Curious about the value of a iBook G3

[macmusician]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking at buying a used iBook G3 with 500mhz, 256 MB RAM, and a fifteen gig hard drive off of craigslist. Its supposed to be in great condition. I would be using it to record some music and make videos for youtube. My two questions are would it be sufficient for those purposes, and what do you consider a fair price? Thanks.

[houltmac]

Personally, for the prices CL/eBay will sell you a used MacBook for I'd say iBook G3's are worthless and useless. Check out the Intel Mac pricing - you will be more future proof'd, be able to get parts longer, will be able to run iTunes (and thus iPods and so on), and the speed difference will be insane. You will also have other advantages such as the iSight, slot load drive, decent trackpad, better display... the list goes on, but the price does not.

[baseballboy828]

I agree with houltmac. You will be very frustrated with it within a few days. It's not going to run any reasonably recent audio recording software or video software. Save up some money for an Intel mac, even if it's a used first generation model.

[notabadname]

Me three. You would find it very frustrating to use. I would definitely go Intel.

[macmusician]

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm still considering the possibility of buying it and dealing with the slower performance and etc. because it's only $100 or so. Obviously it won't compare to the wonderful machines of today but it might still be worthwhile for some simpler applications. If I were to buy a used Macbook instead what sort of price range would I be looking at? Basically I want an inexpensive entrance into the land of Apple that'll still have average abilities, so any suggestions would be great. Plus does anyone have experience with the iBook I originally mentioned? Thanks again.

[baseballboy828]

A used first generation MacBook might run around $700 or possibly less, depending on the condition and the seller. I'd strongly recommend not wasting money on the iBook G3, even if it's $100. You won't be able to do any of the things you want to do with it, and will just end up buying a MacBook when you have the money to do so. Save the $100 for an Intel Mac. Maybe if it was under $50 you might think about it. It's just not worth $100. Even if it's in near perfect condition externally, the internal parts will be worn down from years of use. The second you have to pay for a repair, the $100 iBook becomes a $250 iBook. You will also most likely need to replace the battery if you want to get decent battery life out of it. I can't say it enough; if you buy this, it's just another $100 you'll need to save for a MacBook.

[philbowell]

I'm going to echo everyone else here and say don't bother. Save the money for a MacBook. I have and still use an iBook G4, it runs Leopard (which the G3 won't) and all I do on it is surf the web and check email. It's starting to get very slow at that and any heavy javascript or flash websites bog it down massively. I can't really watch any flash videos on it because it drops frames so the G3 won't handle video editing at all well. You will need a new battery, I need a new one for my iBook but at £90 it's not worth it and I'm just saving for a new MacBook.

[paulandre]

ditto everyone else

[broscup]

I am currently typing this on my friends iBook G3 900 MHz with 640mb or ram, and the reason I have it is because he wanted me to see if I could figure out why the videos play choppy on sites like youtube. So far I have been unsuccessful, and if someone knows a way to help, please let me know. Actually, the computer runs pretty decent, but flash sites just kill it. Youtube isn't too bad, but some of the other flash sites don't play at all. Save your money and buy a intel mac, you will be so much happier. I have a 1st gen macbook pro and it is still running great!

[baseballboy828]

There is no issue with the computer causing it to have choppy video playback on YouTube. It's just too slow for any type of streaming video, Flash, or anything like that. @macmusician: The machine @broscup is talking about is nearly double the processor speed and has 2.5 times the amount of RAM, and it still is unable to even run web based applications. You can't expect something with less than half the power of the machine @broscup described to be useful for anything other than word processing and browsing HTML web pages without heavy javascript or flash.