In hindsight, I got my netbook in 2004
7 June 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes
Recently, I spent some late night hours reviving my first Mac, a 12-inch iBook G4 manufactured in the 22nd week of 2004, which had been quietly collecting dust for tens of months. Bringing a five year-old laptop back to life is kind of like restoring a classic car, though I’m no automobile enthusiast. The 1.07GHz PowerPC G4 computer has had its fair share of upgrades over the years: 1.25GB of RAM (up from 256MB), 60GB of hard drive (up from 30GB), and a new battery as a result of the Great Fire-catching Laptop Battery Recall Programme of 2005-2006 that affected the product lines of Apple, Dell, and Sony.
Amazingly, my iBook still performs flawlessly with the exception of a malfunctioning internal microphone, which does not bother me one bit. What’s even more amazing is that it’s comfortably running the latest Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.7, an operating system two generations and five years later than the one the hardware was designed for. That is remarkable in the world of personal computers.
Then I had an epiphany: This is exactly what a netbook of 2009 is and does, and more; a compact form factor, perfectly capable of running all kinds of services – be it mobile broadband, Wi-Fi, music library, DVD playback, CD burning, publishing blog posts, image editing, YouTube, Microsoft Office, instant messaging, mail, or even Web programming. Sure it can’t do heavy-duty application development and Microsoft Windows virtualisation because of architectural limitations, but nobody in their right mind would expect their netbook to be able to do those things.
Plus, the iBook has a full-size keyboard and a beautiful non-glossy screen that consumers of 2009 would kill for. Did Apple inadvertently invent the ultimate future-proof machine, or are HP, Dell, Acer, and the like rushing to re-introduce the products of 2004 with just smaller, glossy screens and cramped keyboards?
Despite its age and zero accounting value, Revive (the name I have bestowed upon the revived iBook) will faithfully and reliably keep running at full throttle for many years to come. No retirement, no decommissioning.
2009-06-07 » JK