Restoring Apple's Most Upgradable Laptop - PowerBook G3 Pismo - The M1 Mac I Wanted To See... 

Crazy to see how this was designed to be worked on, like a different company.

I bet that when this laptop was unveiled, Apple hyped it as a modular and upgradable masterpiece. Look at them now

That inverted apple logo must have driven Steve Jobs crazy.

It's a shame that nowadays everything is built in such a way that you are almost forced to throw it away. RIP resources 😕 Your video was very good as usual, keep it up 👍

Damn lucky bastard's probably playing Sims 1 as we speak

Apple: We're gonna pretend we didn't make that

I had this exact laptop. Loved it. The modular battery/drive bays were awesome. Could put in two batteries, Zip drives, etc. Could pop off the keyboard in seconds. When the power plug eventually broke, the power card was a separate small board and I changed it myself. Same thing when one of the screen hinges cracked. For all the BS that Apple, and other companies, say they "care for the environment", in reality, it's all about selling product. If they truly cared about the environment, they would make their products repairable, including by third parties, and keep them useful as long as possible. Sad state of affairs.

The red display reminds me of a CRT display I used to have which would would wake from sleep red. So I set the desktop picture to a nice nature scene so waking up made it look like dawn rising. :)

Apple Engineers back there were a different breed xD

The same company is now selling their "Headphones without Headphone Jack" called "AirPods Max" .

I have a PowerBook g3 pismo 500ms that I found being recycled it was in almost perfect condition and it worked well I love to play around with it

“this machine can support up to a *whopping* 1 gig of ram” 😂

send this cat and andrew, he would definitely find a way to max it out.

Hugh, after you wet sand you need a polishing compound to get it to shine again. The idea of sand paper is to make the scratches extremely fine scratches so that it can later be buffed out, wet sanding alone won’t restore the finish. Look for headlight polish, it works fantastic in restoring scratched electronics when used properly.

"This machine can support up to a whopping 1 gigabyte of ram" Thats insane

Next, try the G3 "Clamshell" as those things need to be fully assembled to replace the hard drive. See how that "engineering marvel" feels while repairing.

I got a working one of these for 7€ 6 months ago. It‘s in pretty good condition except of missing rubber feet. I‘ll have to rebuild the battery pack and it will work as good as new!

To solder the batteries, you can solder them with a common soldering iron, the magic is in sanding the surface to be soldered a little, so that the roughness holds the tin. Also use flux for soldering.

i used to have one of these!!! i STILL miss it. when i reached the end of my applecare warranty with it, i remember taking it in to the genius bar to get some small things that had always bothered me, fixed (eg. IIRC the screen had a couple dead pixels, that sorta thing.) back then the genius bar was a different place. when i came back to pick it up, they were like, oh yeah so we noticed your logic board had some issues, and also something something hard drive, so we replaced both of them.... they basically gave me back a BRAND NEW MACHINE. amazing! it was later stolen when i was in grad school a few years later, forcing me to enter the world of aluminum powerbooks, which i was sooooo bummed about. (and also was the start along the path towards reduced upgradeability/ repairability! boo.)

I had one but it was from 1999, it was a 333 Lombard. Very similar to the Pismo except for the back ports(Pismo had firewire). I had upgraded the CPU to the 400 G3 PPC and you could also upgrade them to the G4 like the Pismo at the time from the aftermarket. Had both the right bay and the battery bay (left) with two batteries and got something like 8-9 hours back then. That was an awesome laptop. Thanks for the memory lane. :)

Cold try a nail manicure buffing stick on the scratches

A time where apple wasn't such a greedy company and wasn't trying to stop you from repairing or upgrading apple products.

Wow, you have excellent vintage computer repair skills. Of all the vintage Apple laptops in my collection this is the only one that, I call "My Baby". I picked up my used Power Book G3 (Fire-wire) Pismo around 2003. Also, because spare parts have become harder to find, I obtained a second one on Ebay about 8-years ago. In my opinion this model is the best designed laptop Apple ever made for several reasons which include: 1) A great selection of ports two USB, two Fire-wire 400, Ethernet, 56K modem, IR, PCMA, S-video, headphone, and Sound in, port; 2) Right and Left side "hot swapable" bays (for things like an extra battery, extra memory, floppy drive, 120 MB super-disk drive, 100 MB Zip drive, DVD player, etc.); and 3) Easy to upgrade and repair. During the 2010's thought that, I would have to retire this model but with the expanded use of USB thumb drives my Power Book G3 has continued to have life running both classic OS 9.2 and OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Kids in 2050: what’s a headphone jack?

