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?"

Comments

Affirmative

[psyconaut]

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.

iBook2 running linux

[ChadN]

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.

They rock!

[nebbian]

I've got a 600 MHz iBook, and put simply it's the best system for me that exists now. I get 4 hours battery life, and it's fast, stable, and easy to use.

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:

• Instant sleep and wake up, by opening/closing the lid: You might poo-poo this, but it really does make a difference. No 'hibernate', no 'restoring from HD', nothing. Open the lid, and go. Close the lid when you're done. My last uptime was for a month, and it only stopped because I updated the OS!
• Emacs key bindings in just about every application. Ctrl-k kills the current line in Mail, Omniweb, BBedit, Emacs, everything.
• Global preferences that actually affect the thing they're supposed to affect: Put it this way, I still haven't been able to figure out how to change the time in linux, and get the laptop to remember it. It shouldn't have to be that hard.

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!

Eye the Book.

[Big Sean O]

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.