Interestingly, the 15" A1138 PowerBook was clocked at a negligibly faster benchmark (843) on Everymac’s Geekbench 2 scores over the 17" A1139 (836). The A1106 15" PowerBook was even higher (844).
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What is the absolute best Powerbook G4? Latest 17" model, Most powerful??
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Interestingly, the 15" A1138 PowerBook was clocked at a negligibly faster benchmark (843) on Everymac’s Geekbench 2 scores over the 17" A1139 (836). The A1106 15" PowerBook was even higher (844).
My 17" DLSD clocked in at 877 versus my 15" at 837, when on Tiger the 17" shot to 987
If the keyboard is a prime consideration, I almost prefer the MBP keyboards over the AlBooks, although there's little practical difference in them and they're both excellent.
I wrote the bulk of my master's thesis on an MBP 4,1 where most of the keycaps had been worn through-evidently I wasn't the first person to type a lot on it
The 3,1 and 4,1 offer you a great range of OS X compatiblity-among the best of any modern Mac. The 4,1 officially supports 10.5 to 10.11, and it's only a small amount of work to extend that back to 10.4 as well as forward I think to 10.13(I haven't followed terribly closely). The 15" models all have more or less the same resolution as the DLSD, and on the 3,1 and 4,1 I think they're all LED backlit. On a 17", a 1920x1200 screen with LED backlights was an option, although they're not too difficult to find.
The GPUs on most are a ticking time bomb, but @dosdude1 can fix that permanently.
Add a USB 3.0 Expresscard and you have USB 3.0 in 10.7 and newer.
An SSD will usually make them fly, and you don't really even need to spend a fortune or deal with work-arounds since these are SATA native. I'm fixing up an MBP 8,2 for someone at work to give to her grand-daughter, and picked up a 240gb PNY brand drive at Best Buy yesterday for $30. I wouldn't necessarily use that drive in one of my beat-on-12-hours-a-day computers(I stick with Samsung Evos) but it will work fine for this application.
Hence, the inference (at least on my part) that anything less then the most 'bestest' model won't do.
Every single 17" Albook has the same damn keyboard. If that's all OP is interested in then 'best' is irrelevant and continuing to 'demand' it smacks of snobbery to me.
I know that the question asked-as best as I can tell-was about the best PPC Laptop period, but in a since deleted post the OP has specified their criteria as writing.
I'd suggest a DVI TiBook(DVI for the higher screen res) running OS 9 as a good choice for writing. I prefer the TiBook keyboard to the AlBook.
OS 9 will limit your ability to connect to the internet in several ways, and depending on WHAT you're writing this can be a benefit or detriment.
Regardless, in addition to the keyboard, there are a bunch of great OS 9 word processors. Corel released Word Perfect 3.5e(the last version) as a free download, and it's still around. Officially, you would need to pay for the other options I'm going to mention, but Word 5.1 is a classic, as is Appleworks 6. I think Office '01 was the last for OS 9. There's also my perennial favorite Nisus writer-I'm not sure what the last "Classic" version was. If you need something more in the desktop publishing category, @eyoungren can probably advise, but Quark(which I think held out as OS 9 native for an unreasonably long time-enough that some people speculate the MDD2003 was targeted at Quark users) and PageMaker are the biggies.
I'd suggest a DVI TiBook(DVI for the higher screen res) running OS 9 as a good choice for writing. I prefer the TiBook keyboard to the AlBook.
OS 9 will limit your ability to connect to the internet in several ways, and depending on WHAT you're writing this can be a benefit or detriment.
Regardless, in addition to the keyboard, there are a bunch of great OS 9 word processors. Corel released Word Perfect 3.5e(the last version) as a free download, and it's still around. Officially, you would need to pay for the other options I'm going to mention, but Word 5.1 is a classic, as is Appleworks 6. I think Office '01 was the last for OS 9. There's also my perennial favorite Nisus writer-I'm not sure what the last "Classic" version was. If you need something more in the desktop publishing category, @eyoungren can probably advise, but Quark(which I think held out as OS 9 native for an unreasonably long time-enough that some people speculate the MDD2003 was targeted at Quark users) and PageMaker are the biggies.
