Do Apple iBooks Make Good Geek Laptops?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday June 26, 2002 @11:36AM from the slashdot-opinions-solicited dept.

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?"

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Kinda slow.. by Tom7 · 2002-06-26 11:47 · Score: 1, Redundant

My friend has an iBook and I found it to be pretty slow. I didn't run any benchmarks or anything, but it definitely "felt" slower than my 400mhz celeron vaio in OSX, and that thing cost only $1200 three years ago!

Also, ask around to see what the actual battery life of any laptop you buy is. The advertised times are sometimes measured under pretty unlikely circumstances..