iBook G4. How would it hold up today?

I want to get a cheap Mac for my girlfriend. Its our anniversary soon and she has a Dell laptop thats been driving her insane. All she does with her notebook is light web surfing, email, and writing papers or working on her novel. I found this aution on eBay:

Apple iBook G4 1.33ghz 12" 512MB 40GB Combo BT!!! - eBay (item 110518796539 end time Apr-16-10 21:55:12 PDT)

My main concern is YouTube. She watches a TON of YouTube in her spare time. Not HD mind you, but I know FlashPlayer and OS X dont get along very well, and I can't really gauge performance that well because my 13" unibody is kinda in a different league.

So, Im just wondering...is this a good deal? Would it suit her needs well? She is very happy iPhone and iPod user, (she actually convinced ME to get an iPhone!), and I want to get rid of some of her headaches and have her first Mac be as pleasant an experience as possible.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Some may contradict what I am going to say, but I own that very machine. I upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB and installed a 120GB hard drive. Tiger is quite fast but I have 10.5.8 Leopard installed and it's quite useable. You Tube is not the best but very watchable as long as you don't try and do HD stuff.

Like I said it's not a You Tube SCREAMER but watchable for sure. I take it with me a lot and use it for You Tube and many other things. You can purchase a 1GB PC2700 DDR SoDim module giving you 1.5GB like I did. Any 2.5" Laptop IDE (ATA) hard drive will work but be careful as most drives in stores these days are SATA.

I will replace it someday with an Intel Mac equivalent but till then it's still useable for me. It would be better to purchase even the first Macbook as it's for sure a lot faster and will run Snow Leopard and all the new software, but for that price I doubt you will find a working Macbook (Even the first one) in any decent shape. If so I would own a Macbook!

It's been a very reliable machine for sure and continues to work for me till I get an Intel replacement.

I have an iBook G4 I bought in 2004 and still have and use. I'm running 10.5 on it and like dtravis I increased ram to 1.5m. Left in the 60g hd however and use an external drive for iTunes and such.

Still a very usable machine -- I routinely run Office 2007 on it (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) without issues. Not the fastest thing around (I've got 2 iMacs in the den as well), but usable.

Like a lot of folks, the new MBPs have my eye. The biggest drawback I see to the iBook is that it's not intel based. So the s/w I buy for the iMacs doesn't run on the iBook, and this is getting more and more the case.

But for email, surfing, youtube, watching dvd's (particularly on the road), it's fine.

I also feel these are perfectly valid still, especially given the current price you can get them for.
I have run Leopard on a couple before, with no issues, my cousin still does, and it's fine.
The only reason I replaced my last one with the Powerbook was really down to needing more power for music recording.

awesome. My only other concern is the hard drive. I know its not really user replaceable, which is one of the main reason I love the new Macs.

How difficult is it to swap out the drive if something happens?

I went to macfixit and printed every page of how to remove and install the HD and layed them out on a counter. Then just put the screws and parts on each page to keep track of. Took about an hour and a half the first time.

Lightnin Rick said:

I went to macfixit and printed every page of how to remove and install the HD and layed them out on a counter. Then just put the screws and parts on each page to keep track of. Took about an hour and a half the first time.

Click to expand...

Quite similar to you, to take of my upper case of my MB and clean out my fan, etc. I printed out the ifixit guide, and stuck each screw on the diagrams with sticky tape, as extra precaution, as some of the screws are tiny.

Replacing the HD is easy with the online guides right in front of you. Once you get past the fear of cracking open the case and all that, there's nothing to it. Done it to a few G4's and my newest MBP.