$2500 dollar gem
Written: Sep 13 '02
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Pros: very fast
Cons: os x not there yet
The Bottom Line: Mid priced professional laptop worth looking at!
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| jefhatfield's Full Review: Apple PowerBook G4 15.2 in. (M8591LL/A) Mac Notebo... |
If the average mid range laptops on the market were just ordinary stones, the Apple titanium Powerbook G4 would stand out as a gem.
On the surface, there is the 1" inch incredibly thin titanium casing which is durable and acts to draw heat away from the processor and electronics ensuring a reduced slowdown in speed from overheated components. The usual ports one would except from a laptop in this price range are there including usb, firewire, audio, and the ever present PCMCIA slot, or just PC slot as the industry likes to call them now.
On the inside, this six pound wonder packs a G4 processor at 667 mhz and is optimized to run graphics and video better than any PC laptop on the market. With 256 MB of SDRAM, the system runs at an adequate speed, but either DDR RAM or 512 MB of SDRAM would have been more desirable. The good thing is that the titanium laptop, dubbed the tibook by Apple users, has the ability to hold 1 GB of RAM or around 1,000 MB of RAM. The 32 MB DDR RAM video card is excellent for graphics and games and takes a load off the main G4 processor. The 15+" inch wide format screen is the best part of the laptop making it one of the biggest in the industry.
The tibook comes with a lot of basic software and a couple of games like all Apple laptops do, and now, one has the ability to have OS 9 or OS X as their main bootup system. Where OS 9 is a finished product, OS X is a work in progress which still, as of September, 2002, lacks full support of the industry...especially when it comes to printers and scanners and their full functionality. It is hard enough to find Apple software titles at most computer and software stores, but to find working Apple software for OS X is a nightmare. Beware buyer, a lot of software that claims to work with OS X does not fully work on all the features and thus the recent release of OS X, 10.2, dubbed Jaguar, the latest in the OS X line. Only time will tell if Jaguar will make tibook and other Apple computers work.
In conclusion, tibook is not an entry level machine and not as rugged as it's little brother, the $1199 dollar ibook which is made for consumers and students. But for $2499 dollars, it is not priced too high for the professional or serious graphic design student on the go.
Four stars.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2499
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: PowerPC
Processor speed: 601-700
Screen Size: Greater than 15 inches
RAM: 256
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Epinions.com ID:
jefhatfield
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Location: California, USA
Reviews written: 149
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