iBook Clamshell

joe_mamba

Shame Apple didn't have the balls to release the Neo in those bright colors in homage, and instead went with the safe, bland, corporate committee, focus group approved, muted colors like the rest of their product lineup. Booo! Missed opportunity.

jmclnx

clamshell, that is a name from the past. But has nothing to do with Apple >Clam is a Unix(tm) shell that has many features of tcsh, sh and improvements all its own. >Clam is copyright (c) 1988 by Callum Gibson. Clam is provided free of charge. This came on CohWare Vol1 with Cohorent OS and gave one a small csh(1) environment. I think it was for the 286 version of Coherent which I used back then.

ZekeSulastin

I don’t think I’ve seen a cookie banner pop up with a “please reconsider” on refusal … ever, actually. Neat? I had Debian running on an old clamshell iBook for a bit; the main things I remember were that it was kind of neat, and that it took less cpu to play music from my server via mpd and pulseaudio-over-network than it did to play the files directly on the iBook.

ChrisMarshallNY

Cool site. I always enjoyed the concept of the iBook, but never found it something that I wanted, personally. I used to refer to it as "the MacBook Toilet Seat."

spankibalt

Better known as "Barbie's electric toilet seat".

ranger_danger

I remember when it came out, John C. Dvorak called it a toilet seat.

toddmorey

It’s interesting to remember Apple used to orient the logo so that it was upside down when opened. That looks right to you as you open the laptop, but wrong to everyone else. Now when you’re in a coffee shop, all the little metal promotional billboards are correct.

accrual

I've been thinking about getting into retro Apple laptops! I'm wanting to start with either a Tangerine iBook or the glossy white MacBook A1181.

isoprophlex

Man do I love that old Apple typography, the tall serif'd letters. I'm sad everything's serifless these days...

Cockbrand

The clamshell iBook had one very distinctive disadvantage: when the laptop world had finally arrived at a default display resolution of at least 1024x768, the iBook had an 800x600 display. This forced web designers (in a time before widely supported CSS or even responsive design) to design for the smaller viewport of the iBook instead of being able to take advantage of the higher-res displays of the rest of the world.

qgin

I wanted one of these so much.

zoklet-enjoyer

I was in 8th grade and the school's computer lab was filled with iMacs and the library had iBooks students could check out. That was where I discovered Wikipedia, Yahoo Clubs, and Geocities. We had a PC at home but it was older and we could only get dial up at the time, so the higher speed connection at school and the faster hardware was great.

schappim

Oh memories! The iBook SE was the first Mac I had. This was pre-Mac OS X. The thing had a terrible 800x600px screen but still it was my gateway to decades of Macs. The switch to Unix in MacOS X cemented their place in my life. I will totally deny that the Macs in Independence Day and Mission Impossible were major influences on my juvenile mind to switch to the Mac.

turbonaut

Compare the prices vs a Neo… 1499 usd for the cheapest clamshell! https://www.ibook-clamshell.com/index.php/en/model-overview

drivingmenuts

They should resurrect that design for the Neo.

ActorNightly

I really don't know why people have such nostalgia for old Apple devices. Did people really enjoy clicking on some app, then waiting like 5 minutes while the cursor does the spinning thing as the ap opens? It used to be that you were looked down on if you used an Apple device, because it meant you were more concerned with aesthetics rather than actual usability.

HauntingPin

Those prices are wild . I forgot how much laptops cost at the time. On the other hand, I was just a kid, so maybe I was just never really that aware of it. Price USD Price DM Euro $ 1,599 DM 3749 EUR 1917 $ 1,799 DM 4249 EUR 2172 $ 1,499 DM 3999 EUR 2045 $ 1,799 DM 4699 EUR 2403 https://www.ibook-clamshell.com/index.php/en/model-overview

danielfoster

What I find most interesting about this website is that even in 2026, Germany still requires website owners— even hobbyists- to list their name and personal address in the Impressum. So much for anonymity.