I agree with bunnspecial. As I suggested in the OP's other thread, the 1ghz TiBook would likely be the best choice for his intended usage. It has the same OS limit as the AlBooks, has a very good keyboard (some would say better than its successors'), and is plenty fast for lighter usage, especially if you install an SSD.
Perhaps one of the only caveats would be the lack of a backlit keyboard, which wouldn't be very good for all-around writing purposes...
Perhaps one of the only caveats would be the lack of a backlit keyboard, which wouldn't be very good for all-around writing purposes...
QuarkXPress and OS X were a major turning point for Quark Inc.
At this point, Ebrahimi (the guy who created the program and founded Quark), has had a couple of years of insulting and denigrating the XPress customer while ripping them off. The launch of QuarkXPress 5.0 was expected to run on OS X.
it didn't. The Quark forums exploded. They got shut down. A year and a half later they came back up when XPress 6.0 was launched.
But during that entire year and a half, Adobe spent massive amounts of time luring pissed off Quark customers to Adobe InDesign.
ID was offered to design schools free with the other major apps and was made $99 for students. Unlike Quark, the license was a full license, not an education license.
When QuarkXPress 6.0 was launched, Quark had been in such a hurry that the type rendering engine was still OS9 code in an OS X wrapper. The PDF engine was garbage and it wasn't until XPress 7 that importing PSDs and drop shadows were even possible.
Quark lost it's position as the premier layout app and Adobe has not let up since.
Fortunately, as certain technologies in the design industry have become more mainstream it's chipped away at Adobe's lead. Quark is still in business and they make a great app.
/end stuff you never really wanted to know about Quark Inc. and QuarkXPress.
QuarkXPress and OS X were a major turning point for Quark Inc.
At this point, Ebrahimi (the guy who created the program and founded Quark), has had a couple of years of insulting and denigrating the XPress customer while ripping them off. The launch of QuarkXPress 5.0 was expected to run on OS X.
it didn't. The Quark forums exploded. They got shut down. A year and a half later they came back up when XPress 6.0 was launched.
But during that entire year and a half, Adobe spent massive amounts of time luring pissed off Quark customers to Adobe InDesign.
ID was offered to design schools free with the other major apps and was made $99 for students. Unlike Quark, the license was a full license, not an education license.
When QuarkXPress 6.0 was launched, Quark had been in such a hurry that the type rendering engine was still OS9 code in an OS X wrapper. The PDF engine was garbage and it wasn't until XPress 7 that importing PSDs and drop shadows were even possible.
Quark lost it's position as the premier layout app and Adobe has not let up since.
Fortunately, as certain technologies in the design industry have become more mainstream it's chipped away at Adobe's lead. Quark is still in business and they make a great app.
/end stuff you never really wanted to know about Quark Inc. and QuarkXPress.
Whilst some of the minutiae about the founder/creator were not known to me, I clearly remember the foot-dragging of QuarkXPress through, like, 2005 — how QXP 5 was not really a big leap from QXP 4 (which had been an evolutionary hop from the venerable/rock-solid 3.31). I used 4.x and skipped 5, and like you said, much of 6 appeared like a hastily carbonized take on the OS 9 builds. I skipped 7 and didn’t really see things resemble something stable and native to OS X until version 8.
As I recall, when InDesign was released, this coincided with Creative Suite, and within CS, InDesign was effectively thrown in alongside the usual standbys. This, plus the education licensing you mentioned, made InDesign the de facto layout suite.
Still, I prefer QuarkXPress, even today (even though I rarely need to do layout these days).
I couldn't agree more about the keyboards.
I love my TiBook, and would happily prefer it over any of the AlBooks as a daily driver, if it weren't for one thing: no scrolling trackpad. No way, no how, no iScroll, no nothing. I'm just too used to using one to be without.
I'm using SideTrack on the Pismo and it works pretty well
Cheers
Hugh
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
Fred Ebrahimi was a major (and still is) jerk. He was prone to firing entire departments for now reason, harassing employees and generally treating everyone like dirt. In a different time period he might have been charged and arrested for something.
Gill cashed out and retired in 2000 which left Ebrahimi running things until 2005 when he gave all his stock to his kids and left.
