Upgrading a PowerBook G4 with an SSD

A while back I bought an Apple PowerBook G4. A late-2005 high-resolution 1.67ghz 17" PowerBook G4, the last PowerBook before Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel. In its day it was a mutha; nowadays its performance is leisurely and very little software is still maintained for it, although in its favour the case still looks awesome. The 1680x1050 screen is almost but not quite HD.

I use it mostly as a giant iPod - I've downloaded a tonne of podcasts - but with TenFourFox it can still surf the internet. Debate rages as to whether it's best to install OS X 10.4.11 Tiger or 10.5.8 Leopard on older Macintoshes. Tiger is apparently slightly faster than Leopard, but having tried Leopard I didn't notice much difference. Feature-wise Leopard wasn't a great leap over Tiger, although as you will discover later in this post the Time Machine backup utility was very useful.

No amount of tinkering will make a fifteen-year-old G4 run quickly, but there are a few ways to speed it up. The easiest is memory. All of the aluminium-bodied PowerBooks take a pair of PC2-4200 DDRs. OS X enjoys lots of memory but sadly the G4 motherboard only accepts a maximum of 2gb of memory (1.25gb in the early 12" models), which was a bit stingy even in 2005.

The other big upgrade is a new hard drive. The 1.67ghz PowerBook G4 originally came with a 120gb 5400rpm hard drive, which was very good for 2005 both in terms of capacity and speed. Unfortunately G4 PowerBooks used the Parallel ATA IDE interface, which is a problem because PATA drives were discontinued several years ago.

In theory the most fuss-free way to upgrade the hard drive would be to fit a 7200rpm PATA Hitachi TravelStar or similar, but they're only available used, and I'm wary of buying a used laptop hard drive. How hard was it used?

There are other options. A Compact Flash card with an IDE adapter seems like a waste of a good Compact Flash card. There are a couple of PATA solid state drives on the market, but the reviews aren't great. Amongst the PowerBook cognoscenti the most popular choice is to use a little tiny Micro-SATA SSD mounted in an MSATA-IDE adapter, viz:

A 128gb Toshiba MSATA drive (bottom) beneath an MSATA-PATA adapter (top). You have to screw the MSATA drive into the adapter otherwise it sticks out at an angle. What kind of QC did the adapter pass? Who knows.

Some laptops take MSATA cards naturally. Modern Lenovo ThinkPads often have an MSATA slot for an SSD boot drive in addition to a 2.5" drive bay. But the PowerBook G4 predates MSATA so you have to use an adapter.

What is MSATA? It's a type of tiny SSD that uses the SATA standard, but it's tiny. You can also buy 2.5" SATA-MSATA adapters if you want to put an MSATA drive into a modern laptop.

The SSD in its cradle. One day I will remember that Philippines has one L and two PPs. One day.

The adapters are available from China via eBay. They cost about £3. Just search for "MSATA PATA". We live in a world where people in China can ship little electrical trinkets half-way across the world and still make a profit from £3. Somewhere out in the ocean there's a container ship ploughing through the waves, with a container filled with little electrical trinkets from China. I like to think about that when I go to sleep at night. A container ship driving through a rough sea. Someone has just brought the captain a mug of coffee. The wipers are trying to keep the bridge windows clear of spray. The weather radar shows better weather ahead.

Ordinarily when I replace a laptop's hard drive with a newer model, I clone the original to the replacement then swap them around. That's not possible with IDE, because there's no way to power the replacement drive outside the computer. I have a special set of cables that can power SATA drives and connect them via USB to a laptop, but 2.5" IDE drives don't support external power:

This is all well and good, but it doesn't power the MSATA drive. USB doesn't deliver enough power and there's no separate power header.

There are a couple of ways around this. If you've just bought a PowerBook G4 and you don't care about retaining any of the data, or if the seller reinitialised OSX, or indeed if it doesn't have a hard drive at all, you can simply put the MSATA drive into the G4 and install OS X from scratch. Note that the brand-new MSATA drive will be unformatted, so you have to pop open Disk Utility and format it as e.g. Mac OS Extended (journaled) before OS X's installation routine will recognise it.

To dismantle the machine I followed these instructions from iFixIt, although there's nothing conceptually hard about taking the G4 apart. You need a T8 Torx screwdriver head as well as a standard Philips head.

The G4's interior is as fascinating as its exterior. The orange-and-grey colour scheme is very attractive. This is the trackpad cable.

