ldburroughs said:
...[snipping]The bottom line comes down to price. Sure the Accord is nicer than the Civic but they both are great cars from a great car manufacturer. They target different buyers. Do you need an Accord when you drive three miles round trip each day and park in a subcompact spot? Probably not. By the way, I realize the PowerBook is a wee bit smaller than the iBook but that is due to the thin unforgiving aluminum shell (durability argument again ... played out like the rest of this debate). My size comparison is more for the benefit of the people who "claim" there are substantially more bells and whistles in the PowerBook.
fact: iBooks are cheaper
fact: PowerBooks are faster and have more features
fact: iBooks have more battery life.
There is no mystery here. There is no "debate" as to which computer is better, in any of these terms. Only outside of them can there be a real "debate," but that's just personal. Which advantages a particular user wants more and what they can afford is for them to decide. What "substantially" means can vary greatly by user. People on this board have returned, or wanted to return, their iBooks in exchange for PowerBooks for reasons such as the keyboard feel and the ability to run true clamshell mode, even though these things might be meaningless to you, me, or someone else. It's hard to draw the line between someone else's needs and desires anyway, so I try not to. I mean, does
anyone really
need that Accord?
Saying a PB is faster or slightly smaller is not idle puffery, it's just a fact. But any given consumer can decide that other factors are more important, though, and there's nothing wrong with that.
ldburroughs said:
Most of the people who say PowerBook in this and any other thread own a PowerBook.
Whoa, stop the presses! You mean someone who went through a purchase decision-making process and came out one way has reasons they went that way, and is sharing them? That's nuts! At least you don't own an iBook yourself, that would appear to undermine anything you could possibly say about Apple laptops ...errr, maybe not.
ldburroughs said:
Most do not factor in the price difference. If they do, they are looking at the lowest model available for purchase from Apple directly, not two comparably equiped models. Excuse the pun ... but how about apples to apples.
That's a good idea: configure a base iBook via Apple's BTO (problematic, I know, but this is "apples to apples") as close as possible to the base PB (RAM, HDD, BT), and by the numbers you get a 20% price difference in favor of the iBook, to go along with the 20% CPU MHz difference, 20% FSB MHz difference, 20% HDD rpm difference, 200% VRAM difference, and all the little features (better GPU, true clamshell mode, BT2, HDD drop protection, fancy trackpad, audio-in, DVI-out) that can be so important to some people, in favor of the PowerBook. I make no claim that any of these numbers directly translate to performance in any particular way, but if we want to compare "apples to apples"... this is a sensible way. We could also look at various third-party tests from
Macworld or barefeats, to see how the numbers play out in test conditions.
ldburroughs said:
Also, the iBook was updated last fall, not last spring. Right now these machines are very close. Too close for comfort for most PowerBook users. Haven't we beaten this dead horse to death many times over? I actually like horses and would never do this. I'll work on another way of phrasing this for the future. Both are great machines. Go for what you can afford. At least your still buying a Mac. Welcome to the family. Don't mind all the unnecessary infighting
? The PBs have been updated since last spring.... they were updated just in January. As for being "too close," I don't think any iBooks compare that directly to the 15" and 17" PBs in terms of features and speed, and the 12" comparison is discussed above. But beyond that, I agree with you wholeheartedly. They ARE both great machines, and I don't think anyone can really go wrong with either of them.
