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Do Apple iBooks Make Good Geek Laptops?
Curious Geek asks: "I'm in the market for a good, cheap laptop. Primarily I'm looking for something that is relatively rugged, has a LONG batter life, and that is *nix friendly. I'd primarily use it for Perl, PHP and Java coding either on client sites, in front of the TV, or on the train. It would also be nice if I could run dummy websites from it and let it take care of customer invoicing (again, this is all going to be Perl/PHP/Apache stuff)
At the moment, the best bet looks like an apple iBook, it has a 5 hour battery life, ships with OS X (although I could use mac linux or YDL) and is rugged enough that loads of spotty yoofs have been given them at school. It also has the ability to house an internal wireless LAN card, which is pretty groovy. Can anybody recommend anything better? My price range is limited ~$1400 USD. I know that for that price I could get an X86 laptop - but do any of these have a battery life as good as the iBook?"
I use my iBook2 a lot, running Linux. I carry it around lots of places. It is lite, durable, QUIET! (no fan, and a quiet drive); in short a very good geek computer for a low budget.
You could pick the older model up (say 500 Mhz, ATI Rage Pro; not Radeon) for a decent price, I bet. I bought a carry sleeve from Waterfield Designs (www.sfbags.com) that keeps it very safe in my backpack. I find it feels a bit more rugged than the HP or Compaqs in a similar price range (but less than the heavier Thinkpads, which I used to have)
OSX, formatted with HFS+, I hear is pretty fast if you get the latest versions (online update). I use Debian Linux on it, and am not lacking any features (plus I get ext3, which is fast and I can just poweroff in a pinch)
Battery is okay, but only if you turn down the screen brightness, and make some tunings to the drive spin down (under Linux, probably is better under OS X on batteries). I can get four hours out of it fairly easy.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
The iBook has a few nice features, but lacks a little oomph. I wouldn't consider them as useful as an X86 laptop of the same price.
However, the Powerbooks are really quite nice. They are fast enough to run most useful programs, have good styling, are rugged, get good battery life, and generally are a seamless computer solution. An out-of-box Powerbook is a computer that you can use and not worry too much about whether it will work when you push the power button. I've found that Powerbooks are pretty bug-free on hibernate and suspend, something I haven't found in an X86 yet. It's nice to be able to close the computer, pick it up, and go. Open it again, and no bluescreen.
If you are going for cheap, I think you'd get more bang for your buck out of an X86. If you are willing to spend extra, the Powerbook's extra features are well worth it.
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They tend to be troublesome with support. I came from the x86 world and jumped into a wallstreet g3 powerbook. After installing various forms of linux and bsd onto it I discovered the openfirmware version so old I would not be able to use some of the nicer booters. Add into that a host of other hardware problems and i've found myself serverly dischanted.
What enchanted me was the support services that apple has avaiable if you can get to them. My case and point: The holly service manaul
What a great thing! This little manaual not only told me of the two little release buttons that gave access to most everything one would have to upgrade or replace (modem, memeory, hd, even the CPU). But also told me how to dig even deeper while making sure I didn't make obvious mistakes (don't press here you will break a tab).
The trouble with the service manauls is the access. Apple seems to only want service centers to have access, so you end up having to dig around for a long time on their ftp sites in order to get them. Perhaps the idea is if you can't find the service manaul on a resonably oganized ftp site then perhaps you shouldn't be ripping into a laptop anytime soon.
The rest of apple support kinda stinks (IMHO) however. Hardware problems such as mine where difficult to pin point. The people I talked to for support spent a large amount of time working with me to find if the problem was software or hardware related. And when we did discover hardware related troubles they where reluctant to alow me to preform the work myself asking me to send in my machine to a service center.
Bottom line: the little machines are some of the best laptops out there. With great aftermarket support and fairly good apple service I would feel fine dumping 2 grand into a new one if I had it. In a perfect world I would ask for more nerd support, but hey if your gearing your company towards other things perhaps you don't have time to listen to a nerd.
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service manual depo: http://home.wanadoo.nl/manual.man/manuals.html
I also have a toshiba notebook running linux, and with the iBook on my lap sitting on the couch I can hear the toshiba's cooling fan start up from 4 metres away. The iBook is quiet as a mouse.
It's funny, when I got the toshiba/Redhat system I used it all the time, but now there's simply no point anymore. I use it for the parallel port and that's it.
OK, compare the following features:
There are a bajillion other little things that make the iBook better than anything else on the market (except perhaps the TiBook), and they all add up. Honestly, once you've started using OS X everything else feels like it's stuck in the 80's, including the winNT/98/2k machines I have to work on 8 hours a day.
Hope this helps!
I am artificially intelligent.
We have two iBooks in the "Casa de Officemonkey" and we've been very happy with them.
Hardware
Mrs. Officemonkey runs an older clamshell tangerine iBook running Mac OS 9.2. Her battery is good for ~4 hours per charge.
I have a newish iBook (tail end of 2001) in the snowcase. Sadly my battery is good for only 3.5 hours. It runs Mac OS X and does most of what you're asking about.
