Powerbook G3 Lombard Review

The Powerbook G3 Lombard was the 2nd laptop in the Powerbook G3 line. You can find these still useful laptops today on eBay for around $50. They came with a 333-400Mhz processor, and are upgradeable to 512MB of ram. An interesting note about these laptops is that they are the first laptop to come with a DVD player. The Powerbook G3 Lombard had an identical case to the Powerbok G3 Pismo. In fact the only difference between these two laptops is that the Powerbook G3 Pismo came with two fire wire 400 ports in the back.

The Lombard's suffered from a lot of the same problems the Pismos did.The pink tinge on the display, as well as the dead PRAM battery causing the computer not to start. The dead PRAM battery is a major reason why you see many Lombards tossed in the trash or going extremely cheap on eBay. Looking at a Lombards insides is like looking at a Pismo except that the Lombard didn't have an Airport card. You had to connect your own wireless Internet card to get it to connect to your wireless router.

The Powerbook G3 Lombard had a bronze keyboard just like the Pismo. The unit is almost exactly the same on the outside, on the inside there are several difference. The Lombard shipped with a smaller hard drive 4 GB and 6 GB. It can also be upgraded to a G4 processor like the Pismo. It was significantly thinner and lighter then the Wallstreet. The Wallstreet was the model of Powerbook G3 that came before the Lombard. In its day this laptop was the computer everybody just had to have. It had style and the speed of a desktop computer. In fact, it was one of the first laptops to replace desktops entirely. It was a pioneer for its time. Today you can still use modern operating systems like OS X 10.4.11 Tiger on it. It still preforms admirably in this OS and will do most things newer computers will do. Of course it will not play streaming video, or run Leopard, but it is decent for web browsing, typing, viewing DVD movies and some video editing. You can even buy a DVD burner and install it in here, so you can burn DVD media with your Powerbook. Not bad for a 10 year old piece of machinery. In contrast, ten years before the Lombard, portable computers didn't even exist.