuff. 😉🙂😊
Not related, but everytime i hear the product name 'powerbook', i always remember the old 'p-p-p-p-powerbook!' internet meme. Good times, goooooood tiiiiimes~
It's kinda hilarious that the Raspberry Pi, which is probably significantly more powerful than the PowerBook itself, is just chugging along accepting a SCSI command every epoch or two.
These videos are a lot of fun, the retro Mac community on RU-vid is full of incredibly knowledgeable people who've been at this for years. While that means they can produce some awesome stuff I have to say watching someone dip their toes in and learn in real time really takes me back and is almost a nostalgic feeling. I'll bet pretty soon we'll be seeing soldering tutorials on this channel lol
The modem board you thought was AT&T branded, is actually by global village, they made many modems for the Macintosh, including internal ones for PowerBooks
I love the direction this channel is heading in! I came here initially cause of all the vids you did on used MacBooks you could find on eBay so this feels right up your alley.
Luke, close up your aperture on your camera; you have it wide open and important portions of the frame are out of focus, even though they are inches away from objects that are in focus.
You are right as a matter of fact during the weekend I tried firing my mint condition PowerBook 1400CS and it practically got destroyed like a cookie, the whole screen cracked and went to pieces, was such a nice machine 😢. My 170 is still intact …
I owned one of those Powerbooks back in the day. The active matrix screen was a really big upgrade. Unfortunately, I had trouble with the screen hinges and lost confidence in the portable so I sold it on and just keep using my SE/30. I didn't get another Apple portable for many years. Great video and those Blue SCSI systems look fabulous. Cheers from AKL, NZL.
Loved the old trackball in the middle. Highly usable, in some ways better than trackpad, because there is momentum with the spinning ball, and there’s no need to move finger over a large trackpad. And I liked having a separate physical button to click with thumb. I often use my current MacBook’s trackpad that way, by “clicking” along the bottom edge with thumb while moving screen cursor with index finger. Old habits, when more precision needed. That old PowerBook would make a nice distraction-free writing machine, with its sharp color display and old-school (more tactile) keyboard.
A relaxing, dare I say, chill restoration. Thanks! (And how cool is it to have a 21st century micro Raspberry Pi 'cosplaying' as the hard drive of a 30 year old Mac laptop?!)
Ah, the joys of working on these vintage PowerBooks. You really did a great job with this one, you covered nearly all the bases. Just be sure to get that screen recapped!!!! The displays in these units are SUPER fragile electrically, and if you continue using it in that state, the leakage from the capacitors will make its way up the internal circuits in the screen and ruin it, permanently. It’s an absolute must-do, and yours are clearly failing due to those line artifacts.
I love how the hard drive is 100x more powerful than the laptop. It's an awesome machine tho, I'm jealous. Please cover more retro Mac systems. I would like to see a video on "This retro Mac runs most games/apps and is easy to find" if that is even possible.
i am very happy that your getting into the world of retro mac tech retro tech is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. i know u have made many videos on old mac products but like mike lobelia says your getting into enthusiast level btw please make a video on the iPod nano the smallest one if u can please.
I had a PowerBook 180 at work 1993-1995, the first laptop I used although I had been using Macs for about 4 years before that. It changed the way I worked. Psivewri made a similar video recently although he was talking about old hardware in general rather than this or any one specific Mac.
The issue with the floppy drive is probably one of two things -- the gear that moves the head could need lubricating (white lithium grease has worked for me in the past), or the read write heads are dirty, in which case a cotton swab with rubbing alcohol can fix that. Collin from This Does Not Compute has a video where he does exactly that: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SRScacZP2G4.html
Not necessarily unfortunately. TDNC and myself have both run into drives that are just completely dead. Accepts a disk, doesn’t try to move the heads or spin the disk, then pops up the need to format screen in the OS. No amount of lubricating or cleaning will bring them back. Some logic failure seems common on this model of drive for some strange reason.
