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Ten Years of Apple PowerBooks
ckd writes: "The PowerBook Zone has a short interview with Bruce Gee talking about the evolution of the PowerBook design since the first PowerBooks. (Bruce was the PowerBook Product Manager back then.) Hearken back to the days when 20MB was a good-sized drive in a portable machine! Yes, the PowerBook 100 was not the first 'portable Mac' -- but it was the first to bear the name PowerBook." And of all the (handful) of portables I've owned, I have to admit that I've had the fewest problems with and most affection for the PowerBooks (and now an iBook).
- motherboard
- daughterboard (twice)
- hard drive (twice)
- floppy drive
- power adapter
But it has done awfully well for itself, all things considered. I'm typing this now on my third PowerBook (G3 Bronze, preceded by the awful 5300) and this has been the most reliable yet!
sulli
RTFJ.
My first Mac at work was one of those PowerBook 100s. 8MB of RAM (huge at that time) and a 20MB hard drive. Tiny little black and white screen, sub-notebook size. The only thing that drove me nuts about it was that the trackball was get dirty and stick after awhile. That was back in 1992/1993 or so. Funny thing is that we recently sold off that PowerBook 100 and the thing was still working just fine.
wait, if i get a Power/iBook, does that mean i can hack in to government databases in under 10 seconds like in all the movie's i've seen with those REAL HACKERS using apple lappy's? that'd be schweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
If Apple had not made the biggest blunder in their history and refused to open the specs to their hardware. Open standards always win. Apple can release all of the new machines, power laptops, and pretty looking cases that they want, it won't change anything.
The truth is Apple made a blunder bigger than even the guy from Washington that sold Bill Gates exclusive rights to QDOS for $50000.
A friend of mine used a PB100 until some month ago, when the hard disk started to fail. But even with such a slow processor, and few memory, it remained "usable" because she didn' make too much software upgrades (e.g., still using Word 4/5).
In fact, old software was less resource-hog, and thus you can have a good apparent performance even with clearly surpassed hardware. This is true mainly for Macintosh, as the operating system was nice and usable even more than ten years ago (no comparison with Win less than 95).
I had a couple of another extremely interesting Powerbooks: Duo 230 and 270c then upgraded to 2300. Very small, less than 2kg, really portable, I miss them even writing from my PB G3/500. Now only Sony is making a Vaio of such size (although the new iBook is sufficiently small).
My 0.02 euro...
I loved my b&w PB165. I bought if for cash the first day they were available in LA and snuck it back to Bangkok (computers were taxed as luxury items back them). I took it everywhere--it was incredibly rugged. It was cool to be able to play sounds whereever I was. Only last year did the screen finally dim for some reason, but other than that it works fine.
Apple did right to kill the clone market since MacOS machines would be plagues by same non-compatibility and bad quality issues as the x86 world is today.
Macs just work and that's it. And if they don't you know who to blame - not the "it's the mobo, no the gfx card, no the ethernet card!" stuff you have with x86.
...and when they've faltered, they've made up for it in spades with programs like an excellent trade-in opportunity for owners of the ill-fated 5300- and 190-series powerbooks, or defective power adaptors. I had one of these beasts fail on me and I've got to say, the Apple rep I talked to was just amazing. I got a free adaptor, I got about $500 off a new Wallstreet PB, and traded THAT in again for a new iBook.
The iBooks are spectacular. They are thin, light, and the benefits provided by the PowerBook G4 (speed, screen size) pale in comparison to the fact that the iBook won't scorch your lap(!) - and besides, the speed hit is minimal even under OS X, especially now that 10.1 is out. For $1199, you get an extremely respectable G3 machine with all the bells and whistles appreciated by myself and other Apple fans that have kept us coming back again and again.
Sure if apple had done things differently the company might have made more money but they wouldn't have been apple. In other words they wouldn't be in a position to be releasing the products they are releasing now and they wouldn't have as much control over their own product. As Jobs has said before no one says porsce is unsuccesful because under 5% of the market owns their cars (I might be misquoting; maybe it was ferrari).
