Slashdot Mirror
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
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;
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.
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
I own a Ti PowerBook and have used iBooks. I think the polycarbonate on the iBook is actually more rugged than the thin titanium casing on the PowerBook.