I had been waiting for the video of this laptop for months

Next time we should do a teardown of the MacBook Air with the M1 chip

I have a Lombard, the G3 Powerbook just before the Pismo, and I love it. It's my favourite computer, and I've had a lot of fun upgrading it over the years. My Lombardhas a 400 Mhz processor (upgraded from its original 333 Mhz processor), 512 MBs of RAM (the maximum for this model), a 128GB Compact Flash card "SSD", modern silver thermal paste, a Firewire 400 PCMCIA card, and a slot-loading optical drive taken from a G5 iMac. I use my Lombard for music and replaying childhood games.

Its amazing that early apple MacBook was one of the most modular and repairable of all times, now becomes the almost unrepairable laptop sealed with hard glue

Old, but still gold. Back when Apple listened, and actually cared about their customers, more then they did money.

I had one of these and loved the translucent keys haha. I thought it was so cool.

This brought back memories! I had one of these, and it was a workhorse. I'm amazed they are still around!

great video Hugh. I have been watching for years and love the videos.

Companies nowadays will charge you extra for this kind of modularity haha. Good video though, really interesting laptop.

Louis Rossman would love and hate this.

The best thing i like in technology is repairing and restoring the things designed and created by someone else. And this channel shows the best of it.

This is awesome!! Love you videos mate and hope your doing well.

The headphone jack: finally, for years, i now got sound stablization

Hugh- doing so much work for a headphone jack every phone manufacturer- sike

Absolutely LOVED the Pismo!

I love your videos Hugh!

6GB HDD. The good ol' days.

Nice!

Great video Hugh, was really cool to see this as i just picked up a PowerBoob "Wall Street" and a Pismo for myself recently. These machines are awesome and you really take it to the next level of preservation. Keep it up!

Amazing. You sure know your way around these units. I’ve never seen the inside of any of my Mac stuff but I always snooped Windows equipment.

Please subtitle your videos to Brazilian Portuguese, your content is incredible and I’ll follow you from here! 🇧🇷

This thing is an insult to Apple's work method and thinking of today.

Nice one man keep up the great work! The Pismo is a really cool collectors item.

I really appreciate the hard work that you've put in

Yessir

High Hugh nice that your restoring this old laptop I'm proud :)

Hope you read this, Hugh: Its wet sanding (2000) + Liquid Gloss Poly Wax to polish. It will look terrific!

one of my favourite vintage powerbooks...I bought one of these new back around 2000 (still have the original box too!), and use it occasionally as a “bridge” between vintage macs (1984-1999) and Mac OS X - it just has so much connectivity. Have the same PRAM issue, but no big deal.... Great video Hugh!

Same I wish this was the M1 Mac’s upgradability and try to see if you can upgrade the os from Mac OS 9 to Cheetah

nowadays MacBooks are literally slabs of aluminum with a few usb c ports. looks nice but man it it restrictive.

I would love to see Apple release an affordable laptop like this one today!

Excellent effort Hugh. It’s a beautiful machine in usual Apple fashion.

This is probably the precursor to the M1 chip, as one can clearly observe that there’s ram, graphics, and a CPU on one module, which is completely separate from the rest of the motherboard. one could locate boards similar to this conceptually in modern airplane avionics. I wonder if someone would be brave enough to attempt at producing a modern intel cpu module with ddr4/5 and high end graphics that can connect to this PowerBook… it would become the ultimate sleeper laptop… That person should walk into an Apple store and say that their PowerBook is having trouble with MacOS Monterrey…

Apple:Sees this video Also Apple:Ahh old memories!

I love the sound effects.

Amazing restoration as always Hugh ! But you should really deep clean/retrobrite the plastic components separately on those old devices, it'll make the restoration so much better. Happy holidays !

wow im early this time

After the death of Steve Jobs even Apple's Innovation is also Dead with him .......😔

I have two Pismos, one suffers from the initially-red screen, the other behaves normally. One has an internal fault I can't trace & won't boot from an internal drive. Instead, I use a pair of CF cards, one of 1 GB with Mac OS 9.2.2 & the other a 32 GB with Tiger installed. The CF cards connect via Firewire to a FW CF card reader.

To make the PRAM battery, use copper adhesive, check it in amazon. Cut the copper adhesive tape and put it over the cable on each side of the battery. It works better than soldering the battery.

I still don't understand why nobody in any review I've seen of the M1 Macs has been concerned about the future of these machines. In 10 or so years virtually all of them will be dead, beyond repair. Why? Ram is a very common fault in computers, other than maybe the CMOS battery, it's what goes first. And without RAM, your fancy computer doesn't work. Can you imagine why having RAM built into the CPU is a major design flaw? The CPU is a ball grid array chip, and a big one at that, meaning only a highly skilled professional repair technician with tools that cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars will be able to confidently replace it. And after all that a replacement CPU would be its own nightmare to source, apple will make sure of that. Even if you couldn't care less about things 10 years down the line, the CPU embedded RAM is a design flaw for the here and now. When M1 Macs start becoming widespread, Im sure the RAM will fail in a good few people's machines, that's just how it is. And when it does those people will go to the good ol' genius bar asking for a repair. The geniuses will tell them it's unrepairable and that they need a replacement. Cool, whatever, the customer shows their Apple care junk and they walk out with a replacement unit. But what do you think happens with the one they brought in? Recycling at best, E-waste at worst. A perfectly good chipset, CPU, motherboard, screen, case, keyboard, and so much more, thrown out because the RAM had failed. Then Apple has the AUDACITY to say they are trying to be environmentally friendly with their designs. And don't tell me it's all okay because the RAM speed is faster. Even a disaster has it's upsides.

