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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 bought a G4 TiBook a few months back for similar reasons. I'm a UNIX guy who occassionally does some stuff in Dreamweaver or Photoshop.
A G4 and MacOS/X have served me well. I would suspect that an iBook will serve you equally well (the 12" version is heavily used by some road warrior journalists I use, they love the battery life, size and ease of use).
Oh, and MacOS/X has Perl, PHP and Apache already installed...which is kinda nice (although many will install later versions themselves, I'm sure).
Enjoy.
-psyconaut
P.S: Previously I had a Sony VAIO XG-19...which was rather expensive and elaborate at the time of purchase. I'd say I like the Powerbook more.
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.
...
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.
z.
service manual depo: http://home.wanadoo.nl/manual.man/manuals.html
Personally, I'm addicted to using three mouse buttons. The middle button opens links in new windows, pastes the copy buffer, and so forth.
Do any laptops come with three mouse buttons?
Are the Apple laptops stuck with only one button like their desktop mice?
I've got the iBook 600 (384/20G/12.1/DVD-CDRW/Airport), and I would definitely recommended one of these for what you want. When I initially bought mine, I got it for mainly the same reasons: small and light, rugged, plenty of features. I was also interested in OS X, but not ready to commit--the fact that I could use Debian was the only thing that cinched the purchase for me. When I received it, I reformatted, installing Debian alongside OS 9 and OS X. For the first couple months or so, I used Linux quite a bit, but recently, I reformatted and went all OS X. This is because OS X is fast and stable enough now, and any software I ever used on Linux could be used, all in a much nicer GUI than Linux ever saw. Obviously, the iBook isn't for everyone, but your needs sound rather similar to mine, and I have been nothing but happy with my iBook in the 4 months or so that I've owned it.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Thats right, but why would you want a PCMCIA slot? Everything I ever used in one--ethernet, modem,firewire card--is built-in to the iBook. I can see there being other things but I gather the people concerned with such obscure items aren't the ones the iBook is designed for.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Fairly simple, eh?
Oh, go ahead and patronize me.
The reason for my confusion was the fact that he made as many references to OS X as he did. The first one was talking about the speed with formatting the drive as HFS+. I assumed that he was advocating OS X as the primary operating system. Then later he talked about running Debian as the primary. Hence the confusion.
I assume you mean dual-boot
No, I actually meant multi-boot. No reason to restrict him to only two OSes. Especially considering that OS X and OS 9 can be booted separately on most machines.
Itronix GoBook Max
.if that doesn't just scream gimmegimmegimme, I don't know what does. Your nation might *need* you while you are on that train. You could be ready. ."
Field Pack
Both of these claim to have extreme battery life times and since they are marketed more towards military applications, they are pretty rugged. I mean, come on, check out Itronix's quote:
We have teamed with select systems integrators to enable you to deploy a solution right now for border security, first responder teams, bio-terrorism response teams, and network infrastructure.
. .
The FieldPac looks pretty tough, too. . . think about it, you are on that train and some thug demands your money and you can reach down, pat the case and say "Don't make me use this . .
Seriously though, the app type stuff you mentioned could probably be done on most any semi-recent laptop (P2-233 would probably suffice) and most of the consumer laptops are going to have fluff (like *sound* who needs *that*?) that could dimish your battery run time (somewhat). If you really want long battery life, hunt around in the gear aimed towards outdoors work (again though, they are probably outside the 1400 buck price range).
As for web development, I find OSX to be the perfect OS.
I can edit the source files in my perferred text editor (most *nix editors have been ported), then save it, and view it in Mozilla which invokes Apache, PHP, and MySQL (PostgreSQL also works) to serve the page.
I use a 400mhz G4 tower, which should be about as fast as the new iBooks. I find the speed more then adaquate. Photoshop even runs with all that server software running in the background.
If only the thing had 2 mouse buttons!!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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 guess mac users were never fans of upgradability anyway.
small, light, amazing battery life, awesome screen (1280x768), includes a cd-rw/dvd combo drive. check their website. slightly over your price range starting at around $1449 but worth it for a machine that'll you'll enjoy for several years.
this is one of the biggest geek drawback for apple laptops if you intend to be using X11 apps. to find out how annoying it is, map all of your current mouse buttons to button_1 and see how well you survive.
i sure wish apple would put 2 or 3 button pads on their laptops, they could leave them configured to all act as the same button for dummies by default.
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!
Or if Apple wants to be really clever, they could install three buttons, but have single piece of plastic over them. People like us could then replace the big button with three separate buttons and adjust the driver to distinguish between them.
I've never seen a three-button mouse on an x86 laptop. If someone made one, be it Apple, IBM, or Dell, they would find a burst of popularity from the Unix crowd.
Being tied down isn't the best solution. There's really no point to getting a laptop if you're going to have to plug it in all the time. Mobility is key.
Forget X11 -- MacOS has been a two button OS for years now, since contextual menus came out in, what was it, 8.0? I need to plug in a mouse to use Word or Excel comfortably. I don't understand how users live with the standard mice.