The edge of the keyboard. Note that the lid of the laptop's base comes straight off, and also note that the final 1.67ghz models had a slightly different keyboard than earlier models - the backlight was modified - with a slightly different part number.

The original 100gb Ultra ATA/100 hard drive, now fifteen years old. It's noisy but still works. I'm going to put it in a desk drawer as a backup.

The interior, with a big hole where the battery goes. This is a good opportunity to blow dust out of the fans.

The MSATA SSD is much smaller than the PATA drive. Have you ever heard about Kure Kure Takora? It was a Japanese children's show from the early 1970s about a greedy octopus and his pals. The characters were played by actors dressed in large costumes, a la the Teletubbies.

What makes Kure Kure Takora hilarious is the relentless ultraviolence. It's like Cannibal Holocaust but much less restrained.

Kure Takora and his pals suffer horrible injuries in almost every episode but remain upbeat.
In this clip his friends persuade him to commit seppuku(!), and he almost goes ahead with it(!!), complete with close-ups of the clearly terrified title character holding a katana to his belly(!!!). Meanwhile kids in the UK had The Clangers, which wasn't the same.

As you can see the MSATA SSD looks sad and lonely in the hard drive bay. I eventually lined the bottom of the bay with a couple of strips of masking tape so that the SSD wasn't resting on bare metal. A couple of pads of heat-resistant foam might help keep it in place.
There's a risk the SSD might bounce around inside the case and loosen the hard drive cable - or the sound card cable, which runs over the top of the drive bay, but I suspect you'd have to really bash the PowerBook before that happened.

I didn't want to lose my data and reinstall everything from scratch. It takes time to track down old PowerPC applications. So I used Time Machine to back up all my settings to an external drive. I then installed the MSATA drive, installed OS X (from a USB stick, using this handy guide), updated OS X until there were no more updates, and then used OS X's Migration Assistant to transfer my settings and applications from the external drive to the MSATA SSD. I suggest you budget at least two afternoons to do all of this formatting and data transfer.

Ordinarily I'm wary of using an operating system's built-in backup and data migration tools, perhaps because I grew up with Windows. I'm a Norton Ghost and latterly Macrium Reflect man. But OS X's combination of Time Machine and Migration Assistant worked flawlessly.

Or at least almost flawlessly. For some reason Quicktime wasn't transferred, so I had to update Quicktime to the latest version for OS X 10.5.8 before I could use iTunes. Also my installation of CS2 lost its licence information (I assume it recognises that the hard drive is different, and contacts Adobe via the internet for guidance), but CS2 is now available from Adobe basically for free, so I just downloaded another copy.

In this episode Kure Kure Takora tries to steal a book from a lizard, who fights back, so he challenges the lizard to a samurai duel - and kills him! Kills him stone dead. It turns out the book was a cookbook; the lizard was planning to pour salt over Kure Takora and then cut him into chunks and eat him.

I've never liked the default OS X 10.5 wallpaper. The 10.4 wallpaper was less dramatic but more tasteful; Leopard's wallpaper is surprisingly tacky for Apple. Begone!

All done. Compare this image with the PowerBook at the top of the article, which had the original hard drive.

Does the rigmarole of installing an SSD in a fifteen-year-old laptop make rational sense? My Toshiba MSATA SSD was designed to pump data at 500mb/s through a 6gb/s SATA III bus, but the Ultra ATA/100 interface in the G4 can only cope with 100mb/s, so four-fifths of the SSD's performance is wasted. XBench's figures for sequential block writes are no better than a good 7200rpm physical hard drive:

However the random write speed is much faster than a physical hard drive. Random write speeds measure a storage medium's seek time, which is where SSDs excel, because they don't have to move a head over a disc to pick up data. SSDs in general are faster at writing larger blocks of data than smaller blocks, and the figures above reflect this; SSDs are slowest when writing lots of tiny files.

I really should have measured the speed of the physical hard drive for the sake of comparison. I should have thought of that. Am I going to dismantle the G4, put back the physical hard drive, and test it? No.

Subjectively the G4 doesn't feel as if it's booting faster, although it is noticeably quieter. Applications launch quicker, but TenFourFox is limited more by the CPU and RAM than by hard drive access, which is unfortunate because TenFourFox is the application I use most. MSATA-PATA adapters apparently produce more heat than a physical drive, but the G4's fan seems to come on less; whether it's because I've blown out the dust, or because there's a lot more space inside the case for air to circulate, I know not. I have read that this upgrade interferes with the fan management of the 12" PowerBook G4, which has much less interior space.

