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Ode to the machine I love
- Thread starter Lastic
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Nice vid, thanks. I mostly agree with him, and love my Little Al.
I did find it irritating, though, how he reverses the footage in spots to make it appear as though one could simply press down on the closed lid of an Apple laptop and it would magically spring open to an optimal viewing angle. I know it was an artistic choice, but - it bothers me. Oh well.
I did find it irritating, though, how he reverses the footage in spots to make it appear as though one could simply press down on the closed lid of an Apple laptop and it would magically spring open to an optimal viewing angle. I know it was an artistic choice, but - it bothers me. Oh well.
I feel I’ve remarked on this in the not terribly remote past.
The 13" MacBook Pro, despite the video person’s take, is very much a MacBook Pro in its construction, relative power, and portability. In the long run, integrated graphics may have been a function of internal space, but it’s also what separated the 13" 2011 models from the larger versions which are permanent lemons. Otherwise, the 15" and 13" MBPs share a lot of same ports and functions. The 17" at least provided an ExpressCard slot.
Conversely, for as elegant as the Aluminium PowerBook G4 12" was (and yah, still very much is), there remains a long mess of features and aspects of its internals which resonate more as a “metallized” iBook G4 12" and nothing at all like the Aluminium PowerBook 15" and 17" models.
Having opened and worked inside of all these systems (the 14" iBook excepted), I still double-take whenever I find a picture of a greyish, post-2002 iBook G3 and a 12" PowerBook G4, as they look fairly similar. This is not so much a detraction on the 12" PB, but there was no question Apple’s designers pushed and pulled closely between the iBook product team and the team involved with the 12" PB.
Like the iBooks, the 12" PB lacked a PC Card port. Also like the iBooks, it never accommodated two RAM slots, never featured the FW800 port, and never was equipped with Gigabit ethernet. the 12" was nearly as thick as the polycarbonate iBook G4s, and much thicker than either of the 15" and 17" editions. It also lacked an LCD upgrade option, which would have been possible with the 1400x1050 WSXGA+ monitors which had been in production from at least 2003.
Atop all this, the 12" wasn’t green-lighted for a final revision the way the 15" and 17" models were, leaving the 12" with more or less the same functionality found with the late 2004 iBooks.
That said, the 12" keyboard was delightful, just as it is with all the other Aluminium PowerBooks and pre-unibody MacBook Pros.
My only beefs with my 12” is it’s lack of a dvi out port & PC Card. Not really a beef but Were two of my fav features of my 17” (aside from its massive screen) & necessary parts of my DSLR/photo rig.
Still got nothing but love for my little 12” 867mhz though.
Still got nothing but love for my little 12” 867mhz though.
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The 12" 867MHz was released at a time when the iBook was still "rocking" a G3 though, making the 867MHz more an "aluminumised" (sorry if that's not the right word) iBook G4 than a small PowerBook. Later revisions at least had DVI. FWIW, I find the 12" AlBook to look and feel much better than the iBook due to the reduced size (which is quite noticeable to me when looking at both side by side) and aluminum housing - the white iBook has always looked and felt a little clunky to me.
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Another big difference only recently eradicated was dual-cores in the 13" vs quad-cores in the larger models starting in 2011.
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My 867 has mini dvi, but not the full sized dvi port. I could just as easily enough pick up a mdvi-dvi adapter for a fiver & I have a card reader to supplement the lack of pcmcia slot+adapter I was using with my 17”.
So more than anything it was me being picky than outright criticsms of little Al.
So more than anything it was me being picky than outright criticsms of little Al.
The 12" PowerBook could reap the thinness borne from a stamped aluminium sheet versus a polycarbonate shell, so there was definitely that working in its favour.
Another relationship I didn’t think of until after posting last day: all the iBook G4 models and PowerBook 12" models share the same main model ID of Powerbook6,*, while the 15" and 17" aluminium models were designated with PowerBook5,*.
That’s true. I sometimes wondered whether the absence of a quad core processor in the 13" model line was in some way a limitation of the unibody (and retina unibody) design accommodating only one heatsink fan.