Apple wants to be selling powerful intuitive computers to a market interested in multimedia. Apple basicly owns hollywood and most magazines are still layed out on macs (including ziff Davis if I remember correctly). Yes if in years past apple decided it was going to be more like it's money making competition there would now be a company named apple with more money but - as I said before - it wouldn't be apple.
And let's not forget Apple has a lot of money now... regardless of their policy.
Taking about 3 seconds to go from sleep mode to active was one of the best features... That's part of the reason why I carried it everywhere. It was my 6 pound palm pilot. It was my address book my notepad and my communication system.
After the powerbook died, I ended up with windows laptops that I got from work. They were nowhere near as carefree to use as my powerbook Even with a processor 10 times as fast, it still took more than 5 times as long to come out of sleep mode (presuming that it even survived being put to sleep, but that's another story). In the time it took my (1999) thinkpad to wake up, I could wake my (1993) powerbook, take a quick note, and put it back to sleep. It's usability wasn't really replicated for me until I got a Palm Pilot (interestingly enough -- also a 68000 family processor).
My powerbook was also very stable... The only recurring problem I had was putting it to sleep with Microsoft word in the foreground (Microsoft strikes again). I quickly learned to simply not do that.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Apple never delivered this fix (partly because Apple Corps. forced them to drop MIDI driver development), but by this time it became known that the PowerBook 100 would work fine for MIDI (different hardware design), and could also be fitted with a second serial port, making it the most MIDI-capable PowerBook around.
(Let us pause to remember the Outbound Portable, a third-party Mac laptop with a Mac Plus ROM and a funny rolling trackbar, predating the Apple machines by at least a year. At one stage Outbound were very interested in tackling the professional music market because their machine could do MIDI and the 140/170 could not; but the company folded soon after.)
I spent a while doing electronic music gigs with the PB100 and PB140 running in parallel, Opcode having fudged round the MIDI problems in the 140. I even had the 140 upgraded with a 170 processor board for higher speed. (I never wanted a 170; too many people were screaming at Apple over broken pixels in the active-matrix screen.)
It was a while before I moved on, buying a 520 Blackbird sometime around 1997 - my MIDI processing needs were growing, and I needed that 68040 performance! Greyscale was cool, too. Having to tighten the display hinges every six months was a small price to pay. But by this time, more and more Mac software required colour, and neither my SE/30 nor any of my three PowerBooks delivered it, so early in 2000 I bought a 540c for around $200, and I still use it for legacy MIDI applications (mostly those with copy-protection which can't be moved).
I was finally forced into the PowerPC world by a need to do realtime audio synthesis for the Frankfurt Ballett; at this stage the TiBook G4 had just come out, so I went straight to eBay and nailed a Pismo G3, deciding to let other Apple customers beta-test the TiBook hardware. I use the Pismo and 540c in tandem; the 100, 140 and 520 are mostly gathering dust but also serve as backup machines. The batteries in the 100 and 140 are dead; those in the 520 and 540c are dying.
Of course, the PPC PowerBook is pretty much part of the uniform for electronic sound and media performance. Our Frankfurt team has one each (a Wallstreet, a Lombard and a Pismo), and a recent arts/software conference at the Royal Opera House looked like an Apple product placement: a 50-50 mix of G3's and G4's. Almost all electronic music gigs will have a G3 or G4 onstage somewhere (listen out for those reboot chimes during the set...); Wallstreets are popular because they have serial ports, which still beat USB for MIDI applications.
I still have a soft spot for the 140. Ergonomically it comes out pretty much on top: the ruby-mount trackball beats any touchpad, and the machine itself is built like a tank: it was happy being strapped into a flightcase with piano wire for live gigs. But the Pismo (with an external Logitech Marble Mouse) is cool as well, especially since MacOS 9.1 is remarkably free from clutter and feature-creep compared to System 7.
My next PowerBook will probably be a second-hand G5 (the transparent one that glows in the dark).
