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Apple 12-inch PowerBook G4 Review
Dave_B writes "Tony Smith of El Reg gives his verdict after a month with Apple's 12-inch Powerbook." His overall impression was good, but there are some words of caution in here regarding battery life and heat, so read before buying one ;)
O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center also put out a review here.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
There is a thread on Ars where the author checked the temp of his 12in PB against a 12in iBook. The results are a little disapointing...
PS. There is a large set of images in the thread that could bog down 56k'rs
OMG BIG PENIS ATE MY SOUP
I saw one of these at Comp USA. It's a nice laptop, but it gets hotter than hell after an hour (or so) of operation.
Maybe the PPC 970 will offer reduced heat output.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
was the reg's comments on the software, which I found from personal experience to be particularly pertinent.
First off; bluetooth needs to be simplified. The current method of doing it is confusing and unclear.
Next; same goes for the airport software and splitting up between authentication and encryption. The way apple uses the "internet connect" application in tandem with the network system pref is something that should be addressed.
The battery conditioning issue; Apple doesn't really provide users with any clear and obvious documentation on it.
Finally; CDRWs needs the Disk Utility app. What a joke! It should all be able to be done from within the Finder.
Hopefully these will get addressed in Panther...
-- james
I've set a date of May 28th to buy a 12" Powerbook. I wouldn't mind at all a 17" version, and I'd get the 15" version if it used DDR ram. Anyone justify getting the 15" version spite of the lack of DDR/Airport Extreme? Airport Extreme is kewl, but I probably won't use the G side of it outside of work, and I probably won't even use it then.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Second,while the machine does get "hot", I've gotta say, from a switcher's perspective, it isn't really -hot- hot. It's a pleasant wrist-warming feature compared to some of the scalders I've worked with on the PC side. On the downside, I can no longer locate my laptop by following the drone of the cooling fans.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
The major preventable causes of battery drain are:
- Airport card on when not necessary
- Screen brightness high
- Not adjusting energy saver properly
- Modem off
- OS 9 environment running
I can routinely get 3.5-4 hours with relatively normal usage (compile, crash, debug, etc) if I do the above. If I don't do the above, then battery life drops substantially.I also used top to see which applications are big CPU cycle eaters.
As for heat, I recommend any of the various stands that elevate the TiBook to an angle and allows air to flow more freely underneath.
I can say that the battery is pretty weird, mine went from 3 hours and something in the first weeks to 2h30 now, and yes, I have the same Energy Saver Settings. Only thing that changed is that I now have 640MB RAM, which should only improve it...
It's pretty lame, I certainly felt bad when I saw a friend's Pentium 4 1.8GHZ laptop still showing 2 hours left of battery at 70%.
I've had my AiBook for (about) 2 months now, and right now I'm going to say I love every single aspect of it. Absolutely. No waffling here. I'm a switcher, but from the linux/i386 world, and I've had no trouble porting over my servo control routines and all the other robotics related code I've written over the last couple years for linux.
So basically, I'm happy as a clam. Happier even.
But for one silly little thing: the metal drop-down catch which locks the lid shut when I close it. For some reason (most likely a mechanical defect) it doesn't pop back in when I open the lid. Trivial? Yes. All it takes is one tenth of a second to tap it with my finger when I open it and it pops back where it belongs.
Nonetheless, as a fella raised in a machine shop (my father's a machinist/sculptor/etc/luddite) this kind of thing bothers me. I examined it closely and it's very simple -- the latch's "bearing" is nothing but a hole slightly larger than the axle, so you get minimal friction and maximum simplicity. But it seems to allow sideways motion and this (in my case) is causing binding. I'm not about to oil it, for obvious reasons, though if I can find a non-conductive graphite lube ( "Dry Slide" ) I might give it a shot.
What concerns me is not so much the lack of it retracting, but that someday, if the binding gets too great, it might stop popping down when I close the lid.
So, it's a cool feature and all but my old thinkpad, with its simpler trigger mechanism never had this problem.
