is 12" G4 Powerbook good starter laptop for school age children

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Level 1

9 points

is 12" G4 Powerbook good starter laptop for school age children

I have an 7 yro grandson who is very interested in exploring the computer skills he learns at school. He goes to a parochial school that uses Macs. So I'd prefer to get him an Apple for home, instead of a PC. Since he's still young, and all boy, I'd rather get him a good moderately-priced small used laptop to start off with. I've been researching early PowerBooks and thought a later version 12" G4 would make him a nice netbook-style beginner laptop. The 2005 versions had built-in wifi, larger hard drives, and either combo or superdrives. These have aluminum cases. Do you feel they're reliable and modern enough for someone this age? Any comments and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

PowerBook, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Feb 19, 2012 6:56 AM

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Answer 1

Allan Jones

Level 9

68,690 points

Feb 19, 2012 7:28 AM in response to Smsgt

The biggest issue with any pre-Intel Mac is that they struggle with most web pages. Even ads now have video and that slows the page loads way down on PPC Macs in general. There is little improvement in adding RAM (about the only upgrade available to the average user) because the issue is that most of today's video is no longer optimized for the Power PC processor.

Even simple, web-based children's' games and sites are making our PPC Macs struggle. My grandson (10 yo) was really relieved when I finally pronounced him mature enough to use my MacBook Pro instead of Grandma's eMac when he visits. Disney, Lego--you name it--almost any legit kid's site was not happy on the 1.42G eMac.

I'd look for a used MacBook. I see them on Craigslist in our area at pretty reasonable prices. A caveat: be sure any sale incliudes the original gray system install/restore disks that came with the computer. You will need them eventually, and they are hard to find for computers as old as the PowerBook

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