This one I actually bought on a whim, almost exactly the way I did with my ThinkPad. This one was driven by a vision of the iBook-wielding coffee shop hipster writing epic novels and slam poetry (though to be fair, this is NOT a Clamshell iBook, and I prefer it that way). I had to purchase a new battery because the one that came with it did not hold a charge at all, even after charging for days on end (and neither did the first replacement battery which was just as bad), and also some extra RAM, as I believe it is the very lowest spec that was on offer that year. It was the first iBook in a Dual USB chassis with the "Snow" design language. A 500MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive from stock, and a CD-ROM optical drive. Using MS Word on it made the GPU so hot through the bottom casing it was uncomfortable to touch. I assumed this was because the bottom shielding wasn't there to act as a heat spreader, so I jerry-rigged something up and it runs much cooler now.
I'm currently using it as something of an e-Typewriter with MS Word for Mac 2001 and 2004, depending on which OS I'm booted into at the moment (true coffee shop hipster moments), and to play classic games both new-to-me and nostalgic, such as Quake, Diablo II, Warcraft II, and Riven!
Update I, June 23rd, 2023: SO ON WEDNESDAY SOMEONE APPROACHED ME TO COMPLIMENT MY BABY.
I take my G3 iBook places to write someplace other than my house, it helps keep the creative juices flowing, I find. So I take it to work with me on days I know I have time to hang out before my shift. This lady came up to compliment my laptop. I think she was wearing a DC Comics tee shirt, had a little bit of salt and pepper going in her short dark hair, and said "I just wanted to say, that laptop is awesome."
We talked about how old it was, I mentioned my other laptops, she asked if I've done anything to it, and we briefly talked about how Apple products have stopped beng upgradeable, especially starting around 2013 when the Retina models started to come out, making nothing but the SSD and Wi-Fi cards removable when in the 2012 model still had RAM upgrades possble. And now, you can't really do anything except batteries in the Macs without surface mounted components beng swapped around.
The entire interaction took a few minutes at most, but it made my entire day and validated every bit of time, money, and energy that I've spent on these things.
Update II, June 3rd, 2024: Alright, so Baby has evolved a bit.
After selling off my 1.33GHz 15" PowerBook G4 Alice and gifting my 1GHz 14" iBook G4 Ghost to my girlfriend, I decided that I needed to get another power adapter and actually make the upgrades I was intending to make for quite some time. I went and bought an AirPort card which is kinda useless in this day and age because it uses 802.11b wifi standards and no modern router, even ones that claim they can, can produce a compatible signal. But more importantly, I finally went and bought a 120GB MSATA SSD and a small adapter to make it into a 2.5" IDE drive.
On top of THAT, I replaced the motherboard with one from a later G3, the last G3 iBook Apple ever made. The 900MHz G3 with 32mb graphics and 128mb of built-in RAM. The board design actually changed very little over the years and it was suprisingly easy to swap the newer board into an older machine, though the opposite would not be true. I had been eyeing one on eBay for the better part of a year, and sent a few offers their way over time to see if I could get a deal on it, but they never budged from their $30 asking price.
Some capacitors had been knocked off of the bottom of the board, but I assume they were simple filtering/decoupling capacitors because the motherboard functions just fine. It runs well even under intense loads like running late PowerPC OSX compatible video games like Halo: Combat Evolved, which functions fine but has rendering errors with transparent objects likely due to OpenGL version differences, and Tron 2.0, which I have learned is one of the most intensive PowerPC native games of the time and really functions best on 1.2GHz or better G4 processors.
I did need to source an OS9 installation CD image that had appropriate drivers for the Radeon 7500, though. The generic Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal CD only ever rendered at 640x480 and in a small box at the middle of the display at a low color depth, but a restore disk for the late G4 eMacs which used the same graphics chipset worked wonderfully.
Specs: