This is an unbelievably great machine.
Written: Jun 02 '01
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Pros: It handles photo, audio and video manipulation like a dream.
Cons: I have very little bad to say about this laptop. Paint's too easy to scratch.
The Bottom Line: The case is classy and built solidly, the screen is fantastic. If you already use a mac, you want one of these.
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| floop's Full Review: Apple PowerBook G4 15.2 in. (M8362LL/A) Mac Notebo... |
I do media production for a living so the circles I work in are almost exclusively mac based. It is hard for me to address the idea that macs are a niche market since the broad majority of people I interact with regularly are mac users. (I have a brother that lives in New Zealand that uses a pc, but after a recent visit where his wife was coveting my wife's ibook, it seemed that even that statistic could change.) I say this as a form of disclaimer, I suppose. Buying a mac for me is less of a zealous decision than just the assumed thing to do. Arguments I read online about "what i use at work" and "compatibility with all my friend" and "important to run the software my colleagues run" as rationales for using windows gear apply in my case towards macs.
Ok, enough rationale, on to the product review.
I have owned 7 different laptops since 1990. Until the titanium powerbook g4, each of my previous laptops acted as a sort of an annex to a desktop machine. I might have an internet connection on the laptop while I did something more cpu intensive such as video compositing on the desktop machine. "The tibook" (titanium powerbook) shot down this class division. I find myself moving animations or detailed audio projects to the tibook because it is simply faster than any of my desktop machines. I've never been able to say that about a laptop before.
"Media production" is a vague term at best. The main part of my job description is writing and editing and even creating animations for documentaries. Outside of this, I get called on to do anything from edit a radio series for NPR to create an interactive DVD for the Library of Congress. No matter which type of work I'm doing I've found a way to integrate the tibook into the process. I've even been able to pick up some extra freelance work I would have turned out previously thanks to the tibook and its ability to let me create fancy 2d animations while sitting bored at a relative's house.
The screen on the tibook is phenomenal. The extra wide screen has proven great for photoshop palletes and video compositing displays and even pretty cool for watching dvds. ok, i admit, i've only watched 1 dvd on the tibook since watching movies on a laptop seems kind of silly to me. I was out of town for a wedding and had insomnia while staying with a relative. I pulled out the tibook and some headphones and without disturbing anybody (including the people sleeping on the couch in front of the tv), i was able to watch a movie in wide screen format and fairly decent sound. Its not a regular thing for sure, but I thought it was *really* cool to have the option. The screen looked so nice that I easily forgot that I was watching the movie wirelessly from a laptop.
From the reports I've read about other people's tibooks, I've been very lucky. I think my tibook is absolutely perfect. The weight is low enough (5.2 lbs or something?) that its not an issue at all to toss it into a backpack. The titanium casing just feels great to hold. The screen is so amazingly smooth and thin that I've had all sorts of people gawk at it. I used to have 1 stuck pixel on the display but I cant seem to see it any more. My dvd player injects and ejects buttery smooth.
Its hard to describe how elegant the tibook feels to me. In some ways it reminds me of the "new car" feeling, but I rarely have the urge to pick up my car and just feel the edges.
I recently went on a road trip with a friend who has a 350mhz sony viao laptop. He had just purchased a "co-pilot" gps usb device and mapping software for his pc. Since I keep VirtualPC (a pc emulator for macintosh that lets you run windows, etc under emulation) on my laptop for cross platform authoring, I decided on a lark to install his app on my virtual pc and plug in his usb gps device. Not only did the installation and device work perfectly right away, we discovered that my 500mhz tibook while *Emulating* pc hardware was significantly faster than the 350mhz sony. The same friend takes delivery of his own tibook early next week.
I cant give apple credit for airport (802.11b) wireless networking, but i do think apple deserves extra kudos for including internal ports for the 802.11 cards. It sounds anal, but not having a bulky antenna dangling from the size of my laptop is *very* attractive to me. I've destroyed pc card dongles before and I don't want to relive that.
I never thought about games when shopping for my tibook. I've never been much of a gamer and few if any laptops have ever been even remotely worthy of games. People elsewhere have been bragging about quake specs and such as a reasonable litmus test for machine performance. I can't really speak to those numbers, but I can say that playing Myst3 with the openGL option activated resulted in absolutely gorgeous performance. Nary a hiccup and even movies and animations embedded into the vr scenes played back amazingly well. While Myst3 doesnt push any envelopes regarding 3d performance, it does require quite a bit of processor power... which the tibook lovingly provided.
I expected the tibook to have usb, svga, modem, ethernet, ir, firewire, cardbus, etc outputs. What I was kind of shocked by was the s-video out with composite video "adapter". I went to a friend's house, booted my tibook to an s-video connection on his tv and my audio to his home stereo and proceeded to explore myst3 in a big group. The performance didnt take a hit at all from the internal display and if anything the movies within riven were that much more attractive on a tv. (It kinda hid what compression artifacts there were, making myst3 look even more like a movie than a game)
One of my favorite software toys is "reason", a virtual analog synth studio for both pc and mac. Since the korg usb midi controller I bought to control reason with derives its power from the usb port, I've been able to do strange things like play around with layering melodies on top of each other... while wirelessly sitting in the hammock in the back yard. (not the ideal position for midi work, but still) I recently was playing with a sequence that included (virtually) 5 samplers, 5 analog synths, 3 drum machines, 2 arpeggiators and 5 different "outboard" audio effects boxes (reason limits the amount of hardware you can emulate based on your machine performance) when i noticed that all that was barely registering on the cpu usage display. I have no idea just how much fake hardware I'd have to emulate before I ran out of cpu speed... probably more than i'll ever need.
As you can probably see, there isnt much of anything I dont like about this laptop. I tried running osX on it, and decided that the speed hit you get when trying to preemptively multitask media apps wasnt worth it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 3500
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: PowerPC G4
Processor speed: 401-500
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
floop
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Member: Andrew Dean
Location: Dallas, Texas
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 5 members
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