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AMD: 64 Notebook News

Originally posted by dxp4acu
every day that goes by without a new powerbook makes me believe that something more, something bigger is in the pipeline...
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*Ya tell me about it Hugs his legs and rocks back and forth* G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...G5 Powerbooks soon...G5 Powerbook soon...
 
Originally posted by Powerbook G5
Don't worry, I'll be there soon. Just leave a plate of cookies by the fireplace. ;)
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*Sighs* Even if Jobs did announce it in January I can't get one. YET. Its amazing how much damage a curb can do to a car when the front right tire slides into it. Note to self hit a curb head on from now on. I ended up doing about a grand worth of damage to the rim, knuckle, and strut. It's amazing I was able to even drive the rest of the way home. The tire was, how to describe, tilted inward so part of it was off the ground. :( DAMN.

Maybe if I leave a plate of cookies he'll leave me 3 grand? ;)
 
My car has been a constant source of poverty for me as well. It's amazing how quickly a Ford drains your account, it's like the Gateway of the auto world...cheap and constantly needing parts replaced.
 
Originally posted by Powerbook G5
I remember back in 1998/1999 8 lbs was considered on the lighter side of the laptop weight spectrum. Back then when I got my PowerBook G3 (6.4 lbs!) I was amazed since the Dell Inspiron I was looking at was a "mere" 9.4 lbs and on their website they claimed it was "lightweight and portable".
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i thought the powerbook g3 was 5.9 lbs. but it was certainly lighter than most pc laptops at the time...my laptop was on the heavy side of the compaq presarios made in mid 1999 and weighed 7 1/2 lbs. and the lighter but more expensive presarios weighed in under 5 lbs. but they came out in late 1999

now that laptop users are more demanding, most laptops will be under 6 lbs soon and start approaching what we used to consider a thin and light sub notebook which was once in the 5 lb. territory...but now the average sub notebook is in the 3 to 3 1/2 pound territory

i can't wait to see a 1/2" inch thin laptop and the thinnest i have ever heard of is just under three quarters of an inch
 
With the battery and optical drive in, the PowerBook was over 6 lbs, with the older G3's, you could operate the machine with both the battery removed and the optical drive removed and slip the "weight saver" dummy modules in but I always found that if I did that, the back end was so heavy when the screen was open that it'd want to tip over unless I held it down with my wrists.
 
Originally posted by Powerbook G5
With the battery and optical drive in, the PowerBook was over 6 lbs, with the older G3's, you could operate the machine with both the battery removed and the optical drive removed and slip the "weight saver" dummy modules in but I always found that if I did that, the back end was so heavy when the screen was open that it'd want to tip over unless I held it down with my wrists.
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wow, that's not a very good design then

i have never seen a laptop that is back heavy like that

when my battery died on my presario laptop, i just took it out and went ac adapter all the time and it has been fine with me and it works...the battery died in a year...the ibook i have which i bought the same week in 99 has its original battery and it still holds about half as much charge as it did when i first got the machine, but at least the original battery still works and is not dead like in my pc laptop

the laptop is around a pound lighter on its body portion of the unit but still it is nowhere near being back heavy where the whole computer can fall over

when i first saw pictures of the lcd imac, i thought for sure that the macihine would tip over but when i saw how stable the new imac was, i had no fear about apple going to a larger lcd

20" inches seems quite large in an imac, but it probably will not tip over otherwise apple would not have dared made an imac with such a large lcd
 
The thing is not so much "back heavy" as unbalanced I'd have to say. I mean, it just wants to tip when the display is open, so I think it's just the fact that there is no weight in the front to counterbalance it. If you were to open the Lombard series PowerBook up, you'd see that besides the case, once you pop the DVD-ROM and battery out of their module bays, there isn't anything else in the front of the unit. The logic board sits in the midsection with the processor and RAM card at dead center, the HD to the far right center, the fan and cardbus to the left center, and the modem to the back left corner with the rest of the ports and circuitry to the rear. All you have in the front are the thin plastic casing with the thin metal skeleton and then the plastic latch button and two plastic module bay levers.
 
Originally posted by Powerbook G5
The thing is not so much "back heavy" as unbalanced I'd have to say. I mean, it just wants to tip when the display is open, so I think it's just the fact that there is no weight in the front to counterbalance it. If you were to open the Lombard series PowerBook up, you'd see that besides the case, once you pop the DVD-ROM and battery out of their module bays, there isn't anything else in the front of the unit. The logic board sits in the midsection with the processor and RAM card at dead center, the HD to the far right center, the fan and cardbus to the left center, and the modem to the back left corner with the rest of the ports and circuitry to the rear. All you have in the front are the thin plastic casing with the thin metal skeleton and then the plastic latch button and two plastic module bay levers.
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my fear is that once a person would have the optical drive and battery out, your laptop could fall onto a hard surface and break the lcd or damage the inside of the machine

outside of the panasonic toughbook and some other makes, all very expensive, laptops are just not made to be dropped and apple should have designed the laptop so that there would be weight to counterbalance the unit with the bays out so one wouldn't have to hold it up to prevent it from falling

i do like how the powerbook g3 had the ability to swap out a zip drive into the bay which was the best way for mass storage inside a laptop before the wide use of cd and dvd burners in a laptop which really gives the user a tremendous amount of storage capability on the cheap

on the pc side, there are a lot of machines with burners in them, but the floppy is still used a lot to share word documents and save them...the basic office nature of the pc and the fact that the most likely storage is for word docs will make the floppy perfectly capable of holding quite a few word docs on one disk since they don't take up a lot of space

when the imac came out in 98 without a floppy drive, i was surprised but then i realized that since the machine is more geared to working with and saving photos, graphics, and music, it really does not make too much sense to have a floppy drive
 
I think that if Apple were to have added more weight to the front of the unit, then the one advantage to having the modules removed would be taken away. I never ran my PowerBook with both modules removed for this reason and because I never felt it was too heavy to begin with. If needed, you could just be careful about the angle of tilt that you use the LCD screen at to minimize the chance that it'd tip over. I do wish we still had more laptops out there with hot swapable media bays like that PowerBook, it was pretty useful. You could use internal Superdisk drives, zip drives, HDs, CD-RWs, a second battery, etc, and never once sacrifice portability and convenience.
 
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