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With the advent of the Intel based Macintosh people have been dropping their old power pc based Mac's in order to upgrade to the latest and greatest, which should mean it's a great time for the budget conscious buyer to pickup a Mac second hand. Your probably thinking, "yes, I'd love to get one of those and the price is great" but hold on...
Is everything as good as it seems in Mac land a year later down the road? In this article I'll be taking a look at a 12" G4 iBook read on to find out more about this machine and what I've found.
Testing machine history
The 12" iBook G4 (fitted with 1gb ram) used for this test was purchased late 2005 for use by a university student. Since its purchase it has been used periodically (best guess 1 in 10 days) for note taking in law lectures. It has always been protected properly and never treated improperly (eg left on the back seat of the car on a 40 degree Celsius day) so everything should be fair to the iBook and the problems pointed out will probably be common with other people's findings.
For readability purposes the article will be broken down into two sections, one highlighting points to look at/note for the chassis and the other for the input aspect (keyboard & touch pad)
Chassis
When buying a laptop one of the first things you're going to be taking a look at is the shell of the machine, does every panel fit together? Is anything missing? How well has it aged?
How the lid sits on the base is one of the first things that you are going to notice when you pick up a machine. Like a car as a laptop gets older bits of plastic (or trim if you like) don't fit flush like they use to, however a good design will factor this in and be designed appropriately. The test iBook here has one of the poorest fitting lid's I've seen in a long time (on par with some $600 edu specials used by 8th graders) considering the age of the machine it fairs quite poorly in this regard. If you take a look at the photo you will notice that it doesn't sit evenly across the lid, with a very distinctive grab down where the clasp is, which overtime has the potential to warp the screen.
Another effect of this pull down clasp means that the little rubber prongs seen at the far edges of the screen don't actually touch the base meaning that there is a very ineffective seal around the edges of your machine that wouldn't be able to prevent some potentially damaging materials from sliding down and destroying your screen (there is sufficient space for a coin to fall for instance. If a side picture of the machine is view it demonstrates what could happen and just how ill fitting the lid is.
The next major chassis thing to be wary about is the screen and its alignment to the chassis. For the actual screen I haven't had any nor seen any issues worth mentioning so thumbs up to apple in that regard. However things take a turn for the worse on inspection of the connector of the LCD to the chassis, which is not straight meaning that when your iBook is sitting on a table it will make the screen appear slightly off angle but when your using the machine on your lap, you twisting your leg is more noticeable.
The photograph while admittedly not the best angle does show what I mean by alignment issues.
While working on the machine there is something that is ever more obvious the alignment of the LCD, one of the pieces of plastic around the glass has lifted its self clean off, warping the plastic and giving a horrible bulge to the casing.
Yet that still isn't the thing that concerns me the most about the build quality of this machine, it's something far far more alarming. A screw falling clean out the side of the machine of its own accord, one day it was there another day it was gone. Given that they are custom screws there is noway even if it had been noticed that anything could have been done about it because I don't' think even a torx screw driver can adjust these.
You might also want to press around the casing lightly to check for squeaks, in particular where you rest your palms while typing, as that's one place you won't be able to live with a constant squeak.
Input devices
Starting off with a positive this time, considering the age and use the keys on this machine are still whiter than a lot of people's teeth who I know (though I do know a lot of smokers...) but things start to go wrong for me with the keyboard when I start typing on it, the keys are not at similar heights, some feel like they have dropped down a bit further than others which makes touch typing difficult. This is really apparent looking at the spacebar that you can see how one end is clearly not sitting down properly.
The other input device that's likely to be of concern is the touch pad, which obviously you can't take a picture of to illustrate a point. I've noticed that it appears to track as it should with a reasonable level of precision however the big single button at the bottom often fails to register a click when you tap it off to the side, but if you hit in the middle it works almost every time.
So there you have it, some of the basic things to check to ensure that you don't buy a dud.
In brief:
• Lid fits on correctly, including rubber prongs
• Screen is aligned correctly
• Plastic isn't warped
• All the screws are present
• Keyboard doesn't have cases of lift
While obviously it would be stupid to expect that your windows or apple machine is going to be perfect but the ill fitting plastic on the test machine and screw falling out really makes me question apple's build quality on their new machines also…
It would defiantly make me have second thoughts on buying a macbook.
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