I never thought I would be using Apple products this late in the game. It used to be overpriced and sometimes underpowered. It was a pain in the ass most times. But what it did it did well. I loved them, but it was hard to do. The company was run by both jagoffs and hippy jagoffs, and it seemed like all they were good for was creating great technology and never supporting it, backing it or implementing it to any practical degree (if you remember the features added and removed between system 7.1 and say... 8.1 you will know exactly what I am talking about) and everything was too expensive. Though since one of the hats I wore was the art/publishing director for a friend's wee company. I also always had at least one up and running.
Then I was gifted with a 500Mhz Ti PowerBook (long story, yes i am a lucky bastard)
Imagine my surprise that it's 2001 and I actually spending more time on my PowerBook then any of my other boxes, yes including my beloved Mandrake rocketbox which has all my terabytes (sarcasm) of of mp3s (and pr0n).
Out of the box since last May and running OS 9.1 this little gem had single handedly replaced the beige G3 I was running and I get to take it and work home with me. Yeah I wound up replacing some SCSI hardware with firewire, but it wasn't like I had huge raid cabinet running, just the odd scanner and oddball peripheri (anyone interested in a couple of SyQuest 44 and 88s?).
That alone is enough for me to give Apple the big nod. But ever since I installed OS 10.1 I have actually felt giddy about an OS in a way I have not felt since I first installed Red Hat on a whim back in 1995. I am having fun again... it is cool to hack on this little bastard. I really never messed with or concerned myself with BSD before, honestly, but shit it's like talking to a Canadian, it's not all that hard. I installed MySql today on it tonight, you wanna know why? Cause I could. I wanted to mess around with it on the train tomorrow. When was the last time you felt like that? I never feel that way with Linux anymore (it's just a good solid tool now, I take it for granted). I hardly ever boot the Win2K box, (I find it is more "secure" that way) unless I want to play Arcanum or something MS specific. But who needs games when you have grep?
This wee little PowerBook along with OS 10.1 really kicks my ass. Now I find myself doing the unthinkable and looking into G4 towers, but I think I am going to wait for the G5 since Apple seems to be pumping out new models every six to eight months. Get one of them DVD burners and transfer all my pr0n (I mean MP3s) off the drives.
I just don't understand why they were called PowerBooks back when they still ran with m68k processors and not the 601 etc. PowerPC processors...
This is worth a look-see for sure... pre-PB Macportables. Who'd've thought...
In related news: It is today ten years ago Microsoft began surviving another ten years. Yes, they're not the most impressive company around -- but they're the most impressive company to bear the name Microsoft. Hang on.. more breaking news coming in as we speak.. oh yes: the same goes for every other company in the world older or as old as ten years. Ain't this just amazing?
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
In Japan, there are favorite PowerBook series.
:-)
But, Japanese (Macintosh's fan) people say: "We want compact, and light size PowerBooks."
I want(to cute) it,too...
Happy birthday PowerBook !!
# I can write/speak English a little, sorry.
---- SORAMINE Yukino
Laptops, much more so than desktops, seem a place where Apple should invite third party hardware. Just imagine what Sony could do in terms of portable hardware.
You like 10.1? You used to use Red Hat? You sound like you like package management! Check out Fink at http://fink.sourceforge.net. Its a package manager for OS X and uses some debian tools like apt-get.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
just to tell you one good use of NetBSD
one of the largest (if not the largest) net BBS in the UK uses NetBSD on a lot of it's machines. it performs very well. they also use OpenBSD on some too i think, running on Sparc and X86 hardware.
that there is some big secret apple product announcement this week.
Hmm. Sounds like some sort of home CD/MP3 Player device.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
That's not to say there weren't problems. I was working as a service technician when the 5300 series machines were released. We literally had people bringing the computers to us in bags to keep all the parts together...it really was ugly. More people swore to me that they'd never buy another Mac again because of their experience with PowerBook 5300 than because of anything else Apple ever did -- except for maybe some of the Performas...
The first time I used wireless ethernet was on a PowerBook back in 1995 or 1996. The device had an enormous Motorola 68040 processor in it, the same processor as in the PowerBook it was connected to.
Here are my nominations for notable PowerBooks:
Best Screens: PowerBook 170 (incredible 1-bit active matrix display -- yeah, only 1-bit but it was still incredible.) PowerBook G4 for its ultrathin widescreen.
