several months ago i walk into repc and find a g4 tibook that's not destroyed. i've never seen this.
while aluminum g4 powerbooks sometimes look good, tibooks are always fully and utterly clapped out. ridden hard and put away wet; bent panels, missing paint, broken ports, bruised screens. these things get the works and barely function by the time they hit the used market, but this one looks almost like it just rolled out of the apple store. it works perfectly, too, and it has the aftermarket carrying handle. i have no immediate use for it, so i put it through its paces, then put it in a cabinet.
a couple weeks ago i need a mac, so i pull it out. kaput. dead. zero life. will not do anything, doesn't even attempt to power on. god damnit, macs. this is just what they're like. mysterious failure modes you'll never diagnose and can't fix. yes, i tried that. i tried that too.
so then a few days ago i go pick up this imac DV, and the guy just hands me another tibook, no extra charge. it looks like they always do: clapped out, ridden hard, drug through the mud and crushed under tank treads. paint missing, bruised screen, hinges seized up (shredding the monitor bezel.) all the metal's bent, it's filthy. i later found out the optical drive was rusty.
it does work, so it ends up being useful for me to test out the imac and do some diagnostics. but i can't actually use it for much. i'm thinking, though: maybe i can swap the motherboard into the one i already had that no-shit-quit, and get a nice, clean machine with a working board.
so i go to the office yesterday and get to looking at it. i've already googled "tibook won't power on" six times, but for the hell of it i try again, and i stumble on someone saying to pull the PRAM battery. so i do. it powers right up. god damnit, macs. god DAMNIT macs.
so now it's working perfectly again, it just needs a new PRAM battery. turns out, it's just four panasonic VL2330s in a 6V series/parallel trenchcoat, plastered with kapton. i ordered replacements with tabs, so i should be able to build a new pack without welding. but in the meantime i'm thinking, okay, what about the battery in the clapped out one? maybe i can transplant that.
so it turns out, there were submodels of tibook. naturally. sigh. fucking apple. between the 400/500 and 667mhz models, i think, they completely redesigned the machine inside. nothing in common as far as i can tell, nothing will transplant from one to the other. naturally, this being a mac, there is no fucking way to tell this without taking it apart.
the clapped out one is a 667mhz, so no, i never could have transplanted any of the parts, given that the clean one is a first gen 400mhz. totally incompatible. in particular: apple being apple, the second gen tibook is the only machine they ever made, as far as i know, with a rechargeable PRAM battery. why did they do this and never do it again? who fucking knows. apple: kings and queens of inconsistency.
but this is actually a good outcome, because it turns out they don't make the rechargeable cell anymore. there are thousands of the (absurdly complicated) little PRAM PCBs on ebay; you can bet 0 of them will take a charge. and you couldn't replace it with a non rechargeable safely.
so the clapped out one is basically useless to me, even as spare parts. nothing is compatible, not even the optical drive I think. so, as I'm finalizing this conclusion, I unplug the power from the machine, and... it keeps running. the goddamn battery works.
so i swapped the pack into the clean tibook, and that has now been running off battery power for nearly an hour and is only at 80%. it's not doing much but this is still clearly in better health than the typical "20-second" or "20-minute" pack from this era. against all odds, the clapbook ended up contributing a useful repair part.
i now have, for the time being at least, a completely functional and EXTREMELY clean tibook, one of the few i'm aware of existing. let's see how long this lasts! i give it a month.

