The iBook Clamshell is generally reliable laptop, but they do have some cosmetic and build issues that can be problematic.
The colorful Apple logo and leaf on the top display housing are held on with weak glue that dries out with time. Due to this, a large number of clamshells are missing one or both of these parts. In addition, it's very easy to remove the optical drive bezel off of one, so many are missing that part as well.
The iBook Clamshell isn't immune to brittle plastic. These don't tend to fall apart like some Apple laptops do, but they still suffer from cracks around screwposts, the handle, around the apple logo on the display bezel, and more. These cracks are usually cosmetic only, and these things are still built tough.
One non-cosmetic issue I have run into myself is when the screw wells for the four screws inside the battery compartment break. This can cause the top case to seat in a way where the mouse button won't click.
Instead of a battery, the clamshell iBooks use a small button-sized supercapacitor for backing up PRAM info. I've heard multiple accounts of these supercaps beginning to leak in their age. It's probably a good idea to replace this cap just to avoid any future problems.
The DC power jacks can short against the top metal shield if you're not careful during reassembly after taking one apart. Be careful.
I've run into some weird failures with my own units. I've had two motherboards both lose the ability to power internal hard drives. They would otherwise start up, boot from CD-ROM even, but would not spin up any hard drive that I installed. One of the two boards came to me in that state, but the other failed in this way after I took it apart to upgrade the hard drive. I smelled that electronic burning smell after first power-on, and it didn't start. After taking it apart and back together again, it started, but was then in that failure mode. My assumption is that there is some point that's easy to short out on the board during reassembly that will cause this failure. Close scrutiny of the boards failed to reveal any obvious signs of burning or damage.
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