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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 $200 less than the last high-end PowerBook model."
Quoth the article:
"The processor ratings were always much higher for the Windows notebooks (2 GHz or more), but megahertz ratings between Macintosh and Windows computers aren't directly comparable."
Its good to see a review from a PC centric publication address this, however minimally. Apple has long talked about the Megahertz Myth while the PC world has largely equated more MHZ meaning faster, when in reality its not that simple. I wonder if this will be a continued trend.
--
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
But instead I find myself shut up. The specs on the thing are actually quite nice when you compare it to the Area-51m (http://www.alienware.com/main/system_pages/area51 -m.asp) which costs about 250$ less.
The PowerBook has a 20GB larger HDD, the same GPU, a DVD burner, and gigabit ethernet. However, I still hold reservations about the G4. Mhz is certainly not everything, but the G4 has lagged behind to the point that its outclassed by modern x86 processors. Hopefully we'll see an Apple laptop with that new 64-bit IBM processor soon!
the tibook is also half as thick, and gives twice the battery life of the alienware/eurocom unit.
(eurocom sells its notebooks as a white label to other oems such as alienware. i sell/service both apple and eurocom at work)
Please do not make unqualified suggestions like these, because it implies that anybody who buys the PowerBook is just stupid. I fully expect, for example, that someone who needs to run Final Cut Pro on the road would appreciate or need the extra power. I can barely edit at full DV quality on a 733 MHz desktop G4, so a top-end iBook (800 MHz G3) could be painful to use.
Besides, one may not need, want, or even have room for the $1,500 PC with a nice LCD display.
Too bad the Area51-M has a desktop CPU in it and not a mobile P-4.
If you start configuring the systems comparably there is little to no differance in price between the PowerBook G4 and any PC laptops. I've been looking at them over the last several months. The PowerBook also has a few things going for it that are hard to find in other laptops. The Superdrive. I've only found a couple of laptops with DVD-R capabilities, and the one from Sony which was most closly matched to the PowerBook was more expensive at the time. It was also the only laptop other than the PowerBook that at the time took up to 1GB of RAM.
If you are looking for a desktop replacment you have few choices. The powerbook G4 is one, and something like the Sony GRX 600 is another.
What I find more important is size and weight. The powerbook is very slim at 1" thick and weighs in under 6lbs. The sony GRX 600 starts at 8lbs with one battery and is 1.6-1.8" thick.
There are other little differances like 10/100/1000 ethernet rather than 10/100 however that's not that important to most people. There is also the DVI output on the Powerbook and the VGA output on the pc laptops. Again, that won't matter to most people, but there are a growing number of digital displays becoming available so it may matter more in the future.
Compared to the Dell Inspiron 8200 (1.7 GHz P4, $1,499), the PowerBook has 512 MB RAM (Dell has 128 MB), 1 MB cache (512 KB), 60 GB disk (30 GB), DVD-R drive (DVD), GB ethernet (100 Mbps), a 5-hour battery life (2-3 hours), weighing in at 5.4 lbs (7.9 lbs), measuring 1.0 inches thick (1.75 in).
So no, I don't think the two are comparable. Upgrading the RAM, hard drive, and video card (ATI Mobility Radeon 9000) to match up better resulted in a $2,277 package, with the PowerBook still holding significant advantages in size, battery life, and a DVD-R drive for a 25% price premium.
I just got the 867 MHz laptop myself and I'd like to take this opportunity to point out a great savings that many students can get (it's been pointed out here before but I don't like people wasting money for no good reason).
If you are a student in a program that deals with hardware developement (it's one of the requirements but I can't see how they check it) you can save 20% off of these system once in your life time. As you have to do is purchase a $99 (US) membership to save a good deal of money.
See this page for more info on the program.
...it's meant to travel with my digital cameras (DV also), and not meant to replace my desktop box.
I was looking at the dual 1gig desktop G4s, but since I can get a slot-load DVD burner, I think I'll trade in my 12" iBook and get a TI instead. Don't get me wrong...the iBook is great, but it's not a G4.
And I'd suggest getting a pumped Shuttle (load Mandrake 9.0) and a Samsung 17" LCD for that extra $1500.00 if you do go the iBook route.
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."
...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.
"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire
I recently umm.. switched-back, I guess.
Collecting dust in my basement is a Mac LC (complete with 2400 baud prodigy bundle modem that still will connect to some things) with a 40MB HD.
Shortly after it was purchased Apple came out with the LCII and the LCIII and suddenly my hardware was pretty out of date. I still spent countless hours using it, and it still boots perfectly if I ever get nostalgic for Phrase Craze Plus or Bomber. Eventually I migrated to a PC.
I have always wanted to go back to using a Mac. Every time Win9x would get so buggy that it would require a reinstall, or worse, a reformat or devices wouldn't run properly I would check into Apple and windowshop. When I took a Photoshop class and the class computers were Macs I felt like somebody that came back home, to find things the same, but yet different. After a few classes it felt natural again.
Recently, I have had the fortune to have some spare cash and the need for a laptop, so again I searched around. I decided on an iBook. Once I saw that there was no SuperDrive available I jumped up to PowerBook. Several clicks later I somehow ended up with the top of the line 1 ghz (and bumped up to 1 gig of RAM for $40 extra during the promotion).
I am not a gamer. I primarily use a computer to create documents, create graphics, browse the web, communicate with people, and listen to music. Whether or not Mhz can be believed, if Apple products are bested in speed, matters little to me. Everything works fantastically for my needs.