@@3lectr1c I know there’s a gear in the 400 and 800k drives specifically that basically turns to cheese over time (I’m not sure about these powerbook 1.4MB drives with regards to that), and it makes sense that there can be cases of logic failure, I’m just speaking from personal experience with my 145B that lubricating and cleaning the head brought the drive back to life. It definitely makes sense that there could be a logic failure, but I think the first step in diagnosing the problem should be to see exactly what it tries to do when you insert a disk
@@andrewtaylor4523 yep, check the obvious stuff first. Unfortunately in my case, cleaning the heads and adding lithium grease to the metal stepper screw thing didn’t change anything. It doesn’t even try to do anything. This was a drive from a PowerBook 170. The cheese gear would only affect eject - and that should only be on the autoinject drives found on MAC desktops from the original to the early 90s.
I remember that laptop design was the 1st with an integrated trackball. At the time most PC laptop keyboards were pushed all the way to the front edge so you either bought an external mouse or trackball. After this laptop release, all PC laptops started copying the design.
I've got a few vintage Macs-A G4 Cube, PowerBook G3 (Lombard), PowerBook 180, and a 2009 17" MacBook Pro. I've put solid state drives in all of them (ZuluSCSI in the 180). I also have a few old Atari 8-bit computers with SD card drives in place of floppy drives. Solid state drives make old computers much nicer to work with.
Good job on the repair. Screen desperately needs a racap as those lines are not normal. I've done two of them. Ive got one of these plus the 165c with the passive screen. Honestly, I prefer the 165c. Why? Because the screen on the 180c is much smaller and because it the refresh rate is much worse. Ok for some games but any kind of scrolling is painful. I'm not sure why this is as it's a problem unique to the 180c. I tried to do some programming on it and the slow refresh was too painful. Also, the display ribbon cable on these is super fragile! I've torn two of them and had to wait many years for replacements on ebay to show up.
I just bought one of these myself about three weeks ago. One thing to be very careful of is the display cable; it will tear very easily. Luckily I was able to get a donor 180c to replace it. Also, once the caps on the screen are replaced, those screen artifacts will go away. Replace them with tantalum capacitors. After I replaced mine, the screen looked amazing for a thirty-year-old laptop. I also have a 165c, but the screen has fallen victim to 'vinegar syndrome,' making it almost unusable.
I'm, working on a similar PowerBook (165) on my channel, Mr. Brown's Basement. As soon as I saw you flexing those hinges I knew where your video was going. Brittle plastics are taking their toll on many old Macs but it's hitting these early grey plastic PowerBooks especially badly. With respect to the 165c, I bought one new back in about 1993 just before it was discontinued. I think it was about around $2500 CDN at the time, which was discounted from its usual price of around $3000. Your PowerBook 180c was over $4000.
Some thoughts: Yellowed keyboard - If you're gonna replace it anyway, try to retr0brite it first. If it fails, well... Floppy drive not reading - probably a dirty head, clean it with a Q-tip and some isopropyl alcohol, at least 75% though 90%+ is much better. Might also need to clean up the old grease/lubricant (again with some good-old IPA) on the mechanical/moving parts, and replace with some fresh silicone grease. Hard drive - good choice! For IDE-based systems you can use a CF to IDE adapter. They have them for 44-pin 2.5" IDE connectors. Cracked/broken plastic - you did all you could do. 3D-printed parts are definitely a game-changer, especially if you have the ability to design your own (just please share with everyone if you do!) For the parts you replaced, maybe give some of the above a shot. At the very least you'll have some experience doing so, and if it works out, you now have spare parts!
