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Powerbooks? iBooks?

Re: Re: I suppose my real question is which

Originally posted by Gelfin
The iBook will be plenty for your needs, and you can spend the extra money on pizza and beer. ;)
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Oh. Uh, unless of course you're a parent shopping for laptops to send off to school with your 18-year-old, and in that case of course what I meant to say was, "you can spend the extra money on textbooks and good, nutritious food." :D
 
Re: Re: more resolution

Originally posted by cmoney


whoa momma. i've seen 15" screens with 1280x1024 and that's really the max i'd go. i once saw 1600x1200 on a dell and that was a joke. how people use that is beyond me. i'd have a headache in five minutes.
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absolutely! ... my buddys also have the 1600x1200 dells ... this is so usseless ... all they are doing is codeing ... so to see anything they have to pump up their standard font size to a whopping 18 points or more ... so what does ahigher resolution do 4 ya? except that the fonts look awful, because the the screen fonts look bad in that size ...

the only progs that use taht resolution are finalcut pro or macromedia director or flash... but then again you'd want more landscape profiles as the cinema display offers, not just pumping up the pixels .... i have lots of clients that keep bugging me to make font sizes bigger in my projects .. imagine i'd have1600x1200!!

and in designing webpages the superhighres gives u a totally wrong feeling for size ... well anyway
 
I wonder if Apple could give us more resolution options on the current TiBooks (rev a and b) with a firmware update.

Any comments??
 
college ibook vs. tibook

Originally posted by Curiousstrngmint
I suppose what I'm really wondering is whether people think a college student would have a use for a tibook or whether an ibook is plenty powerful. Also the advantage of getting an ibook is that you can save like $500 or $750, and put that towards a new laptop a couple years later. Thoughts? Thanks.
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You wanted some feedback from a college student, so here it is:

Honestly, you don't need a tibook. They're expensive, they're targeted at professionals or business execs and they're simply too big and fragile. Imagine if someone spilled coffee over it, or stole it from you after two weeks! (yes, laptop thefts are rampant on any campus)

From my experience (drooling over my friends' laptops... I'm just a prospective buyer too!), it's all a question of how you want to balance display size versus weight versus price. Among the Mac crowd, some have 500mhz ibooks and are very happy with them, others have older G3 powerbooks (400mhz or 500mhz) and are equally content.

Processing power isn't the issue: students care about using MS Office, IE Explorer, itunes and perhaps photoshop. I'd heartily recommend either one of the above computers. If you don't want a used computer, then a 14 inch display means the larger ibook, which I've never seen before.

Finally, (sorry for the length) I'd tell you: YOU'VE HIT IT RIGHT ON THE NAIL!!!
Much better to save 500$+ now that you can use for other priorities (or a new computer/upgrade later on), than to spend them on useless perks like a titanium laptop. Let's face it, the ibook is already outdated, but that's why people can afford it. PCs drive technological innovation, and they're outdated every three months. Don't blind yourself, the same thing happens quickly enough for macs (maybe takes half a year). And if you need to do some supercomputing in college, you sure won't be using a laptop!

Last, wait as long as you can. You'll never regret it. You can even wait several months into college, because first papers are usually due only in mid-October to November. That way, you'd also get a much better idea of what you actually want. Of course, that means keeping your hand away from your credit card for many more months to come...
Good luck!
 
If you intend to do any video games, don't use the iBook (uses the 8MB rage 128 where the TiBook has the 16MB mobile radeon). While the iBook might do ok on strategy games, anything more graphic intense will choke on it. I don't know of any college students that don't have games on their computers. The same is true for professionals, just the games are sometimes different.

For the long haul, a new TiBook will be a better option. Especially considering that the G4 processor will have a longer life span, and performs much better on Altivec aware applications (and OS X).

Personally, I would never buy anything that didn't have at least a G4 processor in it.
 
Thanks so much, but I still have one concern

Thanks a lot, esp49129, for that post. My only concern is whether the G3 will still be viable for the long haul. Otherwise I'd spring for the 14inch iBook, all maxed out...I can do without heavy-duty games, and I'd probably be better off without them anyway. But hopefully at MWNY they'll give the iBook the mobile radeon or geforce2go, and then it's probably iBook for me and off to NYC.
 
iBook kicks anus

The iBook kicks anus and I love it to death. It has great graphics, wonderful drive capabilities and really great for consumers. Does anybody know where I can get a storage card for my Newton Emate. I just go mine and I dont know crap about it. If you have info or a site I can get it at, email me at robertherman87@earthlink.net. Thanks,

Swahilibill
 
As far as this side track goes with what to buy. Alpha in my opinion knows whats best. The ibook is great right now, yes. But if you are a college student then you want a computer that will still be able to run all the newest operating systems and applications 4 or 5 years from now. The ibook flunks in a heartbeat. the people reccommending the ibook have either never owned many computers or replaced their computers more often than every 4 or 5 years.

Imagine picking up your beautiful new ibook being perfectly happy for two years and then suddenly noticing you can use any new applications and cant install apple's newest operating system you will be disappointed, and you will wish you had shelle dou the extra $700, because it would have lasted you another 2 or 3 years.

I you buy the ibook, you will probably eat up that extra $700 bucks you saved early on to upgrade the computer later. Or you will shell out another $2000 for a new computer after two years. Either way you didnt save any money in the end.