Best Performance: PowerBook G4, PowerBook G3 series, and PowerBook 3400c/240. The G4 and G3 paralleled performance of the reigning Mac desktops when they were released. The 3400 had a fast processor, but also had fast video for the first time in a PowerBook.
Best Size: iBook, Duo series. The first of the Duo series weighed just 4.2 pounds back in 1994(?).
Best Battery: PowerBook 170. You could turn off the backlight and run the thing literally all day.
Most Versatile: PowerBook G3 series. They had expansion bays, PC card slots with CardBus, SCSI, serial, infrared, stereo sound in/out, VGA out, analog video out, serial, built in microphone, ADB, ethernet, upgradeable processor, two RAM slots, built in modem, optional DVD, and even third party PCI expansion chassis. Later models switched to FireWire and USB over SCSI serial and ADB.
Worst PowerBook Ever: 5300 series. Parts (including the entire screen) would snap off randomly, numerous other hardware defects, slow, prone to crashing, no ethernet, spartan set of features, and expensive at any price! I think thousands of them were finally just ground up -- they were sent back to Apple and never reappeared.
Heaviest PowerBook: Macintosh Portable. Yeah, I know it's not a PowerBook, but it was so heavy I have to include it somewhere. It used enormous lead acid batteries! It also had funky rhombal shaped 3MB memory upgrade cards.
Best PowerBook ever: ??? suggestions ???
I've owned at least the following PowerBooks over the years: 140, (three) 170s, (three) Duo 210, Duo 2300, (two) 165c,(two) 180c, 520c, (two) G3 Wallstreet, 3400/240, iBook 2001 -- but I could be forgetting a few. The 170s and G3s were my favorites.
It's been a fascinating ten years.
How is it that the consumer continues to buy PCs ? I mean, when the US auto industry produced crap products it didn't take us long to switch to the superior Japanese product. And now the US auto manufactures have raised their game to compete.
So what is it that makes PCs so different ? I used to think it was the software, but Word and IE are available for Macs. There must be some other reason. I cannot for the life of me work out what that reason is.
The world would be a better place if we switched to macs (or even Linux at least that doesn't crash every five minutes like Windoze!)
I know this is a little offtopic, but other big news are: Today, Apple will bring out a new device that is not a Mac and that it calls "ground-braking". Every Mac Newssite is talking about it: MacOSRumors, Go2Mac, MacEdition, MacNN.
I would be very interested what Slashdot readers' guesses would be what it is.
BSD... it's like talking to a Canadian, it's not all that hard
I think it was also the only PB to ever use a lead-acid battery, seeing how the technology has changed with batteries is one of the uncelebrated but very important parts of the portable revolution. I look forward to when they have proton-polymer batteries out, which allow super fast charging. The more power available, the more cool stuff can be run in there.
you bit the troll... :P ... cause that what it is, just another troll... a bit less used than the standard BSD is dying troll, but still quite common... strange nonne has moded it down yet...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Never judge a book by its cover
m l
:P
According to this Apple still havent innovated anything in 10yrs !
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/22239.ht
oh except how to sell the same old stuff repackaged
The Powerbook wasn't the first Mac OS laptop to feature an incredible design. Take a look at this machine
ummm - OSX uses GCC for it's compiler suite - you don't get much more open source than that, no?
I'm reading plenty of people bashing the 5300, and rightfully so. But, IMHO, Apple also blew it with the initial release of the 1400.
:-) But while it was new, all that wasn't exactly advertised by Apple and most consumers didn't know all that.]
When the 1400 first hit the streets I was working selling Macs, and many shoppers had lost faith in Apple products after the 5300 and the release of the monstrosity that was MacOS 7.5 ("An error of Type 11 has just occurred. Please reboot, scream, and curl up under your desk in the fetal position"). The place I worked in sold both WinTel and Mac products, and the Mac area was and still is a major portion of the store and does brisk business. But it made being a "Fruit Head" that much harder when you had a new version of the OS that sucked, and laptops that were rumored to catch fire (though I never actually saw that one had burst into flames, I do remember seeing one seriously melted on the bottom of the case).
