Vintage Apple iBook G3 Saved From E-waste - Restored And Cleaned 

7 months ago I found this channel randomly; it is really a channel that produces quality content. Congratulations Hugh Jeffrey

Absolutely criminal that it ended up in e-waste but I’m pleased to see it saved and restored! The G3 clamshell is a true design icon along with the iMac G3 and completely broke the mould of what a computer could look like in the era of boring beige boxes and off grey laptops.

makes my head spin seeing this as vintage... born in the 90's I now feel old LOL

Now this one is a gem! I actually also have one of these Clamshell iBooks and absolutely love their design!

You have to change the setting in TCP/IP and set the connection to Ethernet built in if you want Ethernet to work on OS 9

These videos make me feel so nostalgic. I remember the days when the Internet was such a novelty that I only knew a couple of websites (the ones my dad used to surf on his Pentium 4 PC). Meanwhile me and my brother had an old Pentium 100Mhz PC with Windows 98, an ATI Rage Pro II with 4Mb VRAM and some retro arcade games loaded. I remember playing some TNMT fighting game on that machine, it was soooo awesome.

Before Apple became the "we will not let you upgrade our laptops ever again"

"I was assembled in Taiwan, and restored to my former glory in Australia"

The iFixit as company was born, after an iBook G3 has broken down and founders don't finded any repair manual at that time in 2003.

I always called this design “the toilet seat Mac”.

I've been watching your videos for about a year now. You inspired me to replace the battery in my iphone 7 myself. Bought the parts from iFixit and set about doing it yesterday afternoon. After a bit of struggle getting the screen off, I was able to replace the battery, and even replaced the dust seal. Phone battery health is now back to 100%. Thank you vey much for your videos and inspiration.

I have the same laptop - Blueberry iBook, and mind also still works! The battery even holds a charge. They are quite amazing! The keyboards are great, they look great, and they were so stylish in their time! However, they are a little heave by modern standards! Ha ha! Thanks for a great video Hugh.

Hugh: "If I was around when it came out" Me: We had 486 and Mac Classics in high school...

The colours are back with the iMac :D

Been watching this channel for about 3 years and still has great content

Hugh Jeffreys : I won't look at the data on the laptop to respect the privacy. Dank Pods: Hold my Pkcell

9:36 !! "If I was around in the nineties" ... thanks for making me feel very very old ... the first Mac I used was the Mac Classic, B&W screen, within a few months, I got to use one with a colour !! screen, the whole 9inches (diag) of it !! Operating system booting off ... wait for it ... a 1.4mb floppy disc !!!

I can’t believe you’ve come so far! I’ve been watching since your iPad 2 restoration video from 2017

My father had the Airport version and it still works!! The mousepad doesn't work and the screen is weirdly cracked but intact, The wifi gets abour 1.5mbps speed at max and the game still runs fine as heck!

I can feel that happiness while he is removing the adhesive :), good video btw bro.

I have a stack of about 8 working i3 clam shells of your interested in more as well as some other vintage macs. Thought I’d offer! I also have some original apple posters too. 😄 That ram was the bane of working in a Mac shop. Some of the worst I’ve ever dealt with. Crazy that it’s still working 20 some years later! Great restore.

The first laptop I ever owned and still my favorite ever was a Graphite SE 466 Clamshell G3. Wonderful job!

I owned one of those for 10 months before realising the hinge incorporated a carry handle.

Apple watching their older laptops being extremely easy to upgrade: *Wait what we did was illegal under Apple standards! Never again! Me need profit!*

I bought a G3 powerbook new in 1999. Don't think I've ever had another laptop that I liked as much as that one for all the reasons you mentioned. It would run forever with 2 batteries in the bays and you could buy a charging cradle and have battery life only be limited by the number of batteries you owned.

There's this one Compaq Presario laptop from around the time, that took inspiration from these iBook G3 clamshells, that being the Presario 1400. Notably, when you open the lid you can see this, it also had a few different color "options", with these rubberized panels on it you could get about 6 or so different colors for, besides the standard black. Those being rubber from the time, of course don't hold up that well. I have a couple of those 1400's a black & blue one, are some nice machines & yes, as mentioned they took inspiration from these clamshell G3's. Back in those days, computers, laptops & the like had uniqueness to them, now it's just generic whatnot these days. Which makes retro computing & electronics for that matter, quite the interesting & fun thing indeed.

