If you haven’t read the first part of the #MARCHintosh challenge, make sure to take a look over there as well. Unfortunately, because the Macintosh Plus feels a bit air-gapped, there’s not much I can do in order of sharing content from and to it. So after playing a few rounds qof Space Invaders, I decided to use a different Macintosh for each subsequent week of this month.

I was lucky, because while I was just powering up some of the old computers I had, the iBook properly turned on this time. OH WHAT A JOY! I always wanted to play around with a PowerPC-ehmmm… powered computer, so this is it! I present you without much further ado, the reborn iBook G3/500 from 2001!

Just as with any old computer, as this is already 24 years old, let’s talk a bit about the things that we now take for granted with our laptops in 2025.

First of all, it has a spinning hard disk, and it’s slow as hell, because I have the weird feeling that it’s going to fail soon. It’s also very small, only 14GB and it gets pretty hot. I could replace this with an SSD, but looking at the iFixIt HDD Swap guide, I noticed that it involves literally blowing the laptop to pieces and then put it back up again, which would take me the entire month, at least. Also, this laptop has 640MB of RAM, which actually makes it very usable, as long as you don’t need HDD read or writes. The CPU is a 600MHz PowerPC G3 and it’s pretty snappy while running this Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) installation.

A good thing is the keyboard, while being membrane and mushy and with some flex, most likely because a plastic clip broke inside, but it’s a pretty decent and fast typing experience. Except for that moment where it stopped completely while I was unpacking an archive, until I rebooted the laptop. The trackpad is fairly decent as well, but no two-finger-scroll, nor any kind of right-click capabilities. I tried to pair the laptop with a Mighty Mouse, but this doesn’t have Bluetooth. Nice reality check with these two.

Also the wireless doesn’t work, because the newer security protocols prevent this laptop to make a proper connection to my modern Time Capsule, but the trusty wired network works just fine. Browsing the modern Internet is a big no-no, at least using the included Safari installation. There are modern browsers written for PowerPC, but I don’t want to use this to hang out on Facesmash or Elonitter.

Because of the white and gray plastic, I wanted to pair this 2001 computer with a music player from the same period, and what else than the First Generation iPod? I couild wipe the iPod and sync it anew, but I already have a lot of music on it, and I don’t want to re-sync it again. However, it’s a nice sight to have them together. My main plan was to hear the internal speakers of the laptop, so I fired up iTunes 4, added some early 2000s music and I started blasting some nostalgia bangers. The speakers are nothing crazy, but for that time, they are actually good, with some good bass and highs, although a bit tinny.

I tried to play some videos in QuickTime 6.4, but my AVI files didn’t play, but they can be made to work installing an old , so this computer holds on properly as a multimedia machine, if you feed it the proper standard definition video files.

I also installed and played a bit of Quake III Arena, but while I was taking a screenshot during a frag, the computer stuck. So Quake+iTunes is pretty much the maximum that this computer can do at the same time, and I assume the hard drive to be the culprit.

I tried to play some of my favourite PopCap! Games, Bejeweled 2, Feeding Frenzy and Zuma, all of them working excellently. I wanted to play Chuzzle as well, but it kept crashing.

The best nostalgic activity one could ask for is however Adobe Photoshop 7. I edited one of my old photos and I also did a fast #MARCHintosh comp.

Hope you had the same fun reading these as I had writing the article, as it was written on the mushy keyboard and the non-retina screen on the iBook. I love this laptop, I really need to change its disk drive to something speedier and that doesn’t get as hot, but that’s a task for a snowy day. All in all, I love the nostalgia trip on this, Panther had that brushed metal interface all over the place, next to the super-duper Aqua scroll bars and buttons.

I wanted to install and use some System 9 applications, but the System 9 installation on this machine is broken and I’m too tired and too overworked to start to tinker on this particular issue. Maybe after I change the hard disk, I’ll tackle this issue as well.

So until next week, it’s Zuma time for me! Happy #MARCHintosh to everyone!