Yes, the 1400 looked great, it was light (compared to the 5300) and it had a newer 603e chip. But there was short supply, and they shipped with comparatively little as far as hardware and software. I mean, lets face it, even back then shipping a laptop with only 8 megabytes of RAM was a mistake. Also, I don't think it was wise of Apple to have one model which shipped without the level 2 cache (1400cs). What I saw happening was people simply buying the lesser expensive model (I don't remember the exact MSRP but it was sub US$2000) not understanding what an L2 Cache would do for them as far as performance, and then getting fed up with it and returning it for a WinTel model. As a matter of fact, there was a major sale made in which a large Vulture Capitalist firm had purchased 60 or so 1400cs's from some on line vendor, found them to be painfully slow and crashed often (MacOS 7.5.3, I believe... also painful) and returned the lot. They then came into our store and bought all we had of a WinTel model.
Apple lost quite a bit of the mobile computing market with the 5300 series, sure, and it has come a long way. But I don't think the 1400 series helped.
[additional: Yes yes yes, I know it was upgradable and I know it could even be upped to a G3
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Having just made the switch from a new iBook 500 (640mb of ram) to a G4 500 with 384 of ram . . I can tell you that the speed difference OS X is nothing short of amazing. (under 10.1 - build 5L14).
While the iBook's screen is brighter . . the fact that it doesn't have dual monitor support was pretty depressing. (the powerbook's dual monitor shit is great . . effortless even - just plug in a monitor and go, no extra setup required.)
And having used powerbook for about a week now . . I must say that that it is just as sturdy . . and doesn't seem to weigh anymore (my feel for it) than my iBook.
The iBook is a wonderful machine . . don't get me wrong . . but the speed difference is VERY apparent.
Check out this link: SpyMac. It's a preview of Apple's upcoming PDA, the iWalk, featuring "a scaled down version of Mac OS X". The picture is supposed to be real, but personally I think it looks more like a LightWave rendering or something... Judge for yourself!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I had an iBook 500 with 384 of RAM yesterday on my workbench, and I was working on my TiBook, both were in 10.1 and wow, the G4/400 is quite a bit faster in OS X than the G3/500.
The iBook does have a much brighter screen, but I love the TiBook.
My first Apple laptop was the iBook 300 (Tangerine) and that little guy is a tank.
I really never messed with or concerned myself with BSD before, honestly, but shit it's like talking to a Canadian, it's not all
that hard.
May I sig that?? Please.
Jeff
I must say I am amazed that the unbelievably useful "Location Manager" which has been around for years on MacOS hasn't been more widely adopted in other operating systems. For those not familiar with LM, it is a way of changing wholesale system preferences (notably TCP/IP) so you have have your "home" location, "office" , "travelling", "Stanford DHCP", whatever, so wherever you are, it quickly puts the appropriately-remembered IP info into use. Maybe it is buried in Windows somewhere, but I know too many people who use Windows who type in their IP address, DNS servers, etc by hand when they are visiting another building or whatnot for it to be in common use. Under Linux, there is some facility under netcfg to remember different locations but it is primitive compared to what has been in MacOS since 7.something. And the OS X implementation "Network" system info panel is a nice evolution of the location manager. I've been using LM on Powerbooks since my Duo 230 (which was a long time ago) and can't imagine life without it- I think I got up to more than 35 locations on my original Powerbook G3.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Occasionally I still pull it out. Iteven still has a couple of files I need (Including the recipe for the best stout I've ever tasted [and the same goes for the judges at that contest
hawk
> cheaper and superior hardware -- that's why the clones were killed.
The problem went deeper than that. Apple was doing all the R&D, and the clone makers got a free ride. Their royalties were based on the low end machines, yet they were shipping the higher end machines that paid for the R&D. Apple didn't so much kill the clones as inform the manufacturors that the royalties were going to start reflecting the costs involved--which made making the clones unattractive.
hawk
I had a seven disk boot set. The first disk was a mofified Norton (symantec?) resuce disck which loaded a dearchiver, put a system onto the ram disk, and installed word 4 and excel 3.
Fortunately, I had 14mb of ram n that thing.