I love the G3 clamshell so much. A dream project of mine is cramming a modern PC in one of these chassis.

Hey Hugh, You could try setting the current date and time and then attempt to load the website. If a wrong date/time is detected, some websites might not load.

Ahh a throwback to when you did that lime iBook. Well done, -former- arianator.

I had one of these.. Holy cow, were they slow machines even when they released

I acquired a graphite clamshell iBook SE (non-FireWire) a couple of weeks ago, and went a bit nuts with upgrades. On the day I got the iBook, I installed a 64 GB Compact Flash card for an SSD. About a week later, I replaced the stock CD-ROM drive with a DVD-ROM drive. Over the last couple of days, I performed the glowing Apple logo and translucent screen bezel mods, transplanted some better-condition case parts from a dead blueberry iBook, and fixed some minor case/structural issues from the initial SSD procedure (the screen hinges would creak alarmingly due to misaligned tabs, and the left seam of the top case didn't quite go back together, but I fixed both of those problems). The iBook now runs beautifully and looks awesome, and I'm extremely pleased with how it turned out (and I'm proud of myself for returning to fix the aforementioned issues/mistakes).

I miss these wacky designs- great restoration!

Ahh, I really liked when you said you wanted to keep the hard drive due to the way it sounds like. It seems so many people that are into retro computing are replacing them with CF cards nowadays, losing the character of hearing the drive spin and the sounds of it seeking.

3:04 sounds like a dosimeter without the alarm. Love it.

Me opening up mine right after watching this video and realizing it doesn’t have an Airport card 😅😭

iBook remember them being released and they seemed soooooooo cool!!!!!!

Very nice machine. Well done.

About 4 years ago I found this same exact model and color in pristine condition at a garage sale in North Carolina, USA. If I recall I paid 25 USD. I still have it and turn it on every so often. The only issue is the battery is completely dead and requires AC to be plugged in for it to work.

Not only does he repair gadgets, he also recommends good cleaning tools to use for these devices

I loved this era. Your video made me smile. Thanks.

Thanks for the video! Very impressed by how this laptop held up.

"It's something you can't replicate with flash storage or a modern hard drive." *looks at my enterprise-grade NAS drives clicking away like mad*

This brings back memories of my elementary days using these computers and learning to type using MacMavis

FINALLY! I've been waiting for this since the First Apple laptop vid.

You always save me when I cant sleep 🙏🏻 Love your videos m8 keep it up ❤

I loved these when they first came out. I had an idea that I would have one or two in different colors. The concept is such a great idea but this day and age Apple would never put something out that was this fun and user-friendly

The G3 clamshells are such unique machines and a piece of history. I remember one of my high school teachers having one of these on his desk. EDIT: The only reason I put flash storage in vintage machines is for reliability. A good example is my Windows XP laptop. I got hold of an MSATA to PATA adapter in a 2.5" hard drive form factor and installed a 64GB SSD.

"After dropping my cleaning solution everywhere i can clean off the top lid." the way he said it in that monotone voice made me gaggle lmao

This is in mint condition! A friend of mine found one of these iBooks in the trash a few years ago and gifted it to me, but it was full of cracks, especially in the handle area. To my surprise, the battery was still working after 15 years

This was a pretty nice restoration! I rteckon that those older Macs will be rather sought after at some point, if not already now. Good job!

Watching since 2018 never regret it!!! Epic work Hugh

Awesome restoration Hugh, keep it going!👍😎😸🥰😀

I found this channel about 2 years ago and I’m still here

Wow im getting old, i remember when these came out lol

Good to see your video quality improving and I'm so happy you have opened your online store

Those Clamshell have huge value and are collectible. In 2021 no geek would trash those iBook

A lot of laptops nowadays have versatility to upgrade, apple laptops dont, the problem i see in a ton of laptops is that they dont let a cpu change, but ram and storage are upgradable in most laptops

Nice to see that some folks like this. I bought a similar model (guess processor is litte bit faster) in 2000. I still own it and it runs fine. But it is not really usable. Now I think about selling it or retrofit a modern RaspberrPi to make it usable again. Do anyone know how hard it is to fit a RasPi inside?

It’s so cute I would love a laptop like that now obviously working with a modern iOS! Just think how beautifully retro would be..