A few years ago this kind of upgrade would have been economically iffy for what is essentially a novelty toy. There comes a point when the money spent on upgrading a machine would be better off put towards the cost of a replacement. However MSATA SSDs have come down in price and are now widely available on the used market, so for what amounted to £30 and an afternoon fiddling with a screwdriver I feel it was worth it. Just don't expect the kind of striking improvements you get from replacing a physical hard drive with a SATA II or III SSD. Oh no.

The Soul of an Old Machine

Earlier in the month I had a look at a vintage Apple G4 PowerBook, one of the very last PowerPC-powered models. A 17", late-2005, high-resolution 1.67ghz model now fit for very little, although it was hot stuff in its day. I didn't interrogate its soul; Apple's clever interface design doesn't alter the fact that we cannot communicate with the inanimate world. We have nothing in common.

Apple's design team aimed for something monolithic with the aluminium PowerBooks, something they didn't achieve until the unibody MacBook Pro of 2008. I decided to present this unnatural object in an unusual setting, with music that hopefully illustrates the incomprehensibility of machines.

The PowerBook is in almost every shot, sometimes barely visible. Here it's nestled amongst the trees on the left.

The video was created entirely with a Canon 5D Mk II and a 50mm f/1.4 and some stout boots and Adobe Premiere and me. The image of the PowerBook sitting in the forest with the standby light glowing in the gloom was inspired by a shot near the beginning of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller, discussed here.

Apple PowerBook G4: The Aluminium Models

Let's have a look at the aluminium Apple PowerBook G4. A while back I wrote about the titanium-bodied PowerBook G4 of 2001-2003, but I've never owned an aluminium model, and when one popped up on eBay in good condition I decided to have a look. You know how sometimes you write something, and it comes out smoothly and there's nothing wrong? This is not one of those times. I have written and rewritten this post several times but it still feels like a mess. I'm sorry.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s Apple's laptops were made of plastic. White at first, then grey, then black, with the late-90s iBook G3 briefly dayglo translucent, then eventually off-white with the early-2000s iBooks and MacBooks. From 2001 onwards however Apple started to use metal. The first metal Macintosh was the titanium PowerBook G4 of 2001, although it still had some plastic bits around the edge. During its three-year lifespan the titanium PowerBook had three specification bumps, but it was only ever available in one size, 15.4".

In 2003 the titanium model was replaced by the aluminium PowerBook, which was available in three sizes. The twelve-inch ultraportable and seventeen-inch desktop replacement models were launched simultaneously in January 2003, followed by a fifteen-inch PowerBook later in the year. They all had the same design, and for a short period Apple's laptop range was a model of clarity. The 12" or 14" iBook for students, the 12" PowerBook for business travellers, the 15" PowerBook for most people, the 17" for plutocrats and film directors. Alas this was not to last, and Apple's modern-day portable range is muddled, but that's another story for another time.

The PowerBook remained on sale until 2006, with speed bumps and specification improvements roughly every year. Mine is one of the very last, a 1.67ghz 17" model. It was released in late 2005 and was notable for its high-resolution 1680x1050 screen, which was very impressive in 2005 and is still not bad today for a non-Retina laptop.

An aluminium PowerBook sitting atop its titanium predecessor, now looking very battered. They were all one inch thick, which was impressive at the time. The aluminium PowerBook's cooling vents were inside the hinge rather than being dotted around the side and rear.

The G4 laptops were powered by IBM's PowerPC 7400 chip, which was starting to run out of development potential by the time of the aluminium PowerBook. IBM had already developed a replacement - the PowerPC 970 "G5", which Apple adopted in 2003 for the Power Macintosh G5 desktop and iMac G5 all-in-one - but it was too hot and power-hungry to fit into a laptop.

Meanwhile Intel had built a new mobile chip, the Pentium M, which seemed like the wave of the future, as indeed it was. After what must have been some disappointing meetings with IBM, Apple announced in 2005 that it was going to abandon the PowerPC chip in favour of Intel's forthcoming, Pentium M-derived Core Duo. The transition to Intel took place in 2006, at which point the PowerBook name was dropped. "PowerBook" actually predated the PowerPC - the first ever PowerBooks used Motorola 68000s - but Apple wanted a fresh start.

Apple had an irritating habit of giving things non-standard names, such as "Airport" for "wi-fi adapter" and "SuperDrive" for "DVD-writer". This particular model writes 8.5gb dual-layer DVDs. My recollection is that writeable DVDs were never very popular - pound for pound it was cheaper to use an external hard drive.