Now it sits in my attic in pieces. I should have taken the $400 I was offered for it; I never did put it back togeather . . .
hawk
The very first computer that I owned was the Powerbook 100. The PB100 was manufactured for Apple by Sony and it was essentially a shrunk down Mac Portable, which is why it can run System 6.
:)
I bought it the first weekend in September, 1992. Apple was having a fire-sale, trying to unload them, and I got mine for $700.00. The unit came with 2MB of Ram, a 20MB hard drive, and an external floppy drive. The included system software was System 7.0.1, if memory serves. I later upgraded the computer to 8MB of RAM.
Although its 16Mhz 68000 was underpowered, it run Hypercard and Prince of Persia very well. It could also retain the contents of it's Ramdisk, which allowed me to boot from the Ramdisk if I chose to.
I heartily agree with this. Since I got my iBook 2001, I take it around to all my client sites and pop on their respective networks within minutes of walking in the door. It's also handy at home and in the office, when I switch back and forth from my wired connections to AirPort. The only thing I have to do manually is power on/off the AirPort card. Someone did try making a Location Manager module to automate that as well, but it gave me problems.
:-)
Perhaps the nicest thing about Location Manager, though, were the reactions I got while demonstrating it to my Windows-using co-workers: "That's it, you just pick it from the menu and you're done? You mean you don't even need to reboot? And this was included free with the OS?"
Maybe one day Bill will learn to bundle USEFUL stuff with his OSes, instead of welding in [cough, cough] "killer apps" like instant messaging.
~Philly
No, Open Standards don't always win. Granted, the Mac OS has a very small share of the market -- somewhere around that of Linux and other Unix variants combined. Open Standard Linux and BSD have not made a significant dent in the Closed (and Highly Protected) Standard world owned by Microsoft. Apple remains a significant force in the personal computer industry. Without them,who would Microsoft, Dell, Compaq, et al get their new ideas from. ;-)
Anne
3rd. Ti/500/512MB/20GB/Airport and OS X.1 :-P
Yeah, I use OS X... so sue me.
According to the latest sales figures from Apple (released in their quarterly financial results last week) notebook sales now represent close to 40% of their hardware sales. Think about that -- 40% -- that's a BIG chunk compared to what it was just a few years ago. There are lots of laptops out there, but only one PowerBook -- I can't count how many times I see people with old, beat up PowerBooks in cafes, parks, etc. People love those machines, and with good reason. I recently picked up a dual-usb iBook, and couldn't be more pleased. It's one hell of a fun machine. I loaded up 10.1, PHP, MySQL, and use it as a test / play machine for my web development work. And when I'm not using it, my wife is playing M.A.M.E. Ahhh.... the bliss. :)
Remember how laptops had the keyboard flush with the front of the laptop, until the Powerbook was released?
Everyone said "Duh! That makes so much sense!"-- it was a much better design to have a place to rest your hands while typing, but it took Apple to see it.
That's the kind of engineering detail that keeps Apple ahead of the game. Let's hope they can keep it up!
That's definitely worth remembering for later!
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
In one case, Location Manager does require a reboot- when you associate Extensions Manager profiles with different locations; but not otherwise, you can swap all your TCP/IP settings, date/time and other crap without bothering.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
The 2400c! What a great machine. A vanguard sub-notebook. Still one of the greatest user experiences ever. The "mini cooper" of portable computers.
Parlez-Vous Français? (Quebecois)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I've had my PowerBook G3 (Bronze) for nearly 2 years and I love it. Even though it's not as thin as the new G4s, it's still pretty thin and has a much nicer form factor than most Intel laptops. I also like that I can run with dual batteries and get about 7 hours out of it, which I'm thankful for on transcontinental flights. And, let's face it: any computer in a black case is cool. :-)
I got it specifically to do Unix software development on, so I've been running Yellow Dog Linux on it and it works very well, even sleep works. I hang out in a cafe doing development while accessing mail via my wireless PCMCIA card. It's pretty sweet.