When you said 30 year old hard drive I thought to mention this I have 5 hard drives in my pc and two out of the 5 are IDE 30GB seagate barracuda HDDs. The rest of the drives are all running on Sata 2 connections which are Sata 3 capable. It is also running an operating system which nobody thought would ever run on it as it is a desktop PC from 2004. It is running windows 11 pro on hardware that shouldn’t be capable but there’s no tpm module as it is built in the AMD Athlon 2 x4 CPU as a security module 1.2 and I have a little whining GPU which I installed on to the PCI-E bus and it worked after I installed drivers for it. After everything that I did to it besides putting in every single part that was never meant to game on I was really surprised that once I overclocked the CPU and GPU it is actually able to play almost all modern game titles at the lowest possible graphics level with an average FPS of around 30 on heavy loads and on moderate to light loads exceeds my expectations of a whopping 250FPS in very few games without ray tracing. With ray tracing on it is significantly less but still achieving 128fps under my benchmarks and every piece of hardware still has thermal headroom and performance headroom with all of the stock cooling equipment. You heard that right an 13 year old PC runs windows 11 with 8gb of DDR3 clockable memory and is able to play 6fps games all day long without exceeding 78 degrees Celsius and that is impressive considering that the poor CPU is overclocked 10% to 3.3ghz and overvolted to 1.55v which is not just safe but also the maximum voltage the chipset can demand with also its stock 350w power supply which might be close to its limit but I plan to use only 75% of its performance to prevent damage and retain its stability and reliability. If I were to upgrade it any further I would probably have to upgrade the power supply to avoid power limit throttling
Replacement Powerbook parts in the plastic territory need to exist, but also quite crucially is the Display Ribbon cables. My Poor Powerbook is absolutely WRECKED it was destroyed by my brother and the whole top half needs rebuilding, but i no longer have a rear case for mine :(
You actually can get banned for life from eBay from selling counterfeit items. I made an Among Us fan art shirt and sold it on eBay, then they banned me for my ENTIRE LIFE. Should have called it Sus People instead.
The white plastic MacBooks are the worst for falling apart! The edging around the laptop interior would become damaged by closing the laptop, turning it into random white toothpick-like shards that would randomly break off. Haven't used these in few years, but I still find random pieces around the house.
All plastic degrades and disintegrates over time. It's fun to try to keep these things going, but it will still all fall apart again in the coming months & years. Oh, and that micro SD card will likely fail just as quickly as the hard drive. Welcome to exciting world of retro collecting, the game you can never win!😂
I have a working PowerBook Duo 230, 2300c, and 540c. Great to boot those up and run vintage System 7. I also have an LC 575 with the ultra-rare Apple PowerPC Upgrade card that allows dual booting of the 33MHz 68LC040 and the 66MHz PowerPC 601. The PowerPC mode even has the startup chime from the TAM.
I think there may be something wrong with the display. I've never seen an active matrix display show horizontal lines like that. Passive matrix, absolutely. You might want to look at the caps on the display controller.
I love these new videos you make of old computers restauration. I do the same with old PC laptops and desktops and I can understand very well your pleasure. Bringing back to life these machines I was dreaming of while I was young is so satisfying. Like you are, I'm amazed by the silence and speed of flash memory based HD replacement (we have the same kind of stuffs for PCs). By the way, after being a Windows-PC-only guy for litterally decades, I bought my first MacBook after I watched your video about the MacBook Air M1, when it came out. Because of (or thanks to) you, I was a very early adopter of the Apple Silicon based Macs. And since then, I'm using both MacBooks and PCs to work, with a lot of satisfaction. Thanks for your videos!
OMG, that floppy disk sure brought back memories… I still remember when I used to copy and store a copy of the files on my first Windows ‘98 pc to floppy disks, they seemed so much big (in capacity) to me. It kinda makes me smile when I think of the capacity of the SSDs and HDDs I have now…..it especially makes me feel _old_ (all that happened 20+ years ago). LOL
I sold these in a computer superstore in the UK.. the actual first computer superstore In the UK before PC world got going. We had a range of these and the Mac classics as well.. it was like a game for me to take a customer who came in for a PC and get them to walk out with a Mac. System 7 was great compared to Windows 3.1, and it was file compatible with PCs. The TFT color screen was gorgeous, the only other machine we had with a similar 640x480 TFT was an IBM, but the Mac was so beautiful In comparison. I’d been a huge Apple fan since the Apple II and in 1993 the quality was not too bad, but by 1996 the quality had got so terrible that I switched to Windows until the first Intel MacBook came along.
