I’d like to take a moment to tell you about my favorite Mac.

The Macintosh PowerBook 2400c, the subnotebook version of the more widely known 3400c, is one amazing Mac. It’s almost usable today if you have replaced its PowerPC 603ev CPU with a G3, which of course I did. In fact, I have the cool 320 MHz one from Japan. This is not the kind of thing most people gloat about.

The 2400c runs a wider breadth of operating systems than any other Mac laptop except its cousin, the 3400c (though that machine’s non-upgradeable CPU makes Mac OS X all but unusable). You can install 7.6.1, 8.6, 9.2.2 and 10.2.8, and you can bet I have partitions for all of them. (And I once installed Linux on it, too.)

It’s pure style, just one of the coolest Macs ever on the outside; and on the inside, it was crazy hackable, and had a ton of cool customized accessories available for it, mostly from Japan, like translucent keyboards.

Its expandability means I can use it with FireWire, USB, 100Base-T ethernet, and 802.11g via CardBus adapters (I enabled mine for CardBus use by knocking two resistors off the motherboard).  You can run Firefox 2 and Microsoft Office 2004 under 10.2.8. In other words, it almost qualifies it as a usable current Mac. The 2400c does have too may problems with OS X (no sleep, no sound or brightness control, etc) to make it something you’d want to use every day, but the fact that you can use it for modern tasks at all is kind of remarkable for a twelve-year old laptop Mac.

Go 2400. I’ve never really loved any of my Macs before or since. But the 2400c was special.