And the main topic. Have to say Alpha is wrong. Gel has the right idea on this one. But this is assuming people are using OSX. If you only use OS9 then Alpha is right, anything bigger is just silly (ala peecee users). But OSX eats up screen realestate like never before. The only way to save a bit of that space is to reduce those icons size thus negating one of the features of OSX. I you really want to take advantage of OSX we need the IBM lcds (you know the ones that cost $10,000). Crank up the font size and icons size and you have a screen that displays things that are indistinguishable from the real world. This is the key to getting truly realistic easy on the eye displays. Its a ways off because of cost, but if we take baby steps in that direction we will get to the nice lcds in a few years.

All of you who say you can reduce dock and icons size and therefore dont need more space, you are right. But this is a work around. You are solving a problem. And you shouldnt have to. You should be able to use thos ebig icons. And the big system fonts shouldnt bother you. Its good to know most of us know how to work around these problems, but id rather see them solved by higher res lcds. That way we get space AND nice pictures. Reading would be so much easier and my pretty icons would remain pretty.
 
Prelude to new TiBook?

I notice MacCenter are offering a free airport base station with every 667 TiBook. Its admittedly a wild leap of imagination, but could this not be construed as "clear the decks any way you can, we got new models coming in"?
 
Re: Prelude to new TiBook?

Originally posted by Vanilla
Its admittedly a wild leap of imagination, but could this not be construed as "clear the decks any way you can, we got new models coming in"?
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Sure, its a $300 insentive. But it would seem more like they're trying to get rid of Airports. I checked apple.com and the only special deals they had were on the 2001 model machines, which isn't too bad, actually.
 
Re: Re: Prelude to new TiBook?

Originally posted by dukestreet


Sure, its a $300 insentive. But it would seem more like they're trying to get rid of Airports. I checked apple.com and the only special deals they had were on the 2001 model machines, which isn't too bad, actually.
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interesting that you should say that. for months now apple has been dumping airports, powerbooks, and ibooks. likewise vendors have been dumping airports and powerbooks. apple employees are getting amazing deals on powerbooks right now. we all thought it meant new powerbooks at tokyo and it didnt happen. seems like they are really gearing up for a big update to the powerbook. if they wait till NY it will be 11months since the last update. if they felt they needed to wait that long they must have had somthing big in the works. new airport could be part of it. any other guesses?
 
I was hoping for an upgrade so I could get off the fence and buy a mac, but nothing happened at Tokyo. Now, they have all these deals, and I was again thinking about hopping off the fence, but I worry about an upgrade or revision right after I buy. I'm going to wait a little longer and let my bank account build up, and hopefully in the near future something gets done and I will, like most of you, be a mac owner!! I am looking forward to opening up my first mac box, and taking out the mac packaging, and reading the mac instructions (no, that wouldn't be any mac fun), then plugging the mac plug into the mac wall and mac using my mac mac. Well, I've got mac work to mac do today or I'll get mac fired!
 
Re: Well that's a no brainer

Originally posted by BeerDrinker29
Nothing really new there, except for that screen resolution. The iBook line moving to 14 inch screens has been around for awhile. I hope it's not true..
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i like the 12 inch screen because the smaller and lighter case makes this an ultra portable at under five pounds (maybe ultra portable is even lighter by description these days)

the 14 inch screen is beautiful but the whole laptop is a pound heavier and that pound does make a difference...my old ibook is a few more ounces heavier than that and it's too heavy...and my pc laptop is a pound heavier than the 14 inch ibook and the thing feels like i am carrying around a minitower
 
Re: Re: Well that's a no brainer

Originally posted by jefhatfield


i like the 12 inch screen because the smaller and lighter case makes this an ultra portable at under five pounds (maybe ultra portable is even lighter by description these days)

the 14 inch screen is beautiful but the whole laptop is a pound heavier and that pound does make a difference...my old ibook is a few more ounces heavier than that and it's too heavy...and my pc laptop is a pound heavier than the 14 inch ibook and the thing feels like i am carrying around a minitower
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Jef, I would hate to see you lugging around an old PowerBook then. Back when they were over 7 pounds. The 14" iBook is spec'd to be 5.99 pounds (call it 6) which is not an anchor by any means. Granted, I wouldn't want to lug around a 10 pound laptop, but all the current offerings from Apple are no more then the 6 pounder.
 
with power adapter and battery (which like most pc laptops is underpowered) tips the scale at over 7.5 pounds

throw in my techie manuals, pens, pencils, and alka selzer, then you are talking fifteen pounds everywhere i go...to clients, to students' homes, to school, to borders books to check out mac and pc mags, and everywhere else

one day, apple may make a super-portable like sony's C1 laptop which is just over 2 pounds w/o external cd-rom or power adapter

for short excursions, you can carry it in a purse or a large pocket...really cool, but the screen is a short 8" inch lcd and a little hard to see and the keyboard is at 75 percent instead of the standard 90 percent mobile users are accustomed to
 
It seems that one thing y'all can try is lightening the bag itself. Rather than the heavy leather bags a lot of people carry, there are many bags made from lightweight materials. My bag is fairly light (www.sjdesign.com) and the little file things that flop over it are removable so I don't always have that extra weight.
 
I have a Brenthaven backpack type bag for my TiBook. It is made of the lightweight materials and I usually don't put all that much else into the bag. Power adapter, cord, podium cooler thingy, Macally optical mouse, pad (HD logo on it :D ), and maybe a magazine or three and the charger for my iPod. There are days I have to check and make sure the laptop is in it, it's that light, at least to me it is.
 
In a year or so I will have to get a new laptop for college and I was considering getting the 12" iBook (hopefully it'll be a g4 by then)

I really hope Apple doesn't change all the iBooks to 14" screens... If they do I'll just have to get a TiBook -- it's one extreme or another for me :)
 
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