There's a lot to be said for simplicity. I kind of wish apple had forgone the cool and wow effect in this place for something a little more sturdy.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
On an iBook, with 10.2.4, I don't have any battery issues. I can't get more than 3.5 hours by shutting off Airport, lowering the sound and screen brighteness, etc., while keeping my processor to full speed, but I imagine that if I lowered by processor speed I'd get pretty close to 5 hours.
Znonymous Coward wrote:
Nope. The new IBM PowerPC 970 will actually produce more heat then the current G4 processor from Motorola.
Luckily Motorola recently anounced a new low power version of the G4 at around 1 GHz. If this new chip ends up in the 12" PowerBook it will be a lot nicer machine.
How do you think the RAM holds it's charge? Magic?
256MB is fine on a PC and 384 is fine on a Mac. The only apps I've used that could use more are PS 7 and Eclipse (could use 2GB if you could add it).
To increase airflow (and to make it a touch more ergonomic) i use a plastic intray, with a book wedged underneath it.
This provides an angled surface for the TiBook to sit on and
it raises it up to a better height.
I use an external keyboard and mouse of course.
With the other four and reduced CPU usage I get around 3 hours on a 1 GHz TiBook. This is noticeably better than my 500MHz TiBook, by the way, which usually hit the wall at 2 hours and a bit.
On turning off Airport:There's an interesting thread at macosxhints.com where there is disagreement about it. One person claims:
This doesn't actually work. I've spoken with support techs, and the airport card never actually gets turned off. The menu extra does disable the network interface, but the hardware is not ever powered off unless you remove it. I suppose this is part of the kernel extension and why the Airport Extreme hacks to work with other cards have problems when you remove the 802.11g cards.
So, your mileage may vary. - Eric
then it gets good grades
t ml
http://iafrica.com/news/sa/3030.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28245.h
A 12 inch Powerbook? Like that will ever happen. Come on guys enough with the April fool jokes already..
So, one of you says, 'You need disk util to erase CD-RW disks'. The other says, 'No, you just right click on the CD-RW and select 'erase disk''.
Then the first one says, 'Oops, you're right.'
And the second says, 'Oops, I'm wrong.'
I don't have a CD-RW drive that works, so I'm beggin' ya, please, tell me who is actually right?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
...that will enlarge your powerbook, with pills alone.
I get a lot of spam about it, so it must work, right?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
It's not all roses.
Now I am a rather big mac fan. My roomie saw my 1G Ti and had to get a 12 inch. Here's what happened.
- iSync did not work with his ericsson/sony phone. All meetings were 7 hours off from iCal settings. This rendered it useless.
- The Ericsson/sony phone could not connect the 12 inch to the internet over bluetooth and was a major time sucker to try and get it to work. In the end we gave up. Time is money.
- Plugged into our network, the 12 inch couldn't see through our firewall to any outside urls or tci/ip addresses including those at my house. My 15 inch worked fine. LOTS of time on the phone to tech support. No resolution. Airport support was not an option but I even did buy an airport extreme to help him out but he was already soured.
Too many issues to deal with. It was sent back to Apple and we were sad.
Stuff's got to work out of the box and work well. We were all rather disappointed. I remain the sole mac user at my company.
:
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I had the same time difference problem with iSync and Sony Ericsson T68i.
I suppose it's moot now because your 'puter's gone, but the problem is caused by the phone's time zone not being set to the same time zone as the computer.
iSync "cleverly" compensates your appointment times in England for the equivalent time in Australia (in my case). Well, it might be clever for people who travel a lot (can anyone comment?), but it's very easy to not set the time zone in the phone (you have to go looking for the option).
I just switched and have felt the mighty heat of the 12in.
:)
My solution is two words: blue jeans.
if you get the thick kind, you won't even be bothered when playing games (which seems to be the worst time for me since you got the both hard and optical drive spinning)
of course, if you got your work to pay for your Mac, and have to use it with slacks, then you get what you deserve
Thanks, I'll check it out.