That said, I loooove my TiBook. OS X or Yellow Dog, it's the best Unix laptop I could have bought.
Girlfriend: Sometimes I think you love that computer more than me.
Dilbert: I do not love you more than this computer.
Dilbert thinks: Please don't ask me about the laptop.
Girlfriend: This computer...?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The lack of DB9 serial port kills the iBook for me, and you can't add one with the non-exsistant PCMCIA. I'm sure there's a USB dongle to DB9 serial that would work fine, but I'm too lazy to dink around.
Otherwise, a fine and well made laptop.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
This article from about two months ago, entitled "Comparative Laptop Reviews", may be of some help, although it's mainly focused on x86.
I needed this as well. My solution:
http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/pdaadapter
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Is plugging in a PC card really considered "upgrading"?
If it didn't come with the computer, it's an upgrade.
Personally, I don't think the lack of PCMCIA slots is a big deal on the iBook. The single mouse button is what keeps me away.
You can do that by substituting "Windows" for "Mac OS X." Like the other poster said, Mac OS X loves a lot of RAM. CPU speed isn't the issue here, the 128 MB of RAM is. Yeah, that sucks. But that's why it may feel slow. I can say that a lot of what I do feels a lot faster in Debian Woody on my iBook 500 than it did in Mac OS X. Not everything, though. However, I have 320 MB RAM which is plenty for OS X in my experience.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I bought an iBook about a month ago, have been using it extensively. I recommend it highly. Let me throw out two points which I haven't seen mentioned yet. First off, the battery not only lasts longer, it's just great. I used to have a sony picturebook. The small included battery lasted about 90 minutes; the double sized batteries lasted 180 or so. Since I often need rather long battery life, I would carry one small battery and two large ones with me. I can't count the number of times that I would realize my small battery was running out, reach into my bag for a large one, and realize... I have no idea which of the two identical batteries in there is charged, and which is flat. Apple fixed this; they just put a little button on the bottom of the battery. If you press it (when the computer is on, when the computer is off, when the battery is out of the computer... it doesn't matter), from zero to four green LED's light up, telling you the battery percentage. I now carry three batteries with me, which I have found is truly enough for 18 hours straight use, or almost a week at the level I use it... and telling how charged each of them is just works. Secondly, suspend works on the ibooks. Now, my picturebook of course had suspend, both to disk and to memory. But suspend to memory took noticeable time, and sometimes never revived properly (I think it had something to do with the phase of the moon). The iBook just works. As soon as the case is closed, it goes into memory suspend. You can tell immediately, if you're nervous, because the screen backlight (which you can see through the glowing apple) goes off. And the heartbeat white led starts blinking. When you wake it up, you do need to give it a signal... it doesn't detect case opening. But simply brushing the surface of the touchpad works. Also, if you hook up a usb keyboard or mouse, touching the mouse or using the keyboard will wake up the ibook while it's still closed, without turning on the backlight, so switching to an external monitor when you get home doesn't even require you to open the thing up. All that said, I do have two points of concern to point out. First off, the screen. It's beautiful. It's bright, colors are sharp, etc. Viewing angle is somewhat limitted, but no more than any other laptop I've seen. On the two iBooks I've bought in the past month (my mother got one, too), there has been exactly one bad pixel; a dead (black) pixel towards the bottom center of the screen. Clearly not a statistical sample, and of course single bad pixels are always possible, and there's no promise otherwise. But if this is something which tends to drive you mad ("No! It's not perfect!"), I highly recommend trying out any laptop in a store before you buy it. Try out the exact one you'll end up with. If the kind salesfolk won't let you open a box that you're almost certainly going to pay $1300 for, go somewhere else... As a side note, of the two iBooks I bought, the one from compUSA had the bad pixel, the one direct from apple was perfect. No idea if they give inferior ones to distributors and keep the best for themselves, but it's certainly not impossible. Again, insufficient data for a meaningful answer. Lastly, the iBook isn't fast. I got the lowest end model, 600MHz/128MB. 128MB isn't enough. Don't kid yourself. I upgraded to 640MB, and memory is no longer an issue, but it's still not a speedy machine. Some things are fast; scrolling, switching applications, rendering images. Some things are slow; menu access, opening applications, de-minimizing windows. And OSX is still not 100% flawless, either. I've had to relaunch the finder (equivalent to restarting the X server) twice now, and reboot the whole machine once. Keep in mind that I never restart the machine otherwise, since I just use suspend... but still, it clearly needs a bit more work. Will OS X 10.2 be it? I don't doubt it will help, but there's no denying that this is a young OS, especially compared to MacOS 9. Overall, then, I really think this is a great machine, especially at the price. It's not perfect, but all laptops have quirks. I find the quirks on this machine more pleasant than those on any other laptop I've ever owned.
I've had this sig for three days.
I use Linux on my iBook. With no external mouse. Yet, I get along fine. What is my secret? I have the right Command key mapped to the middle button, and the enter key by the arrow d-pad mapped to be the right mouse button. No problem there.
