Possibly the single best pre-widescreen lappy ever made, Mac or PC, was Apple’s PowerBook G3, codenamed Pismo. Apple introduced it in early 2000 to instant praise and adulation. It came with a 400 or 500MHz PowerPC G3 CPU, two PC-100 SO-DIMM slots for up to 1GB RAM (Apple only rated it for 512MBs), a 6 or 18GB ATA-66 drive, a 6X DVD-ROM drive, a 14.1″ Active Matrix TFT display which could handle 24-bit color and was driven by an ATI Rage128 video sub-system with 8MBs of VRAM driving the gorgeous 1024×768 backlit display, 2 USB and 2 FireWire ports, a 56k modem, 10/100 Ethernet, optional internal AirPort, and a PCMCIA Type-II slot. All this was swaddled in the single sexiest case ever devised for a machine, making it even more desirable by Apple lovers everywhere.

I got mine upgraded to run a 550MHz PowerPC G4 processor, bumped the RAM up to 1GB, replaced the aging 6GB drive with a riproarin’ 7200-RPM 60GB drive, and slotted in an ugly but fast DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. It was the best machine I had ever had, bar none. It was so much so that this entry is looking more like a love letter than a retro review. The Pismo was also the only machine which was able to last for 7 years and stay up to date with technology, a testimony to Apple’s prowess with it OSen as well as its industrial design chops.

I ran the system on everything from 9.1 through to Mac OS X 10.4.11. It won’t upgrade to 10.5, since its only a single processor system. I ran iLife ‘06 on it, even GarageBand, quite well. It was certainly no massive workstation, but with the extra RAM it could run FireFox, Mail.app, several utilities, Adium X, and still play a DVD without skipping. iTunes worked very well on it, too, aside from the fact that I was unable to sync my iPod 5G to it.

I dearly miss the machine, though I know there is a person out there using it right now (I know who they are, famiy friend) and enjoying it. In the last year after purchasing my MacBook Pro it had not been used as much. I did, however, always keep it near me. It was a phenomenal machine and, I assume, remains so. I’ve long thought how nice it would be to see Apple make a Pismo Celebration model of the Intel-based MacBook Pro with a widescreen version of the Pismo case. I would pay good money for that. Yes, I would.

written by Tyler Regas