Bought a 1995 Macintosh Powerbook 5300c

By Atomic Wanderer Chicken
in Apple (macOS)

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Grand Master

Atomic Wanderer Chicken

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I bought a vintage 1995 Macintosh PowerBook off of craigslist for $15. The Powerbook works flawlessly and the screen is very sharp. It came with 15 manuals/docs also. Are PowerBooks collectible or valuable, espcecially if it has all these docs/manuals with it?

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Grand Master

Atomic Wanderer Chicken

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This is actually my first Apple product lol! Its a nice vintage laptop and the screen is extremely sharp for its age. !

Does the Ipad have a floppy drive and a touch pad? :woot: This is also built in the USA, so therefore it is superior to the ipad!

Mentor

(Account no longer active)

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I'm a vintage Mac collector. My first computer was a Mac Plus, then we moved on to an LCII. My first laptop was PowerBook 165 (which I got for $25). I mastered System 7 at a young age.

For $15, you did well! Working PowerBooks in good condition tend to sell for much higher.

The number of vintage Mac collectors has increased slightly over the years. People are getting back into vintage hardware. Not for serious work, but for fun in their spare time. So, have some fun with it! System 7 was a unique platform. Learn all you can about it. There's a site called the Macintosh Garden where you can get a whole lot of "abandon-ware". Try out After Dark, Office, Claris applications, games (Crystal Crazy, Spectre Supreme, Hellcats). If you like playing around with old hardware, you'll love it. No OS is easier to network than System 7 - AppleTalk worked great.

The 5300c had a 10.4" 640x480 pixel active matrix color LCD display. From passive matrix to active, the price would have jumped about $1,000! The screen quality on early color (active matrix) PowerBooks is better than on some laptops today, and active matrix is what collectors want, because it lasts a lot longer.

Once again, well done. Unfortunately, my 5300c no longer boots. :(

I'm no longer a Mac person. As soon as I experienced Windows, I saw it's advantages over System 7/Mac OS (Start menu/taskbar/right-click mouse button menu-scroll wheel/pre-emptive multitasking/memory protection). I dislike Mac OS X, mainly because of it's poor window management, and also the fact that it's a hog on system resources.

Grand Master

Chicane-UK Veteran

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Good find! Not sure what it's worth but there's something kind of fun about picking up these old machines, that used to sell for thousands of dollars back in the day, for pocket change.. recently scored a G4 Cube complete with monitor at work to go with a G5 PowerMac.

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