The high-res 17" model was launched in October 2005 at a price of £1749, which was inconsequential if you had half a dozen credit cards, like everybody in 2005. At the time I was a PC person, but I've always had a soft spot for Apple products. I don't actually recall seeing or thinking about the aluminium PowerBooks at the time. Despite the success of the iPod, Apple in 2005 was still just another computer company rather than a massive consumer electronics giant. Its revenue in the fourth quarter of that year was $3.68bn, versus $46.9bn in the same period of 2016. It was, in 2005, possible to live a full and rewarding life without ever thinking about Apple or seeing an Apple product in the flesh, which is not the case any more.

The titanium PowerBook G4 had a simple non-gesture touchpad. As you can see the keyboard font was Univers, which stretched back to the early days of the Macintosh.

The aluminium G4's keyboard and surprisingly small trackpad. The silver-on-silver colour scheme was unique to the aluminium models. I'm not fond of it; the titanium keyboard is more legible.

Technically the last ever PowerBook was the 1.5ghz 12" model, which was discontinued in May 2006. However the high-resolution 1.67ghz 15" and 17" PowerBooks were introduced a few months after the 12" model - they were discontinued a few weeks earlier - so it's debatable which was truly the last PowerBook.

Also, have you ever read about the Basque language? As with Korean it's unrelated to any other living language, but whereas the Korean people exist on an isolated peninsula, the Basques are surrounded by the French and Spanish, so the survival of their language is even more impressive. The Basque word for "book" is "liburu", which is a beautiful word. It's a sexy word as well. Imagine Scarlett Johansson slowly saying the word "liburu".

The aluminium PowerBook's keyboard has a fade-in-fade-out backlight. It only turns on when the lights are low. As you can see Apple also switched fonts to VAG Rounded, which they replaced only recently with San Francisco.

Alas that is something I can only imagine. The PowerBook name died in 2006, but the aluminium case lived on. The first few generations of Intel-powered MacBook Pro models used essentially the same case, with minor modifications, right up until 2008. Sadly almost all of the aluminium-bodied models - PowerBook and MacBook alike - are obsolete nowadays and can't be upgraded to run MacOS High Sierra. The PowerBooks are obsolete because Apple dropped support for the PowerPC back when they launched OS X 10.6; all but a handful of the aluminium MacBook Pros are obsolete either because they had 32-bit processors, or 32-bit firmware, or just because.

The only way to buy a PowerBook now is on the used market, which essentially means eBay. eBay is flooded with broken old Macintoshes that are in theory useful for spare parts, but why not just buy the parts themselves, hmm?

My hunch is that eBay sellers throw away broken PC laptops but try to sell broken PowerBooks because they think that Apple fans are suckers who will buy any old tat. As I write these words eBay here in the UK has 45 PowerBook G4s for sale, of which only eight are intact and in working condition, and one of those listings appears to be spurious. There's just no point buying a broken PowerBook. You can't fix it economically, and even if you do, you won't be able to sell it again.

For comparison's sake, the titanium PowerBook G4. The titanium model was designed by Jory Bell, Nick Merz, and Danny Delulis, although lazy writers tend to credit Jony Ive, because he's the guy at Apple who designs everything. I have no idea how much work Ive did on the aluminium model.

What's the aluminium model like? For writing I loved the titanium model's keyboard and wristrest, but as an internet surfing machine even the fastest titanium PowerBook is very sluggish. The slim design was striking in 2001 but has never grabbed me - the fussy hinges and plastic border let it down, although the thin bezel around the screen is still very impressive even in 2017. In contrast the aluminium PowerBook's keyboard feels a bit spongy. The silver-on-silver colour scheme looks a bit naff, the keyboard letters are hard to see in daylight, the backlighting isn't very visible at night. On the other hand the smooth metal wrist rest is surprisingly comfortable, but I'm worried I'll eventually cause the thin plastic border at the front edge of the case to pop off when I rest my wrists on it.

The 1680x1050 screen is, as mentioned up the page, still pretty good. It's a bit dim and yellow - I'm not sure if that's age, or dated technology - but when hooked up to an external monitor it makes for a genuinely useful second screen. Only the very last PowerBooks had a resolution bump - the 15" model's display was increased to 1440x900 - and if you want to try one out, bear in mind that they were preceded by a pair of non-high-resolution 1.67ghz models.