Ps5?

Watching a repair I would never care or perform. Loving it

I'd love to learn what you do, this stuff fascinates me!

Wow, something repairable? From apple? Impossible

Then it wouldn’t be an SoC, don’t be silly :) Also it wouldn’t be so fast, but u know that already

This was a nice video for the end of 2020

I have one of these that I bought new. In addition to all the wonderful qualities you mentioned, they were also very durable. Also, with an external battery charger, battery life was only limited by the number of batteries you owned. Fantastic machine, although it was barely capable of running os X. Apple used to really care about the entire user experience. Even the 2011 macbook pro that I use daily is fully repairable and I have performed many repairs and upgrades to it.

When Apple wasn't run by jackassess !

firstlol

My first laptop was the first generation Powerbook G3 “Wall Street” model, predecessor of both the “Lombard” and the “Pismo” - and I still have it. It looks exactly like this Pismo, but with a black keyboard. It no longer boots due to a “question mark” hard drive error, but I’ve kept it for sentimental reasons (and it’s in excellent condition). You’ve inspired me to pull it out and consider trying to get a replacement hard drive, since I’m pretty sure I still have the OS 9 install software disc for it in my box of miscellaneous Mac stuff 😃

When Hugh said beautiful sound effects my headphones sang battery low😂

Nostalgia! This was my 2nd Mac ever. First one was a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet which I ended up fixing up myself due to a broken hinge. I was 15 years old and it constituted more than a year worth of savings from my job cleaning an auto garage.

Nice video as always Hugh! I plan on fixing my 2011 MacBook Pro’s keyboard.

absolutely love working with that kind of hardware

I did the exact same thing you did with your pismo, i fully restored the machine i own, it had a lot of problems, but i did it. It also had a red backlight problem but the red wouldn"t fully go away anymore, so i opened up the display assembly and i carefully replaced the cfl tube with a brand new one, the display now has a brighter strip on the bottom, but the display is nicely bright overall so i am not gonna fix that because when the bulb warms up, the whole display has a nice and even backlight, its a very difficult repair, but once its done your screen will look so much better. I also replaced all the cells in the battery with high quality ones and it lasts for around 4.5 hours, which is way better than 10 minutes offcourse. My laptop is as good as it ever going to get so i am happy with the result :)

It’s like a different company made this. I like you.

I had one long time ago. I miss it. One of the greatest Mac laptop out there.

very satisfying!

The sound effects are pretty cool 😮

this was on my birthday so thanks hugh

I was waiting for this one ☝🏽

If you aren't the most underrated repair channel on youtube, i don't know who is

Great job, and a beautiful machine

This is the first Apple laptop I owned. Loved the swappable bays for being able to quickly slide in a new battery. Feels chunky by today's standards but definitely has more character.

I still run my Pismo whenever I need to access some Classic Mac OS apps, or just for the fun of it. The backlight needs replacing, other than that, it runs just fine. It was a great machine.

Taking apart laptops and cleaning/upgrading them is soooooooo therapeutic for me...

its surprising just how bad its got in the lack of repairs until you look back and think they can do, but don't want to, its all about the money :P keep up the good work :)

I like people like you who are hands on and like challenges, i was just expecting you to upgrade it too

I'd forgotten what marvels of engineering Macs used to be such that almost everything was easily accessed for any kind of servicing. I still have a dual processor PowerMac G5 just because it's so nice to see the care that went into the design.

I loved my Pismo G3, in the the end I had a G4/500 accelerator card with 1GB RAM, Zip drive or battery in the right bay, which kept me going until I finally replaced it with a Powerbook Titanium 1GHz which is still my favorite Apple laptop of all time, closely followed by the Powerbook 2400c/240 in which I also had a G3/200Mhz accelerator card and a custom transparent case that I bought in Japan.

i miss this times.. I have a 2006 macbook, and how easy it was to to upgrade it and fix it... it's incredible.

I had the Lombard model. I loved it. Great computer and very versatile.

Fantastic work as usual. I have no idea how you keep track of all the screws and little pieces. 🤯

Nice job, mate

Wow, I’d assumed Titanium was probably the most complex laptop design, but I was wrong! Can probably get you replacements to the damaged parts if you want. Awesome video!