I have good friends at Quark and it's been a challenge for them to transition since 2005. It's much better now as they have managed to repair some relations, but it's been rough.
The only reason I know about the issues with XPress 6, 7 and 8 is because I was using those on PowerPC and working with Quark to resolve some issues. The problem was that the optimizations they did for Intel didn't carry over to PowerPC and that often affected me.
We're using XPress 2016 at my new job and the problem there is PSD previews. They go corrupt after a while so we can't really use them too much.
PM me if you need it, version 1.3 is the one I have that seems to work best.
Cheers
Hugh
Why not post to Macintosh Garden? You can add to this page:
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/sidetrack
Version 2 seems to be all they have.
OK, uploaded to Macintosh Garden on the page you linked to
Cheers
Hugh
Cheers
Hugh
If the keyboard is a prime consideration, I almost prefer the MBP keyboards over the AlBooks, although there's little practical difference in them and they're both excellent.
I wrote the bulk of my master's thesis on an MBP 4,1 where most of the keycaps had been worn through-evidently I wasn't the first person to type a lot on it
The 3,1 and 4,1 offer you a great range of OS X compatiblity-among the best of any modern Mac. The 4,1 officially supports 10.5 to 10.11, and it's only a small amount of work to extend that back to 10.4 as well as forward I think to 10.13(I haven't followed terribly closely). The 15" models all have more or less the same resolution as the DLSD, and on the 3,1 and 4,1 I think they're all LED backlit. On a 17", a 1920x1200 screen with LED backlights was an option, although they're not too difficult to find.
The GPUs on most are a ticking time bomb, but @dosdude1 can fix that permanently.
Add a USB 3.0 Expresscard and you have USB 3.0 in 10.7 and newer.
An SSD will usually make them fly, and you don't really even need to spend a fortune or deal with work-arounds since these are SATA native. I'm fixing up an MBP 8,2 for someone at work to give to her grand-daughter, and picked up a 240gb PNY brand drive at Best Buy yesterday for $30. I wouldn't necessarily use that drive in one of my beat-on-12-hours-a-day computers(I stick with Samsung Evos) but it will work fine for this application.
My 4,1 was an amazing machine. Although I had the base model, I eventually upgraded to 6 GB RAM and a 1 TB drive. Loved it so much I got another! Though I sold that one after a while. Came in matte or glossy, and was the first with a multitouch trackpad. The keyboard is one of the best I've ever tried (better than the unibody ones and much better than the retina ones I reckon). I had a USB 3.0 card installed on 10.6 (though needed drivers for that), and I did actually get it to run 10.4 perfectly eventually (expect for the trackpad, I never did get around to fixing that). It was also the last model with a moddable Apple logo.
Yes, they are a delight to type with!
And for the record, the unibody MBPs, rMBPs, white/black MBs, and the aluminium Apple extended wired keyboard (ca. 2007, onward)? I am able to confirm they all use the exact same mechanism, throw, and feel for their keys. Their chronological first use would have been the 2006 MacBook, followed by the USB keyboard; their last use would have been earlier this year when the last rMBP was discontinued.
I don’t know whether their BT keyboard still features it.
It might use the same mechanism, but at least to me there is a slight difference in key pressure and sound. I have multiple MacBooks that use the mechanism, and a couple aluminum wired and wireless keyboards from the late 2000s.Yes, they are a delight to type with!
And for the record, the unibody MBPs, rMBPs, white/black MBs, and the aluminium Apple extended wired keyboard (ca. 2007, onward)? I am able to confirm they all use the exact same mechanism, throw, and feel for their keys. Their chronological first use would have been the 2006 MacBook, followed by the USB keyboard; their last use would have been earlier this year when the last rMBP was discontinued.
I don’t know whether their BT keyboard still features it.
The wireless ones (from my experience, this all is) are louder and firmer than the wired ones. The wired one is fairly mushy, very little effort to press. The 2006 MacBook is about as firm as the wireless, but not as loud. The 2008 MacBook Unibody is not as firm as the 2006, but not as mushy as the wired keyboard.
Keep in mind these could be varied due to age and usage over the years, perhaps when these were all new they felt/sounded more similar.