[volcano]

A friend of mine has a birthday coming up, and I've decided to buy her an Apple computer. She loves my iBook, and grabs it everytime she possibly can. I have the latest version (1.33GHz G4, 1GB RAM) and I absolutely love it. I know she'll love Mac if I just force-feed her one.

Anyway.

I've be scouring my local Craiglist and have been searching on eBay for nearly a week now. Simple, right? Not so much. I keep having this dilemma: my budget is around $500 (perhaps a tad more, depending on what's available) and a G3 seemed fine. But then I started thinking: if she gets an iPod later on (from me, more than likely) it will only have USB support. iBook's didn't have USB 2.0 until the G4 processors were introduced, so if I bought her a G3, she would have to live with the slow syncing of a USB 1.1 port.

There's the problem. I would love to find an 800MHz G4 iBook, but I've been having no luck with that. Heck, I'd even consider a 1GHz G4 model, as long as I didn't have to spend too much more (I think $600-650 is reasonable, anyway). And the sad part is, when I do find a model I like [on eBay], 99.5% of the time they do NOT include the Airport (Extreme, in some cases) Card - which is really frustrating! I do not want to shell out another $100 for that, considering it used to be an $80 or so option back in the day. I wouldn't mind buying one and installing it, though, if the price of the iBook allowed such a thing to take place. I'm also looking for Tiger to be installed on it - with the original discs, because I plan on restoring the system as soon as it arrives for a nice, clean setup.

Am I making too big of a deal about this USB thing? She'll mainly use the computer for iTunes, Microsoft Word, and maybe some Photoshop every now and then - nothing too strenous. I know the dingy 600MHz G3 would barely be useable, so I figured at least a 800/900MHz G3 might do the job well enough. Any thoughts?

I started to consider buying her either an iMac G4 or eMac, but I believe she would really love the portability of the laptop. She's like me - she can't stand being stuck at home for hours upon hours writing a paper.

[volcano]

Okay, nevermind. I just picked up an 800MHz G4 w/ Tiger, Combo drive, original box, original discs for $475.

[mduell]

Where? I'm looking for a system just like that.

[volcano]

eBay, actually. Sometimes when I search I select the 'Sort By: Time: Newly listed' option and I come across some good 'Buy It Now' listings. I was tempted to purchase a 600MHz G3 w/ everything included for $300 earlier but I'm glad I waited.