The first MacBook Pros had the same basic specification as the high-resolution PowerBooks, although the 15" model slightly lowered the screen resolution to 1440x900 (the screen itself was a little bit shorter). For the record the last 17" MacBook Pro was released in 2011, with a 1920x1200 screen. Apple then decided to opt for smaller, but higher-resolution retina displays, and the company apparently has no plans to re-introduced a 17" model.

A comparison of resolutions. From top to bottom 1280x854 (late TiBook), 1440x900 (unibody MacBook Pro), 1680x1050 (17" high-resolution PowerBook), 1920x1080 (1080 HD). The aspect ratio goes from 3:2 to 16:10 to 16:10 to 16:9.

What else? The screen hinge mechanism is greatly improved from the titanium model. The lid pops open and is balanced so that you can raise and lower it with a fingertip. The machine also feels surprisingly light. I learn from EveryMac that it's heavier than the titanium model, but perhaps because it looks so much larger it doesn't feel heavier. And it doesn't even look that large - in terms of physical volume it's only slightly bigger than the 15" unibody that replaced it.

Unfortunately the 17" model has a few problems. It falls between a few stools. As a mobile machine it's unwieldy, and although my battery is still in good condition replacement batteries are very expensive, so over time it will be impossible to use it on the move even if I wanted to. As a desktop replacement it's too slow, and as a casual internet surfing machine the only modern internet browser still available for PowerPC machines - TenFourFox, a fan-made PowerPC port of FireFox - is sluggish. Opening a few tabs causes the browser to freeze, as does using anything Web Two-y such as Google Drive.

As a writer I need a good keyboard, a big screen, a browser with masses of tabs, and the machine has to work as quickly as I think, e.g. lighting-fast, but sadly the 17" PowerBook G4 only ticks one of those boxes (the screen). On a purely visual level I've always thought that the design looks odd - the huge expanse of aluminium makes the keyboard seem comically small. As far as I can tell the 12", 15", and 17" models all used the same keyboard; it's a shame Apple couldn't have added a numeric keypad to the 17" model, or moved the keyboard towards the user slightly.

Ultimately for serious work the G4 is in the position of being good enough but frustratingly slow, so why bother? I have to say that I haven't upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, and if TenFourFox were made faster the PowerBook would be transformed. It's striking how much has changed since 2005. Nowadays the computer is an internet browser whereas in 2005 the internet was still, just, an optional extra, but I'm digressing into the realms of philosophy here.

You're supposed to review the footage, work out a timeline, and then write a script that fits the timeline. Or you can speak as quickly as possible and then slow down, which is what I did.

Upgrades? Memory is easy, as above. The hard drive involves some fiddly cable-pulling, but isn't conceptually difficult. The aluminium G4 models used old-fashioned IDE PATA drives, the last models running at 5400rpm. The cheapest, easiest upgrade option is to buy a 7200rpm IDE PATA drive and clone your existing drive onto it, followed by cloning your drive to an MSATA SSD (£25 or so) mounted in a SATA-IDE adapter (£5 or so from Hong Kong), followed by using one or two Compact Flash cards in an adapter, followed by an actual IDE SSD (not really worth it). Beyond that lies the realm of esoterica. Replacing the 17" model's keyboard requires essentially stripping the machine down, whereas the 12" model is a bit easier. Unlike the titanium models, the aluminium G4 supports modern wi-fi encryption, so you can use the internal Airport wi-fi card with your home network. The aluminium models also have Bluetooth, and the last models have FireWire 800 ports.

My suggestion? The 17" model is a physically impressive talking point, but if you want something genuinely practical buy the best-condition 1.5ghz 12" model you can find with the longest-lasting battery, then upgrade the memory and replace the hard drive with an SSD. Along with the contemporary G4 iBooks the 12" PowerBook was the archetypal blogging-in-Starbucks machine, but without the iBook's reliability problems.

With a 12" PowerBook you can stride into Starbucks and use their wi-fi to blog about Valerie Plame and/or Peak Oil and/or Terri Schiavo and/or Howard Dean, and chicks will dig you (I guarantee this). Bear in mind that the other side - people who blogged about Ward Churchill and "Pallywood" and Dan Rather - they didn't visit Starbucks or use Apple PowerBooks. They blogged at home, with desktop PCs surrounded by cigarette butts and bottles of pee, drinking Mountain Dew.

Contemplate how many words were written about those issues; contemplate how they were mostly wiped from the public's mind when the financial crisis hit a few years later; contemplate how little anybody cares about them now, with the possible exception of Peak Oil, and contemplate how little anybody will care about you and the things you write in a few years, assuming anybody cares at all today. Lost in time like tears in the rain. Humbling, isn't it?