May be a blessing in disguise.
As many readers pointed out, these iBooks are low-end 500MHz G3 models and they've been used and abused by high-school students for a whole year. Local technicians familiar with these machines have even chimed in to say that most of the 1000 iBooks being sold have logic board problems or worse. In other words, $50 for the iBook and another $50 in gas and tolls, for argument's sake, and you're probably already losing money. Any hopes you had of profiting on eBay should have been dashed when you saw that there was a one iBook per person limit - even if you live locally.
How badly do you want a Mac? We've got a Motorola StarMax 5000 with a 300 MHz G3 add-on chip that's gathering dust. I'm pretty sure it won't run OS X (and if it could it would be tremendously slow). OS X doesn't support processor upgrade cards, and I'm pretty sure doesn't support StarMax boxes. It has 160 MB of RAM (maxed out) and is running Mac OS 9.2.
There's also one on [link|http://cgi.ebay.com/Motorola-StarMax-5000-300-PowerPC-tower-fast-untested_W0QQitemZ5227485795QQcategoryZ171QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem|eBay ] for $1., but it's not clear what it includes.
Why do you want a beret? Would an iBook fit your needs? (Apparently iBooks will run Tiger (if they have at least 256 MB of RAM), but I'll bet a 500 MHz G3 would be very slow with it.)
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who also has a Dual 2GHz G5.)