When repairing those plastic stumps, A # of us just put a Shrinktubing on it and then shrunk the tube til tight, then dripped Superglue into it, around the top, to glue the tube (where it touches) Best of Luck…
This “quality” surprises you??? You haven’t seen Lenovo’s laptops then , The Thinkpads, Yogas, Thinkbook… latest and from some years back… as soon as you open them after the first time they start falling apart, is like on purpose made to break while servicing them, especially if you don’t know what you doing. What you talk about is nothing new. You just don’t have much experience with many other models.
Luke. Can you do a video about data backup strategies using apple products and the apple server OS ? And the speed and use of Thunderbolt and the new Thunderbolt & usb 3.2 integration? And maybe using OS images of your old apple computers on an M1 M2 computer using parallels or something like that. So you can manage OS versions ?
Blue SCSI? Not if it uses a micro SD card. They tend to fail in no time flat if you are reading and writing to it constantly. To bad they don’t interface to a SSD. I am for restoring classic computers, I still have the need for a 286 machine since I program vintage two way radios whose software will not work on the faster machines. Getting started on a Techra 520D that I used in the past for remote programming. Power supply full of those pesky surface mount electrolytics.
Transitioned from an Apple IIe to a PB 180c in 1994. Used it until 2001 when I got a titanium PB G4. Gave the 180c to my 7 year old nephew at the time. Wish I had held onto it after it quit working for him.
How about a video on old (Gen 1/2/3/4) iPads and their usability today? I have picked up two superb condition Gen 2 iPads recently for less than £10 each on eBay.
I honestly prefer when you talk about more recent Apple products. For vintage tech i prefer other channels like This does not compute or Adrian Digital Basement. It's not a personal thing, however it’s clear that you are trying to broaden your audience, but the retrocomputing world probably doesn't belong to this channel. I personally appreciate much more videos where, for example, you do upgrades on less recent machines.
Having flashbacks to elementary school in the mid 90s and these old PowerBooks but with the monochromatic screen. The computer lab also had dozens of Macintosh Color Classics. I suggest a review on the Macintosh Color Classic in a future video.
Awesome video!!! I bought and still own that same model laptop. It's in a closet 10 feet from where I'm sitting. The only difference is that mine is in pristine condition and everything works. Well, except the battery. It is the original one that came with the unit and understandably does not hold a charge. So it needs to be plugged in to run.
Just buy a Steam Deck if you want to mess with things and have fun after....playing games :) And it blows this thing away as a portable computer too!!!
Hey Luke, can you please try to boot from an external cloned drive from any M2 Mac? This seems to be an issue … Not only can you not replace an M2 nvme but it looks like they have locked down external boot drives.
Boy, seeing this Mac brings back some old memories for me. I used to build those in the Colorado Springs Colorado plant that was here back in the early 90s. great to see it’s still working.
The original Chromebook given out by Google to beta testers had the same problem, they were made to survive about a year of testing and then the standoffs all started failing if you used the device at all. Coating the outside of the standoffs with JB Weld, ideally before they started disintegrating, worked a treat. Unfortunately I didn't know about it til it started to happen, lol. But it's a great way to prevent damage down the road or stop it now.
Now all you need is a dot matrix printer, spools of paper, ribbon cartidges and your word processing abilities are complete with this computer. Or better yet, an olde IBM laser printer would not make those clanky sounds as the printer is working.
The old plastic was just never meant to last this long. When they made these they did not think people would be using them 40 years on. Same for the screens that are dying on some macs. Just gonna have to hope someone makes quality re-shells for some of this stuff.
I get a kick out of the issue with the brittle plastic of old Apple laptops. I bet the Apple engineers who designed these devices had no idea that people would still be using them 25 years later. 😂
I was the Apple software quality lead for this product. I was responsible that software was tested and did not fail our tests. All Apple products serial ports had problems, that were not fixed in hardware until the first iMac which happened to not use the serial ports.