You can always use an external mouse too. I have a decent three button (no scroll-wheel, thank god) Sun mouse, but haven't bothered to figure out how to get it working in X. Haven't felt the need to find out.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
A year ago, I sold my PowerMac G4/400 Tower to buy an iBook 500.
;P
I love it. I can safely say that this is the most satisfying computer purchase I've ever made. Not that my other computers sucked, but it just rules.
Up until a month ago, I ran Mac OS X full-time. More and more, I've been using Squeak as my operating system rather than Mac OS X proper, with the exception of web-browsing which I do in OS X. I switched back to Linux so I could work on some aspects of Squeak more easily, and tie Squeak into my environment, long story.
I'm a veteran Linux user, dumping it a couple years back to switch to Mac OS X. I've switched back, and am doing fine. Linux still sucks in many of the ways I remembered, especially in the area of GUI consistency compared to OS X. But then again, I spend a lot of my time in Squeak, not with regular X apps so it doesn't bother me much.
I installed Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r6 on this puppy and the install went as smoothly as any x86 Linux install I've ever done (and I've done more than my fair share). I was surprised to find that out. A while back, I tried to install NetBSD, and it was a pain in the rump, so I was expecting something similar for Debian. Piece of cake. Upgraded to Woody without any problems.
I can even close the lid and have the 'book go to sleep, just like in OS 9 and X. It doesn't wake up as lightning fast as OS X does, but eh, I expected worse!
This machine is fast and durable. Incidentally, that's what I wanted from a computer. I'm sure you can get faster iBooks and PowerBooks and maybe even a faster PC notebook, but this does what I need and them some.
Sound still doesn't work, to my knowledge. This is a bummer, but not a huge deal.
I have my right command and enter keys mapped to do the job of my other mouse buttons. No, it's not a pain in the ass. Quite natural. I have a USB mouse, but haven't felt any need to figure out how to get it working in X11 yet. XFree runs fast enough, some room for graphics speed up though.
Don't see the big deal aobut a PCMCIA slot. This baby has everything I need on board, which IMO is a helluva lot better than to have to futz with PC cards. USB to serial adaptor works like a charm with the Newton.
Aaron
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
OSX runs like a snail on an iBook.
It's not fast, but usable on a TiBook, but i was shocked to see how poor performance was on a 600Mhz iBook.
Don't buy it unless you enjoy watching paint dry.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I'm typing this on a IBM T20 laptop with 3 buttons and a point stick.
The third button is mapped as , well, a third button, but when you click and drag vertically with it, it acts like a mouse wheel.
My Tadpole Sparkbook has one of those IBM keyboards with 3 buttons and a point stick as well.
yeah... running windows on a mac laptop is kinda slow... (WHAT?!)
seriously, it is. I'm installing some stuff on Win98 running under Virtual PC on my iBook right now (I need some Windows-only software for work). It is relatively slow.
Running mac apps it isn't so bad. I'm relatively happy with my iBook (600 w/640 megs of RAM), though I wish I had one of the newer ones with a better graphics chip. The things aren't the fastest machines in the world, but I like OS X, they are pretty well-built (at least compared to the last few Dell laptops I have used), and the battery life is quite good.
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
All Sony's new laptops have three buttons - well actually two and the scroll wheel which you can press in (acts as middle button).
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Look at the sig, lil man. It's a progrmaming and operating environment. Entirely in Smalltalk. Also runs on bare metal as an OS. I live out of Squeak like many hardcore elispers live out of emacs. Gives me complete control over my computing environment.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
RISC processing is going to change everything!
Patience is a virtue, but I don't have the time - TH
This has apparently been fixed in newer versions of the PowerBook. The problem doesn't appear if you use a case with some breathing room in it (that doesn't hug the PowerBook tightly). I thought the problem was nonsense until I decided to buy a chic new case for my PowerBook; the problem came up immediately and I switched back to my old, ugly case without further trouble.
I've found that simply raising my AirPort base station as high as I can get it (in my case, on top of my PowerMac G4, which sits on top of my desk) helped reception enormously.
I love my PowerBook G4/400, although I periodically think about replacing it with a newer model. I would certainly not replace it with an iBook since I love the higer resolution screen.
Note that you can get reconditioned TiBooks for about the price of a new iBook, and that might be worth thinking about for many people.
D
Okay, I'll clear that up. The version I have has a 15 gig drive (small, but enough for now). I have it split in half; one half being a Debian partition, the other a MacOS X partition. Basically, when I got it, I wasn't sure which I'd use more, so I can boot into either. I do NOT have OS 9 installed (and thus I opted for the UFS file system for Mac OS X, which I've learned is slower than the HFS+ filesystem, at least as implemented)
I personally use Debian about 100% of the time; I just have it all set up the way I like things, and haven't had time to get into OS X. The original poster was asking about OS X, so that is why I talked about it more. But I'd suggest that people just use what they like; OS X seems to have a lot of potential.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
True, but as any good Unix person knows, it's very bad to run your normal stuff as root. You can type ">console" at the Aqua login screen to get a text mode login prompt if you need it.
Say hello to zMac.