The iBook G3 Review

I recently purchased a 12 inch iBook G3 running at 900 MHZ with 128 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive, I updated the RAM to 640 MB which is the max you can upgrade on these books. This iBook came after the original iBook G3 "clamshell". If you remember the iBook G3 "clamshell" was a radical design and everybody just had to have one in 1999. The iBook G3 2nd generation was radically different and came out in the early 2000's. You can find one of these iBook G3's on eBay for about $300.

The iBook G3 is tiny and very easy to carry around, it is also a nice stylish white color. It was one of the main computers that educational institutes ordered, and you can probably still find many of them in schools and universities that have not retired yet. They are still very valuable machines and can go anywhere on the web. The 900 MHZ model which I own came with a 32 MB VRAM chip which means it can go on You Tube and watch streaming video with ease. The iBook G3 I have is the last G3 computer that Apple ever made. After the release of the iBook G3 900 MHZ, Apple decided to abandon the G3 all together and continue developing the G4 chips, the next iBook to come out had a G4 chip installed.

A lot of these iBook G3 and iBook G4's suffered from a graphics chip problem which resulted in a large number of these computers being junked or sent back into apple for repair. Apple discontinued the iBook Logic Board Repair Program in 2007, so you can't send an iBook with a broken graphics chip into apple anymore. There is a fix for this you can do yourself though. You can take a small piece of card board and place it underneath the graphics chip so that the solder balls make contact with the chip on the motherboard, this is a temporary fix. You will eventually need to re-solder the chip to the motherboard as it will eventually lose all contact with the motherboard.

The iBook G3 is still a great computer, so if your low on cash, you should consider picking one up on eBay for a discount price. This computer will do almost anything a new computer at over $1000 dollars would do, at a fraction of the price. I give my iBook G3 two thumbs up.