A 'book of great beauty
Written: Jul 03 '01
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Pros: Small, speedy, ethernet, firewire looks beautiful, cheaps
Cons: 12.1" screen not 13.3"
The Bottom Line: If you like the Mac and want a fairly price laptop take the plunge. Curious Wintel folks will love it too.
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| davidcharles's Full Review: Apple iBook Key Lime Special Edition 12.1 in. (M82... |
First off, I'm by no means a Mac fanatic and spend as much time in front of Windows as the Mac. Although for my personal use I always retain a recent PowerMac, my previous two laptops have been Wintel - a Powerbook was just too expensive.
My last Wintel notebook was bought when the first generation iBook was released - i was sad that Apple's 'affordable' laptop looked so childish. I'm glad Apple have put their product design skills to better use with a Machine that retains a different look without the zaniness.
The machine seems solidly made. Apple notebooks seem to vary in build quality from model to model. The new PowerBook G4 looks amazing, but the coating can chip and stratch if you don't treat it with kid gloves judging by the amount of damaged display units around. The new iBook feels rugged throughout, with it's hard shell plastic casing, nice springy keyboard and solid trackpad.
Performance-wise, the iBook is nice and racy for most take once you've shoved in a big SODIMM, and uses the same somewhat dated RAGE128 graphic as the PowerBook. A VGA out is present, although the dual monitior capability of the chip has been spitefully nobbled by Apple, meaning it'll only mirror the iBook screen, rather than added to your desktop real estate. Similar nobbling took place with the memory bus - 66mhz, rather than 100mhz. These steps, i can only assume, have been taken to keep sales of the PowerBook high. It's a silly move, as the PowerBook G4 has some lovely features that people with the funds will want to pay for, without attacking the iBook's performacne potential.
That said, the iBook is massively well equipped for the money - dual USB, firewire, ethernet, decent sized HD, hot-swappable drive bay and so on. In operation, you've soon forgotten about the spec sheet and enjoy a fast computing experience.
Now, if you're a Mac person you'll know the Mac scene in a state of turmoil with the old Mac OS being replaced by a completely alien but vastly improved UNIX-based OS. The new OS shoves the Macintosh way out in front of Wintel again, but has few drivers and many rough edges which could take many months to fix, if not a whole lot longer. The old Mac OS was bags of pure functionality built on a highly dated core OS, so it's going to take a whle before the new OS does everything the old OS did as well and as smoothly.
My iBook dual boots to both OSes, and OS X can run Classic Mac OS as an application, like a kind of semi-emulator. This work well, although there's not that much point using the new OS until all your apps have been updated to run natively. This could take some time. If you're new to the mac or new to owning computers, a machine containing two very different OSes could be a turn-off.
The iBook runs OS X pretty well with little noticeable difference in basic performance when compared to my G4 400 desktop. One or two parts of Mac OS ten could be a lot faster - finder manipulation and app-launching - and it remains to be seen whether Apple can improve this simply by recoding and optimisation. However, for the most part, a correctly set-up OS X Mac doesn't feel sluggish at all - an new iBook or any other recent Mac.
The machine is light, and easy to carry around. It gets a lot of attention when you power it up. The screen is ultra crisp although only 12.1" for a 1078 pixel resolution. However, this isn't as bad as I'd anticipated even if a 13.3" screen would have been a better bet for Apple.
Is it going to win over Wintel people? Who cares! It's the best portable on the price running any OS and that's all that matters to this purchaser.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1299
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: PowerPC G3
Processor speed: 401-500
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
davidcharles
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Reviews written: 2
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