back to article Apple's Clamshell iBook G3 at 25 – not just a pretty case

It is 25 years since Apple's Clamshell iBook G3 arrived, replete with iMac styling and an innovation – optional Wi-Fi connectivity via Apple's AirPort. For context, Wi-Fi predated the implementation in the Clamshell iBook G3 by a few years, but Apple's device was the first mass-market consumer device to feature the technology …

  1. bud-weis-er

    I always felt that once you'd seen the Psion 5, the iBook looked a little lame.

    1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

      Honestly I feel that Psion peaked with the 3. Those things were built like tanks.

      My 3 got run over once. Dropped out of my pocket and a car drove over it. All it needed was a new screen - fortunately fairly easy to get in those days... Hinge has broken now, sadly, and it's just tucked in a drawer gathering dust :(

      1. bud-weis-er

        I read an interview with one of the Psion team years ago, and they said the 5 wasn't the success it deserved to be because the 3 was too good. Wow they were good tech.

        Nothing I own now seems to come close, they're either too big to be portable and with me all the time, or too useless to do anything except consume media.

        1. Dave 126 Silver badge

          > they're either too big to be portable and with me all the time, or too useless to do anything except consume media.

          Whilst not perhaps as streamlined as a tiny computer with built-in keyboard, fold-up keyboards do exist. Android and iOS are not lacking in productivity software such as spreadsheets.

          A review of five fold-up keyboards:

          https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-mobile-keyboards/

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      > I always felt that once you'd seen the Psion 5, the iBook looked a little lame.

      Your reason to compare those two machines isn't immediately obvious to me. One was designed to be carried everywhere by businessmen and last for ages on batteries and provide a fairly good typing experience given its very small frame, the other was a colourful though conventional laptop with a full desktop OS aimed at students doing coursework at a desk, and it weighed five times as much. Have I missed something?

      Comparing the Psion 5 and the Apple eMate seems more interesting, both released in 1997, both long lasting on battery power due to CPU, lightweight OS and monochrome display. In which case I'd agree, the eMate wasn't very inspiring. Moot though, since eMate was only released to the education market. I'd forgotten how big the eMate was - nearly 1.5 Kg, compared to the Psion's 400 grams - having only seen one once at school (a teacher got one, we didn't).

    3. Captain Hogwash Silver badge

      I always felt that once you'd seen a toilet seat, the iBook looked more than a little familiar.

  2. wolfetone Silver badge

    You have to look at this G3 iBook, as well as the iMac, and just ask - What happened?

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Do you mean "What happened [to create the polycarbonate iMac and iBook]?", or "What happened [after this period]?"?

      1. wolfetone Silver badge

        I'd say both really. What happened to get Apple there, what happened for us all to leave that period. What happened to those 25 years? What happened? What happened.

        1. Dave 126 Silver badge

          >What happened to those 25 years? What happened? What happened.

          Well, scientists report that it was like this:

          https://www.theonion.com/report-1998-was-ten-fucking-years-ago-1819581939

          but over two and a half times worse.

          1. Doctor Tarr
            Mushroom

            Mind blown

            My son told me this weekend that if Back to the Future was written now, Marty would have gone back to 1994.

            1. MyffyW Silver badge

              Re: Mind blown

              OMFG - and be playing onstage with pant-less members of L7 no doubt?

        2. Dave 126 Silver badge

          The Titanium PowerBook G4 was the Apple laptop that broke the curvy plastic mould in favour metal rectangles. Polycarbonate, albeit white, would live on for a bit in rectangular Macbooks and iMacs, colourful polycarbonate having a last hurrah in the iPhone 5C... Curiously, I didn't know the following:

          Sadly, little is known about the design process and who drove it. Three people - Jory Bell, Nick Merz, and Danny Delulis - are typically credited, though the standardization of that order of mentioning them in every article, and the lack of any other details makes it seem like everyone is just repeating the same original source (whatever that was). That may very well be correct, but it’s difficult to discern their specific roles, or who else may have been involved. It’s hard to believe that Apple Industrial Design Group chief Jonathan Ive had no role in such a tent-pole product. But as some have observed, it bore little resemblance to anything else that Ive designed

          - https://www.massmadesoul.com/features/tibook

          1. Andy Taylor

            "The Titanium PowerBook G4 was the Apple laptop that broke the curvy plastic mould in favour metal rectangles. Polycarbonate, albeit white, would live on for a bit in rectangular Macbooks and iMacs, colourful polycarbonate having a last hurrah in the iPhone 5C..."\

            All the plastic MacBooks cracked, every single one. 2006 models around the edge of the keyboard, unibody machines around the Ethernet port and display hinges.

