it's not normal to find apple laptops at the thrift store and the few times they
do show up they're usually asking at least 10 times the 4.99 i paid for this one but
the more i get into it the reasons why it was so cheap will start to become obvious
this is an ibook g4 and i actually bought one of these back in 2011
and used it to edit and upload videos for about a year back when the power pc platform was
still pretty usable for that kind of task but this one has clearly seen better days
first of all it has what looks like either paint or makeup
all over it along with its fair share of scuffs and scratches
on this side you can find a vast array of ports which is something you definitely
won't find on an apple laptop these days there's a kensington lock slot a modem
ethernet firewire two usb ports a monitor output and a headphone jack
on this side is the optical drive you could get these with either a combo drive which could read
dvds and burn cds or a superdrive which could burn
both dvds and cds but just looking at it i don't know which one this has
and there's the power jack which predated the mag safe connector this
style kind of looks like an rca jack although the center pin is different
on the bottom we can see a lot more of this purple paint or whatever it is
and it's missing one of the rubber feet
and i did not get this with the power adapter but i have one from my power book which i was
able to use so i plugged it in and let it charge up and amazingly the battery holds the charge
and here's the information model number a1054 24 volts i didn't think that adapter was
that high of a voltage 1.875 amps copyright 2003 so that's approximate date of this one
so it's clearly quite dirty but at least the battery is working
but when i open this thing up you'll be able to see why it was so cheap
yikes what happened to that keyboard
first of all i could tell it was heavily used because of the amount of dirt on it and the fact
that the letters started wearing off and they wrote the letters in magic marker on the keys
and you can even see some scotch tape residue on this one so i don't know maybe they're trying to
stick on little stickers to say what the letters were and then somebody got violent or something
fell on this i don't know what happened to cause them to rip off
the majority of the alphabetic keys and the space bar
some of them don't even have any remains of the key switches left they're just bare metal contacts
these might actually still be functional because it has enough of the key switch
in there but clearly this keyboard is not salvageable
and even if it was it's quite badly yellowed compared to the rest of the case
and i'm starting to get that purple paint or makeup or whatever it is on me
so before we go any further i'm going to give this thing a good cleaning
first i'll remove the price sticker
oh there's even more paint underneath it
and to clean it i'll try using this pitney bowes office equipment cleaner
which is a little bit stronger than window cleaner and it has a funky smell to it
yeah it's coming right off so i don't know what that was
this computer is still not going to look pretty but at least it won't be
having this paint come off on my hands
so
that's a lot better i also cleaned the touch pad and palm rest area and the button still
has a nice click to it i'm not going to worry about cleaning what's left of the keyboard
and even though its battery is still holding what appears to be a charge
i plugged in my power adapter and it's glowing green
so after a good cleaning let's turn on this
$4.99 ibook g4 with a ruined keyboard and see if it still works
at least we got the startup chime
is the display going to work ah it's lighting up, it took a while though
i can hear the hard drive
and there it is starting mac os 10
your computer's clock is set to a date before march 24th
2001. yeah the battery probably went dead but the touchpad is working
it has 10.4.11 which i believe is the latest version you can put on one of these
800 megahertz power pc g4 640 megabytes of ddr sdram
i don't want to show the original owner's full name but it was nancy's computer it shows cd-rw
so i think that's just a combo drive and yes it does have airport extreme wireless
and it has about a 30 gigabyte hard drive which i believe was the base
configuration created september 28 2003
and it has a bunch of icons on the desktop stacked on top of each other
i didn't do that that's the way it came so let's try to separate those
that's the disk image for firefox 3.6.6 we have a burn folder and 2012 nj recycling 2 pdf file
in the applications it has internet explorer back when that was actually apple's default web
browser for a while before they developed safari otherwise just oh there it is actually safari
so maybe it came with internet explorer and they added safari later
otherwise just the basic apple stuff quicktime player awesome kid stuff here dr seuss's abc
netscape back when that was still a thing
office x so they did have microsoft office on this as well as appleworks
and deimos rising i don't know what that is quicken 2004
sound studio so it looks like nancy got quite a bit of use out of this computer for a while
and it looks like both nancy and bernie used this computer but i can't find any documents
in either of their folders so i think they cleared it out before they retired the computer
which is a smart thing to do
they don't even have anything left in their itunes library bummer that's itunes 6 from around 2006
microsoft office is still working here's excel this is back when once you bought office
you bought it for life there was no such thing as a monthly or yearly subscription and here
was the mac version of clippy or clippit as i believe it's supposed to be called
and actually even the keys which got completely sheared off are still working
if i tap on them just right for example if i tap on this key i can get it to respond
see it's working and here's the one next to it which also got sheared off
so surprisingly this keyboard is still somewhat usable
you just wouldn't want to type on it but it's possible if you had no other choice
obviously i'm going to replace this keyboard and luckily replacements are still
cheap and readily available i think they typically go for about 15 on ebay
and the speakers are working too
and hello yes the microphone is working too you can see by the input level meter
judging by the newest files i can find on the hard drive it looks
like this computer was last used in july 2016
i was able to connect it to my wireless and in safari the apple website even still kind of works
you can at least see the ads for the latest apple products
so far everything seems to be working fine but let's test out the optical drive
with this dvd so i'll stick it in and see if it starts playing
you can hear it spinning up
let's try this laser lens cleaner
the scotch laser lens cleaner for dvd players and dvd-rom drives is
specially designed to remove dust dirt and small particles from your dvd lens
the unique microfiber ten brush system cleans the most sensitive lens and is designed to work in all
dvd drives the cleaning process will begin now and lasts about 30 seconds
the underside of the disc has little tiny brushes on it
which i guess this program of the disc is sweeping across the lens as it plays
the cleaning process is now complete okay looks like the dvd drive is working
and it ejected the disk
now to test how long the battery will last
i have it playing another dvd and i'm going to unplug it right now
and that is unplugged it's running on battery power and we'll see how long this stays playing
because as far as i know it has its original battery from 2003
so i'm not expecting it to last as long as it originally did
oh i didn't get it on camera but it just suddenly turned off so obviously
the battery is no good anymore but when i plugged in the ac adapter and turned it on
it picked up where it left off so obviously it was able to go to sleep instead of just
cutting off the power suddenly in which case it would need to restart the operating system
i just bought a replacement keyboard for it for 15
on ebay but otherwise i'm going to leave this ibook g4 alone because i already have my
powerpc laptop needs covered with the array of machines here
my powerbook 5300c my clamshell ibook g3 and my powerbook g4 the most powerful one apple ever made
but it's nice to see that an 18 year old apple laptop can suffer such abuse
and yet still work perfectly