I'm running OS X on my desktop machine and still haven't decided whether I should switch the laptop to OS X or not. Probably not for a while. OS X is still much more of a memory pig.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
When you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
My first PowerBook was PB160. I loved that thing and used it as my main machine for years. In that time I upgraded it with a 180 daughter board, thus jacking it up to a whopping 33Mhz from 25! I found an illusive 56k modem built for it, jacked up the ram and started collecting dead PowerBooks for parts. I had a 150, two 160s, a 180 and a 165c. During that time, I saw many PowerBooks come and go but never could justify spending the money for a machine that was basically, a slower under featured version of the current desktops. This was also a "gray area" for Apple and a time where they didn't make their best machines. So, I ended up building a Desktop out of 7500 parts that I still use today for a server and giving my 160 to a friend.
Work loaned me an ibook 466s for about a year and was almost tempted to get one even though they were missing many features I wanted. Then I saw the new ibook...
This was the machine I have been waiting for all of my life!
Small: like the DUO, it is easy to get around with and not as bulky as the Ti-book.
Light: I laugh at my Girlfriend's Dell Inspiron 7000 on a daily basis.
Solid: Like the 5xx series, this thing feels like a tank.
10x7 screen - This is a must!
Fast: 500Mhz G3 is plenty fast enough for almost anything
Firewire, USB, Video out, RGB out, Ethernet, CDRW, DVD...
Airport: - You'll NEVER go back.
And it's just damn cool looking.
Sure you can knock it for its small 10GB HD but you can put a bigger one in yourself and new versions have bigger drives. The screen is small but I want a small machine so...
The point to all of this is that Apple, IMHO, has created the best Notebook EVER. This thing is the greatest.
BUT...
Mac reboots are still slow as molasses. As bad as or worse than win. Maybe OS X.1 fixes this?
sulli
RTFJ.
20 years
> I have to admit that I've had the fewest problems
I used to work for a VAR that serviced Mac's and the local telco used 5300's for their people.... There was a "little" problem with heat. I ended up changing so many mother boards on the 5300's, that my best time from battery out, swap board, and first chimes was sub 7 minutes......
"This laptop will self destruct, well, when ever it feels like it" - my version of Mission Impossible
Of course, Be my guest.
- motherhead
(okay great, first i wanted to post the as an AC because it was incidental, now i have to avoid the lameness filter...
okay a joke.
What's the difference between the Taliban and Christmas?
Christmas will be here in December.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen, good night and enjoy the rest of the show.)
He said canadian, not some french faggot.
MacOS networking is terrible. Ever try to get multiple network interfaces working at the same time using the built-in software?
But I do agree that the location manager isn't that bad..
Two NICs? Nope.
However, I consider that to be really only a server/gateway router issue. Any Mac servers with multiple network segments these days I would expect to be running OS X, which has the same routing as other BSDs do. And I'd never waste a Mac on a gateway router.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I installed MySql [entropy.ch] today on it tonight, you wanna know why? Cause I could.
The official mysql.com site now provides binaries for Mac OS X as well.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Well, not having support for multiple network cards makes using Airport annoying. It would be a lot nicer if I didn't have to enable airport, select a network, and then use location manager to tell it to use the airport for my tcp/ip settings.
Too many steps, and it isn't like I can just type the commands out which would take a matter of seconds.. all the clicking involved turns a simple matter into minutes
True and thanks for the heads up. but again check out my link and get support for 10.1, explanations on the differences between Apple's Included Apache and PHP modules and other builds, as well as support for upgrading from 10.0.x. For OS 10.1 fans that are a bit iffy with BSD, this guy is a geek deity.
I bought a used Asante Mini EN/SC (SCSI-Ethernet adapter) just for the heck of it, and now I can put my PB100 on my cable modem.
It'll run AOL 2.7 and an old version of Eudora (with the chicken icons) for email, and it'll run MacWeb 1.0x for extremely limited websurfing (no inline JPGs, b/w inline GIFs and no tables!).
But it runs!
It also runs Word 5 and Excel 4, including the Solver add-in.
Great little machine! Except for the impossible-to-find Pb-Acid batteries.
Never refuse a breath mint.