          2. Dave 126 Silver badge

            Since I posted a link about the Titanium PowerBook G4 on Mass Made Soul, I thought I'd link to their write-ups of the Psion 3a and Series 7 too:

            https://www.massmadesoul.com/features/tag/Psion

    2. Necrohamster Silver badge

      I dunno, do you look at cars from 1999 and ask what happened?

      It's called progress, grandad

  3. Detective Emil
    Alert

    Blimey!

    That means it's getting for 25 years since Legally Blonde came out. [Starring the Computer]

  4. Greybearded old scrote
    Thumb Up

    It had a better nickname

    I loved the old toilet seat Mac.

    While it wasn't top of the range it wasn't really as under powered as that, compared to what else we had at $WORK at the time. Fit more RAM and it was quite up to running OS X a few years on.

  5. abend0c4 Silver badge

    First mass-market consumer device to feature [WiFi]

    Somewhere, I have a (pre-PowerPC) PowerBook 520 with the PCMCIA card cage. I know it supported modem cards, but does anyone recall whether there was ever driver support for Ethernet or Wifi cards?

    1. abend0c4 Silver badge

      Re: First mass-market consumer device to feature [WiFi]

      To answer my own question - it appears that the initial version of the PCMCIA cage was released in 1995, a year after the PowerBook 520, but only the subsequent RevC version supported WiFi cards.

      So, it looks like the iBook G3 may well have been the first mass-market device to have WiFi built-in, but wasn't the first portable Apple device to feature that capability...

  6. Dickie_Mosfet

    I still love those old Clamshell iBooks!

    Back in 1998, I was working with a friend on a website that was going to astonish the world called "ClickOn2Chichester". (Sarcasm aside, the idea wasn't a bad one: 1. Build a kind of directory website for the city in which we lived. 2. Use that site to demonstrate to local businesses that we could also build websites for them. 3. Point out that we could drive traffic to their new website by linking to it from our city directory website. I've still got the files for CO2C somewhere. The mashed-up HTML/CSS would make a modern dev cry.)

    We wanted to be able to show our city directory site to potential customers, so we needed a laptop. My friend had some inheritance money, so he bought an orange Clamshell iBook (I seem to remember that they cost about £1600, which was a lot of money in the late 1990's).

    The display resolution on the Clamshell may have been only 800 x 600, but it was as sharp as a pin, especially when running System 9.2 with its boxy, rectangular menus and windows. The keyboard was good as well, with a similar feel to the much-loved 'Wall Street' and 'Pismo' G3 Powerbooks (and in my grumpy, middle-aged opinion, far better than the hardly-any-travel chiclet keys on today's machines).

    At the time, 300MHz was not considered 'slow'. In fact, we enhanced the website with Apple's "QuickTime Virtual Reality" software; we'd put a camera on a tripod, pan the camera so that it took a photo every 45 degrees, get the film developed and printed, scan those 8 photos into the laptop, and then import them into QTVR which would convert them into a "Google Street View"-style panorama that we could upload to the site. Pretty advanced stuff for 1998.

    And then we invited a third guy to join our little venture. I won't mention names as this is a public searchable website, but let's just say that things weren't quite the same after that. "Third guy" wanted to borrow the iBook from my friend—but instead of carrying it in the boring, black, well-padded IBM laptop case that we'd bought to protect the machine, he insisted on putting it into his cool trendy ethnic satchel with its dodgy, fraying shoulder strap that was held together with knots. Needless to say the inevitable happened: the shoulder strap un-knotted itself, the satchel hit the tarmac and the screen on the iBook was cracked.

    Not long after that, friendships began to fray, and I went my own way. But I'll always have a soft spot for the old Clamshell iBook. They weren't the 'toy' machines that some people imagine them to be.

  7. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

    Clamshell?

    I always sort of thought it looked like a toilet seat.

  8. kgilvin1

    That was the first laptop that I bought myself after mowing lawns all summer. Loved it.

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