We both use Airport to connect to a base station that is hooked up to our DSL modem. The chargers for the iBooks are "Yo-Yo's", so the cords wrap up pretty neatly. I'm told the new chargers are even more compact.
I have big ham fingers, but I like the keyboard on my iBook. My keyboard features an inverted-T cursor pad on the right-hand side which also maps to pgup, pgdn, home, and end.
My iBook is smaller, slimmer, and lighter compared to my 2-year old Compaq Armada laptop, but the iBook doesn't have a floppy drive, infrared port, or card slots. It also gets pretty durned hot.
The one-button trackpad has my vote for the lamest Apple feature holdout. I'd also like a bigger screen, but I was cheap (I bought the system on clearance for $999).
All in all, I like the new iBook's hardware as much, or better than any laptop I've ever used. It reminds me of my Palm V.
Software
If you're interested in web development, Mac OS X is a good platform, but there are a few caveats...
Mark Liyanage packages PHP and MySQL, and Fink does a really good job of making a whole lot of *nix-y things available in Debian-like packages. Between these two sites you should be able to equip your iBook with the necessary tools.
Also, Mac OS X has some unusual directory conventions and the Apache configuration file is a little non-standard. The usual caveats about mucking with the configuration file apply, but if you're a novice with Apache, you'll have a steeper learning curve.
I think BBEdit is the best text editor for the mac. I use it to write HTML and Python scripts. It checks and colorizes syntax and you can use regular expressions for search and replace. I'm usually quite cheap about commercial software, but BBEdit is worth buying.
Mail.app does a good job with e-mail and if you're on a low-Microsoft diet, you can dump Internet Explorer and download Mozilla or OmniWeb. Appleworks (which comes with the iBook) is a 'good enough' office suite and my experience with the demo of Microsoft Office is that it is very very good (but not necessary for my home machine thanks to having a Wintel machine at work).
Don't worry about file formats between platforms. Virtually all software that runs on both Mac OS and Windows will use the same file format. The only notable exception is the line-endings on text files (I eliminated the problem by changing the default options in BBEdit).
Mac OS X application development is taking off and you can run most of the command-line tools you're used to. You can also install the X Windows System and run the Gimp, Xemacs, or whatever.
The Verdict
Even if you get a low-end iBook, you'll get the second-most happening *nix on the planet, solid hardware, and good battery life. Everything works right out of the box and, feature for feature, the iBook is comparable in price to other major manufactuers.
My father is a blogger.
I have a 500 MHz iBook, and the thing zips - its all about how you set it up and care for it. If your a geek, you will tweak OS X to do your bidding, which with each update gets faster and faster (with a huge speed bump comming with Jaguar). Also, the current lineup has a faster bus and faster processors which really add to zippyness (the 600MHz/100bus models are up to 30% faster than the 500's). RAM is yet another issue - more = faster (duh).
Overall I have had my iBook for a little more than a year and I forsee another 2-3 years of solid performance before I need to upgrade it. It was worth every penny!
Sound waves should be free!
I've owned my Powerbook G4 667MHz since November 2001. In March 2002, the paint on the unit began to bubble and flake-off.....like Herpes vesicles. The machine also began to generate a lot more heat than it did upon purchase. The battery life dwindled from a typical 3 hours down to 1.25 hours on a full-charge. The Powerbook's fan was always on. This was unacceptable for a $3200 laptop.
It took me a month of arguing with Apple and documenting my problem with photos before they would replace my defective unit. They denied any knowledge of widespread paint/durability problems, despite the existence of companies like TiPaint.com that sell touch-up paint for the Tibook. Touch-up paint for a laptop?!? That's absurd. Anyhow, my unit went in for a massive overhaul. They essentially gutted my machine and placed it in a new case, replaced the battery, fan and logic board. It took several weeks, since the critical parts were back-ordered (signs of a more widespread problem). I really wanted a replacement because my unit was a lemon. Instead, they "repair" it.... and create more problems. The paint is beginning to flake again, and I have reason to believe that the processor is not attached to the heatsink (constant fan, paint falling off, poor heat dissipation).
Problem is, us Mac users are SO dependent upon our machines for our respective livelihoods, that being without our computer for another repair of indefinite-length is killer. Having to fight with Apple to even get to the repair stage is a big enough deterrent for most users, reducing us to using crippled machines out of desperation.... If y'all haven't seen the infamous TiBook paint photos, hit up:
http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/p/photo.php?dir=Defectiv e_Powerbook
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
This is the sound of the buzzer.
All machines that can currently run OS X will be able to run 10.2/Jaguar.
ALL. NOT SOME, ALL.
Quartz Extreme will be available to those with AGP graphics hardware with at least 16 MB of RAM, but not meeting those requirements WILL NOT prevent you from using 10.2. If you do meet the requirements, you'll be rewarded with even better performance, but even without that, performance is likely to increase (from reports around the Mac community, from Jaguar users, anyway).
-/-
Mikey-San
Apple Authorized Service Lackey
"Moof!"
Mikey-San
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