My favorite Mac laptop was my first one, a 12" G4 Powerbook. Perfect in every way. I still miss that laptop, used it up until OS X Tiger went EOL, and even a little past that with TenFourFox browser.
The 12" MacBook was in a lot of ways the spiritual successor to the 12" PowerBook and was hard to beat for portability. It's a shame it was hobbled by the hot and weak Intel CPUs of its era and butterfly keyboard… if they resurrected that form factor with an M-series CPU and improved keyboards of modern MacBooks it'd be a wonderful little machine.
I love the old G4 aluminum macbooks, but man, aluminum was a bad choice for the hinges. You won't find one in 2023 that isn't broken off. Sort of like how you can't find certain models of beige PowerPC Macs that haven't had their outer plastic crumble to dust.
The various AIO LC/Performa models and the G3 Molar Mac are particularly susceptible to brittle plastics with how heavy the integrated CRTs in those are. Have seen too many disaster photos where someone had bought one of those on eBay only to have it arrive in a million pieces due to the stresses of shipping. Definitely the sort of thing one should only buy locally.