Both AirPort and Location Manager have AppleScript support. Write an AppleScript. Hell, compile it & save it in your Speakable Items folder, and switch by talking, forget the mouse... ;)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Sounds interesting, I would need to learn applescript though ;) Maybe there are some mac-perl modules ;P
AppleScript is incredibly easy. If you can learn Perl in a week, you can learn AppleScript in... well, five minutes. :)
These are your basic references, in order:
AppleScript isn't as powerful as Perl in some ways, but it's vastly easier to use & it integrates into the GUI much, much better.
You need a program called the Script Editor. It might not be on your HD yet, but it will be on your MacOS install disks.
I'll even give you some sample code. Here ya go, this is what AS looks like; you can even cut and paste this into Script Editor, it should work. I give you this one because it's one of the few I have that doesn't use any OSAXen; it's all done through the scriptable Finder, so all you need is OS 9.
to ProcessFile(fileRef)tell application "Finder"
set currentName to the name of fileRef
set extension to the last text item of currentName
if extension is "html" or extension is "htm" then
set creator type of fileRef to "DmWr"
set file type of fileRef to "TEXT"
else if extension is "smil" then
set creator type of fileRef to "TVOD"
set file type of fileRef to ".SMI"
else if extension is "gif" then
set creator type of fileRef to "ogle"
set file type of fileRef to "GIFf"
else if extension is "jpg" then
set creator type of fileRef to "ogle"
set file type of fileRef to "JPEG"
else if extension is "c" or extension is "h" or extension is "cpp" then
set creator type of fileRef to "MPS "
set file type of fileRef to "TEXT"
end if
end tell
end ProcessFile
to ProcessFolder(folderRef)
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "."
tell application "Finder"
if (count of items of folderRef) is greater than 0 then
set fileNo to count of files of folderRef
set speechString to "Processing " & (fileNo) & " file"
if fileNo is not equal to 1 then
set speechString to speechString & "s"
end if
set folderNo to count of folders of folderRef
if folderNo is not equal to 0 then
set speechString to speechString & " and " & (folderNo) & " folder"
if folderNo is not equal to 1 then
set speechString to speechString & "s"
end if
end if
set speechString to speechString & " in folder " & name of folderRef
say speechString
set x to 1
repeat while x is less than or equal to the (count of folders of folderRef)
my ProcessFolder(folder x of folderRef)
say "Returning to " & name of folderRef
set x to x + 1
end repeat
set x to 1
repeat while x is less than or equal to the (count of files of folderRef)
set currentFile to file x of folderRef
my ProcessFile(currentFile)
set x to x + 1
end repeat
else
say "Skipping empty folder " & name of folderRef
end if
end tell
end ProcessFolder
set x to 1
set currentSelection to selection of application "Finder"
if (count of items of currentSelection) is 0 then
say "I have nothing to clean up."
else
repeat while x is less than or equal to the (count of items of currentSelection)
set currentItem to item x of currentSelection
if folder of (info for currentItem) then
ProcessFolder(currentItem)
else
ProcessFile(currentItem)
end if
set x to x + 1
end repeat
say "Cleanup file types done."
end if
What the previous batch of code does is ask Finder for its currently selected items, and then, for each of them, if it's a folder, it recursively processes every item in the folder, and checks its unix-style file extension. If the file extension matches one item in a list, then it changes the file's creator and document type codes. Specifically, it hands over all html files to DreamWeaver, C source to Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, and SMIL, GIF, and JPEG files to QuickTime. It executes rather slowly, but I don't need to run it very often. I compiled it to an applet, and have it in my Speakable Items folder.
It's a little buggy. It doesn't seem to work right when the currently selected items are files (well, it doesn't do anything at all). I don't know why, I haven't cared enough to fix it. :)
Most of my AppleScript links either to MacAST or to the QuickTime Player. Unfortunately, AppleScript has to be implemented at the application end, unlike Perl which can interface through pipes to most anything text-based. However, this makes it more powerful in some ways: AppleScript works exclusively by sending events, so it can do things that normally would require the user to click buttons, hard to do in Perl (although I think there's an AppleEvents module in MacPerl, which would be more flexible than AppleScript; all my Perl work I do on my *nix box so I don't know :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
T'es con,toi.