This does not work on all computers, at least my G3/350 running 10.3.1 does not reveal the serial number when the version number is clicked twice in "About this Mac"

Hasn't this worked in all OS X versions?
I remember doing that a long time ago when Apple needed to know the serial number of my Cube...

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Stealing bandwidth off of the internet since 1989.

This all depends on the age of your machine & on any logic board replacements. the Serial Number given is in a chip on the logic board. Not all machines have this chip. Most G3 Powerbooks do not have them. I believe the first G4 Ti's didn't have this either.

A very early release of OS 10.0 did not have this feature. I know without a doubt everything 10.2 and up does.

I have a rev. A 500 MHz G4 TiBook and I have never had a problem displaying the serial number. I believe you are correct about the G3's though.

Actually, the original TiBook does have this feature. I lost it when they changed the logic board.

This doesn't work on my Dual 1ghz G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors) which i bought a little over a year ago. I remember that it used to work when I first installed OS X 10.2 on it. But now I'm running Panther 10.3.1 and it just says "Serial Number", not the actual serial number.

"ioreg -c IOPlatformExpertDevice | grep serial-number" 

"| sed -e 's/.*\<//' | xxd -r -p" 

Works just fine on my MDD 1.25 GHz...

There is some magic around this: talking about my late 2001 iBook, the serial # used to appear in the About this Mac window until I sent it for a display repair (it was around 10.1.5). When it came back, it had the logic board replaced, a new display and the HD was re-formated with MacOS9. At this point I clean installed Jaguar but the serial # would NOT appear anymore, so I thought that the new logic board was the culprit. This until I update to 10.2.8 (the first release if I remember well), when I realized the the serial # was back!!!
Now I'm running Panther and the serial # is still there.

Since OS 10.1 I've used 2 iMac DV's, a PB G4 667 and a G4 iMac. I can't recall ever having problems getting the serial number from the "About this Mac" pane from any of these computers (and I just confirmed that both the PB G4 and the G4 iMac provide the serial number), nor can I recall having trouble getting it from any of the other 15 or so Macs I "administer". Currently none of these machines is above OS 10.2.8.

Is this missing serial number thing a rare bug? Perhaps these people need to do something like reset their PRAM? Fix permissions? fsck? I got nuthin'!

doesn't work on my 17" Al G4

It does on mine. Always has.

...perfectly functional on my 400Mhz Pismo PowerBook G3 FireWire

Identical machine, Apple Profiler show my serial number under MacOS 9 (and I think 10.0) but not after.

I have had service done, but don't think the logic board was replaced.

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What ever happened to "Is it a hint"?

Since when does something have to be useful to be a hint? It works on my 12" PB and a single click switches from OS version to build another click switches to serial # and a third click switches back to OS version.

Works on my iMac (Summer 2001) 600 Mhz G3.

Actually, this is a problem that Apple has known about all the way back to 10.1.3. See Apple Support Article 106529 for more info.

I was able to fix the problem way back then by resetting my PRAM as per the article, but this article only mentions that as a fix prior to 10.1.3. Anybody wanna give try this on their non-serial-number-reporting-Mac and let us know if this still fixes the problem?