Can a Powerbook G4 have internal alterations?

No.

No, I am not. Nor, obviously, are you.

Think about what you are asking: 'can you turn a Ford Pinto into a Ferrari?'

The G4 is a PowerPC chip machine and to run Mavericks 10.9 or anything beyond 10.5.8 requires an Intel chip.

Oil vs water, they do not mix.

You could always buy a new MacBook Air then gut your G4 and use it as a custom carrying case. 😁

The main reason why is heat.

Most computers these days use a variety of cooling pads and cooling gel to make sure the CPU does not overheat. Alas, the same gel that can cool the machine down can if applied too much of become an insulator, and give the machine more heat. Apple's computers are finely tuned with the firmware telling it exactly what speed to give fans, and have certain venting systems to keep their notebooks from overheating. When those breaks we see people trying to monitor the internal heat and alter fan speeds with firmware fan control software. Unfortunately they could be speeding the demise of their machine. The G4 was not much cooler than today's CPUs. Apple has never released the internal temperature requirements of its computers, so these fan control programs are actually all based on guesswork. If you burn down your home because of trying to make a computer mod, don't say you weren't warned. I've seen pictures of iMac G5s actually scorched by their own heat when they were malfunctioning.

An older MacBook or MacBook Pro Core2Duo is a good machine to have around.

Note upgrading to Intel you should pay attention to this tip.

1Prophet wrote:

Wow... that was short and sweet! Can you expand how you know this? Are you an Apple Tech?

The G4 is 10 years old. Think about what that means in computer years. Now, the G4 case is larger than the MacBook Pro, so on a volume basis, sure you should be able to fit the guts of a Mavericks Mac into a G4 case. But just about every component on that board has changed in that 10 years to provide the dramatic increases in battery life and CPU power.

You can probably find the right Intel CPU, but then your next step is to integrate it with everything else and somehow put the right chip on it to let Mavericks actually install. The problem is that CPU will completely outclass everything else on the motherboard by 10 years, so you'll have to replace more parts, and more parts (RAM, GPU, interconnects, etc). Also the ports are in different places, so you will have to reroute connections and cover up the ports that are no longer supported.

So yes, you can do it, it is technically possible...but you are going to have to do it yourself. That means every little bit, every last piece. By yourself. Because nobody else is going to provide a ready-to-go Intel motherboard for that G4 case. Go ahead and look around on the Internet, you won't find one. If you want to try building your own Mavericks compatible motherboard, you will need every bit of technical expertise in laptop design that you possess from your years of experience in designing laptop internals. And if you don't possess that, you're sunk. It would be much more worth your while to just lay out a few hundred for a used MacBook Pro that runs Mavericks.

I understand what you are coming from. I have a PowerBook G4 that I loved. But when I put that PowerBook G4 next to a MacBook Pro, the PowerBook G4 case seems very oversized, too thick, too heavy. Try a MacBook Pro, the design is close enough to the G4 that you might prefer it more over time.

Try Crucial.com. They still sell memory upgrades, solid state drives. and internal drive upgrades for the G4. I added a memory chip to my iMac and it made a huge difference in performance. http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/viewscanbyid.aspx?id=EE902FFA31D926C3

There is nothing Crucial sells that will help the original poster make a G4 PowerBook run OS X Mavericks, which was their goal.