What were PowerBook G4 laptops made of 20 years ago ?

[Gigamaxx]

I've never seen any Intel iGPU fail on any laptop or desktop in the past ten years. They are super reliable.

True dat! I wonder though with the struggle to get more performance out of 14nm++++++++ if this will hold true down the road. Higher and higher clocks and more watts can’t be good in the long run. Time will tell.

 

[trs96]

Since we're talking Apple history here, what was the first ever Intel based computer to be hackintoshed and when did it happen ? Any guesses ?

 

[MacMan]

I have 3 of them in boxes in my basement. One has the dreaded broken hinge issue.

 

[pastrychef]

Since we're talking Apple history here, what was the first ever Intel based computer to be hackintoshed and when did it happen ? Any guesses ?

 

[trs96]

Nobody knows the answer ?

Believe it or not, Steve Jobs was responsible for the very first hackintoshed laptop. A Sony Vaio.

If Steve Jobs had gotten his way, that VAIO in your lap could've been running OS X, Apple's operating system. It sounds like fiction, but consider the source: former Sony president Kunitake Ando. The revelation, which stems from an interview Ando gave to Japanese journalist Nobuyuki Hayashi in 2011, highlights the close relationship Jobs reportedly shared with Sony's co-founder Akio Morita -- a relationship that led Jobs to make an exception to Apple's walled off ecosystem. And according to Ando, it was on a 2001 golf trip in Hawaii that Jobs decided to surprise Sony executives with a version of Mac OS X running on a VAIO, four years before the Intel transition was made public.

As we all now know, that Apple/Sony partnership wasn't meant to be. For Sony, the proposal was simply a case of bad timing, as it ran counter to not only the success the VAIO line was experiencing at the time, but also the wishes of its engineering team. After having spent so much time optimizing VAIO for Windows, Ando says Sony's engineering team saw OS X on VAIO as a diversion of resources and were "opposed [to] asking 'if it is worth it'." It was because of these two factors that Sony never pursued the prospect of Mac-compatible VAIOs any further.

 

[trs96]

Here's one of the more detailed write ups of this story that first came out back in 2014.

Steve Jobs wanted Sony's Vaio computers to run Mac OS X | AppleInsider

Despite stamping out the once-popular Mac clone program upon his return to Apple in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs a few years later reportedly flew to Hawaii to pitch executives of Japanese electronics giant Sony on the idea of selling Mac-compatible VAIO computers.

appleinsider.com

 

[pastrychef]

Here's one of the more detailed write ups of this story that first came out back in 2014.

Steve Jobs wanted Sony's Vaio computers to run Mac OS X | AppleInsider

Despite stamping out the once-popular Mac clone program upon his return to Apple in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs a few years later reportedly flew to Hawaii to pitch executives of Japanese electronics giant Sony on the idea of selling Mac-compatible VAIO computers.

appleinsider.com

Makes me wonder how long M1 Macs were in R&D before being shown to the world...

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Interesting stuff.

My first Mac was an iBook G3. All thick plastic. I remember I had to order a PCMCIA wireless card as an extra and fit it myself (Apple probably too expensive). The white keyboard was held down by two half-turn screws and was very "flexible", not like modern stuff. Once lifted I had to find the antenna lead, plug-in the card and insert it. Luckily this all worked!

Then came a G4 Mac Mini. The rest is history.

Don't know what the GPU was ...

 

[trs96]

JK Scheinberg was the Apple employee who first ported OS X over to an Intel based computer. He could be called the father of the Intel hackintosh.

How does Apple keep secrets so well?

Kim Scheinberg's answer: Fear? I've been meaning to tell this story for a while. The year is 2000. My husband (JK) has been working at Apple for 13 years. Our son is a year old, and we want to move back to the East Coast to live near our parents. To do this, my husband will need to be granted pe...

www.quora.com

 

[trs96]

Don't know what the GPU was ...

I remember it well, an ATI Radeon with a whopping 32MB of DDR1 vram. What power !

All Mac mini G4 models have an onboard 4X AGP ATI Radeon 9200 graphics processor. The Mac mini G4/1.25 and Mac mini G4/1.42 have 32 MB of DDR SDRAM. Although the box continued to list the "official" specifications of the Mac mini G4/1.42, the "stealth update" Mac mini G4/1.5 has 64 MB of DDR SDRAM.