PC Mag's First Look: PowerBook 1GHz

IrateSurf writes "PC Magazine has completed a First Look review of the new Apple PowerBook, which is the first notebook from Apple with a 1-GHz G4 processor. The notebook also has a nice price cut, running $2,999 -- that's $200 less than the last high-end PowerBook model."

Comments

Good to see

[code shady]

Quoth the article:
"The processor ratings were always much higher for the Windows notebooks (2 GHz or more), but megahertz ratings between Macintosh and Windows computers aren't directly comparable."

Its good to see a review from a PC centric publication address this, however minimally. Apple has long talked about the Megahertz Myth while the PC world has largely equated more MHZ meaning faster, when in reality its not that simple. I wonder if this will be a continued trend.
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Difficult Comparisons

[slevin]

I did a little comparing of all the major brands of laptops recently, and there really is nothing comparable to the Power Book. There are faster laptops, certainly. And there are cheaper laptops. But there is nothing else on the market that offers similar features.

Only the Area51 also offers a high end graphics card. Only one of the sony's offers a large screen while staying reasonably light weight. No PC laptops at 6lbs and under qualify as desktop replacements. I've been carrying around a PowerBook G4 for almost 2 years now, and it is as heavy as a laptop should be - anything more really is too much. I'd love all the power of a top end IBM or Area51, but they are in the same price range (or more for the IBM) and both are in the 8lb range.

If I had one thing to change, it would be the fact that the power book has both a "return" and "enter" key. As a developer, I could really use another control key to make my emacs life easier. Who says, "boy am I glad that there is both and enter and return on this keyboard - I couldn't get by without it."

Got mine a month ago...

[hprotagonist0]

...and I'm loving it. First Mac I've had in about 10 years (my first computer was a Mac Plus - 8" screen, 1M RAM, no HD). It's gorgeous, fast, and just plain well-designed.

About the only thing bad I can say about it is that the keyboard layout's kind of lame. Considering the amount of room made avaliable by the form factor of the LCD screen (which is beautiful), you would think they could manage to sqeeze in pgup, pgdn, and delete keys without having to do fn-key combos (fn-up, fn-down, and fn-backspace, respectively). Also, I hate using the one-button trackpad, but that's a beef with Macs in general, and easily fixed by plugging in my Logitech trackball. Haven't had a chance to burn DVDs yet, but it's nice to have the option there.