1999 - 6GB of storage is plenty 2020 - 6GB of storage fits only a few movies. 1999 - 512MB RAM is plenty 2021 - 512MB RAM for 2 to 3 Chrome tabs.

I remember as a kid wanting this laptop so bad. Nostalgia overload.

Sometimes I wish Apple still cared about upgradability

I work at an e-waste place so I see old laptops like this sometimes but all of them that I have seen so far are very damaged and missing components

I have 3 of these I saved from eWaste recovery as well! No power supplies and I believe the hard drives were disabled as they were from a school upgrade back in the day. eBay prices are all over so not sure where to sell them.

I remember using these in college and at Uni. Laptops and computers now are nowhere near as fun to use or look at.

Great content 👍🏻 now I am addicted to your channel ❤️

Ah dang, I was really looking forward to seeing how that thing comes apart, because I have tried to disassemble one unsuccessfully

Videos like this always reminds me that gadgets just come and go.

i've always wanted one of the colorful clamshells, imo they're the most iconic apple product

How old do you feel when this is vintage !!!

This is the episode I have been waiting for

i was happy until you said "if i was around in the 90s"..... and made me feel 1000 years old.... i was repairing the G3 laptops and towers in the late 90s and early 2000s.... great nostalgic video sir!

LOVE your videos! Just ordered one of these for myself! So excited to get it. re: Hard drive replacement....Do you think you could just cut the metal to get to the hard drive instead of having to disassemble the whole thing? Does SSD create less electromagnetic noise or whatever that metal is there for?

7:00 The 802.11b standard wasn't approved by the IEEE until September 1999. Wireless Access Points weren't popping up in people's houses until 2002 or so. That's why it wasn't standard in this G3.

I loved these Macs ! I use to have them when I wss in elementary! But it was the desktop version! Not the laptop. That is so beautiful!!! U should restore the desktop version next!

Actually the maximum for the ibook G3 Clamshell is 1 gig of ram and they actually sell a 1 gig chip its the same chip that fits the g4 lampie model of the imac i recommend that if you have a working cd drive and a hard drive dont upgrade it you could cause more harm then good and mac os x and mac os 9.2.2 where never designed for SSD

Had the tangerine version, probably one of my favorite Macs of all time - such an 'friendly' feel. Really wish Apple would take more chances now, sooo tired of all the current aluminum squares.

I just started running an emulator to get some old software working for a camera I own. Still waiting on the connecting cable to see if it works, or if I have to hunt down a g3 or g4 mac. Glad you saved this one!

I would love to see transparent electronics making a comeback.

You cured my boredom.

Hey Hugh! I have a question do you think you can use 4K in your videos?

I love computer restoration videos!

Geez, that is a flashback for me.

One of the guys in forefront of Rights to Repair Movement, who knows that a display change from the same device could have ignited this!

I felt like I'm on a time traveling when seeing items like this"

I want an iBook G3 Clamshell. You can’t use it to surf the web anymore but I can always like type up documents or something with it

Watched this on my PowerBook G4! (using SafariWebKit / LeopardWebKit) I have one of the blueberry iBook G3s as well. They are so pretty!

You think that laptop is upgradeable? In my hp from 2011, you have direct access to the ram, cpu, ssd, fan, and wifi card without removing a single screw. (It uses a spring loaded latch)

I know these wouldn't be useful for everyday use but I would love to get one as a collectible... maybe eventually... I still love this design... I wish Apple would go back and give us something with this design again

i love aesthetics of the old tech ngl

Another job well done Hugh, I love your channel 😁👍

old cars make me nostalgic, old tech makes me appreciate what we have today. this is not that old but if you have any old tech around the house please make sure to recycle them, you're not going to use them, and someone else probably going to throw them in the trash which hurts the environment really bad.

Do you feel need of any extra bits in your pro tech tool kit? Or its wiser to purchase Manta tool kit?)!))

just saw this noti while watching another aussie restore an imac g4

I really wanted one of those when they were new. Apple laptops (even today) have a unique sense of style that PCs lack. Alas, they are significantly out of my price range.

Old is actually Gold

Always love your videos Hugh!

What a really cute laptop

Apple in 90s : repairability is our top priority! Apple now : fk repairability

I wonder if apple will release macbook with many colors just like the new imac.