I have yet to find a P2P client worth using (even following suggestions on this and other sites) yet my iTunes library stands at over 700 songs. This is due to the ease of ripping a cd with iTunes. It recognizes your cd, you deselect any tracks you dont want to rip, press a button and an entire CD is automatically labeled and filed away.
Anyway, if you ascribe to time = money (which, if you read this site, you probably should) the amount of time you will spend using a Mac makes it a bargain. I haven't touched my PC in a while. It sits in a room broadcasting information to my Airport (which works better than a D-Link card I previously had in a Dell, contrary to some earlier reviews I read).
I know someone that just switched from OS 9 to OSX, and she says that its a tough switch for her, that its very different. I last regularly used a Mac with System 6.0.7 and come to OSX from Windows XP and I have found it easy to use, but probably touching on references from both.
By the way, the REALLY expensive part of owning a Mac is that you want to buy stuff for it all the time. An iPod, a DV camera, a Wacom tablet, Creature speakers, etc, etc. It really does work seamlessly, and makes you want other gadgets.
-DM
No, the number of execution pipes, the kind of instructions they have to deal with and how well the rest of the system can keep the processor fed with data all have an impact on speed, clock frequency alone is a terrible indicator of performance because.. because well, it doesn't indicate performance.
For a nice extreme example of this, compare an IBM POWER4+ @ 1.45Ghz (austensibly a PowerPC chip) with the Pentium 4 Northwood @ 3.06Ghz
Notice that the POWER4+ beats the unholy crap out of the Pentium 4 even though it's clock frequency is below half?
" 1 MB cache (512 KB)"
And the rest. the 1MB cache block in the Powerbook is L3, the 7455 has 256KB of L2 as well.
last year I stacked my bike and my old TiBook came flying out of my backpack and hit the road, open and on. I was wearing my iPod and it hit the road too and was still playing as I scraped myself up off the cobble-stones. The TiBook was anything but damaged. I have tipped two drinks though it in the past, a Vodka and Ice and a Beer and both times my tibook was fine after a quick wash and dry. who cares about a few scratches here and there. everything fades. the tibook actually looks kinda rugged with a few nicks in it. now i have a new tibook (my old one was stolen) and love it.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
There are two important differences between the PowerBook and the Sony laptop that you didn't mention. First, the Sony laptop only includes what they call "i.Link" ports, which are 4-pin FireWire ports. These ports don't carry power on them, which makes it impossible to use things like bus-powered external hard drives and such. That's a serious drawback in my opinion; what's the point of having a laptop if you have to find a wall socket every time you want to use your external drive?
The other thing is that the Sony laptop apparently doesn't have built-in wireless networking. They offer an 802.11 PC card option, but that isn't nearly as slick as the PowerBook's built in AirPort card and antenna.
I write in my journal
Although I will concede that the PPC has lagged behind x86 in overall speed (not by too much), there is one area that the PPC destroys the x86, Power consumption.
Now to a desktop user, power consumtion is not a very big deal, one loud fan takes care of it. But in laptops we see where the PPC shines. My 500Mhz ibook gets equal performance to a Sony Viao PIII 900 and about 2 hours more battery life (provided I'm not spinning the DVD drive). It is also way more compact because cooling is less an issue.
Don't get me wrong, performance is a big deal. And Motorola has should have kept up on PPC performance better. But the PPC has not lagged that much, and on a laptop scale I think the PPC is an overall better platform.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
I had a PowerBook FireWire ("Pizmo"), a G3 system, running OS X 10.2.3 and 384MB RAM of late. Nice, but it lagged badly when I was running Virtual PC 5. It worked, mind you, but I couldn't do anything else with the 'Book.
Enter my new 1GHz system, with 768MB RAM. Because Virtual PC 5 is optimized for G4 chips, as well as the performance updates of 10.2.3, Virtual PC is a welcome and powerful member of my applications at work. In fact, as I type this, Virtual PC is running an instance of Windows 2000 Professional with 256MB RAM allocated to the environment, connected to my company network, while about 4 Mac OS X apps are running without any slowdowns. I could probably switch on Red Hat 8 in addition without any slowdowns if I wanted.
An iBook is good, but the G4 chip is designed for heavy loads in Mac OS X. If you are a power user that needs multiple environments from an emulator or through other UNIX software such as X Window, the 1GHz system is worth the extra expense. Just load it up with RAM.
Don't get the G4 PowerBook for super-heavy games. While it comes with a Mobile Radeon 9000 with 64MB RAM, it's a functional arrangement for Quake-engined games such as Jedi Knight II and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but not the optimal one. On the other hand, what PC laptop out there could actually play any of the popular PC games with a Quake or Unreal engine?
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
100 hoops?
1) Visit website
2) Signup as a developer (I had already done this for the DC newsletter).
3) Email Canadian reseller (for Canadian - you US folks can do it all online).
4) They give you password to the price list.
5) Tell them what you want to order.
6) Save $800Cdn (bought some extra things) and have your new laptop next business day ($10 shipping fee added to cost of laptop - yes ten dollars).
That's 6 hoops for $800. That's a lot of money for a student.
It wasn't a difficult process. The Canadian reseller company (EMJ) was quite good to deal with - actually more polite than dealing with BMac (the best Apple store we have in my area).
The 10-20% that you save on all Apple products through this program is most often 20%. I got a second battery for my laptop for $88(Cdn) and they are $194 new or $150 with a new laptop.