Simply in a class by itself.
Written: Jul 09 '03 (Updated Jul 13 '03)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Quality of Tech Support: |
 |
|
|
Pros: elegant design, great keyboard, included optical drive unlike other 12" notebooks
Cons: runs hot, no USB 2.0, analog only external monitor port
The Bottom Line: Three things keep this from being my dream notebook - a new G5 chip, 1 GB RAM and USB 2.0. In the real world? It's nearly perfect.
|
|
|
| blackguard's Full Review: Apple PowerBook G4 12.1 in. (M8760LL/A) Mac Notebo... |
Motivation, or Why I Gave Up and Loved the Machine
Prior to purchasing this PowerBook, I owned a dual AMD Athlon super PC that I had lovingly put together over the course of the past year. It had as cutting edge parts as I could afford and ran even the most arduous tasks - complex 3D games - without ever having a hiccup. I ran that monster for over 68 days at a stretch without rebooting using Win2K and thought that I had finally reached the Holy Grail of computing - a reliable, extremely powerful computer that I knew from inside out. I called the computer The Beast.
The problem was that I wasn't happy. When the fans kicked in and the PC sounded like a jet about to take off, it was impressive, but overkill. I rarely played computer games anymore and the types that I liked to play - strategy and role-playing games - really didn't even tax my computer at all. What I found myself doing most days was simply writing, nothing that I needed a wannabe supercomputer for. In addition, putting it all together was a nightmare of incompatibilities and even though I eventually got it very reliable indeed, I knew that it was just a headache waiting to happen. My family and friends, because they knew I put it together from scratch, began to see me as the PC guru and I became ad hoc tech support for them all - which seriously cut into my time. After a year of this, I hit my wall of sanity. I needed to simplify my life and the first step would be getting a laptop to replace The Beast. The idea would be to replace the computer, first and foremost, but I also wanted to get rid of all the audio-visual equipment I owned as a side benefit. I wanted a true one-box solution.
The Criteria
1. It had to be small, with a 12" maximum screen size. I'm a small guy with small hands and I honestly don't need a larger laptop. As a truly portable system, it needed to be light and so anything larger was out of the question.
2. Internal optical DVD drive. I didn't want to fuss with cables or external drives at all. In addition, while I am not a movie thief (making a DVD burner a non-issue), I do like to watch them occasionally, and so a DVD drive was a must.
3. Excellent keyboard. I am a writer and while I didn't expect much writing to be done on the included keyboard, there was going to be some when it wasn't connected to my full-size keyboard at home. No miniaturized keys or wacky keyboard layouts would work and if I could dream, I would like one with a good action for touch typing.
4. Decent processor performance. I knew there would be a drop in this area, but there was only so far I was willing to go. I didn't want the computer to feel as if it were working hard when I ran 4-5 applications at once.
5. Decent maximum RAM. I am always doing several things at once and many of them are very RAM intensive. I set my minimum limit at 512 MB.
6. Decent video performance. Aside from watching the odd DVD, I still like to play a game every once in a while. I didn't need cutting edge 3D gaming, but to not have choppy effects would be nice.
7. Lots of connections. The laptop was going to be a desktop replacement when at home, running an all USB batch of peripherals (keyboard, speakers, mouse, printer and scanner) scavenged from my old system. The monitor was going to stick around, too, so there had to be at least a SVGA output and preferably a digital output.
The Field: 12" Should be Enough
I initially leaned toward a Windows-based machine, seeing as all my software would be immediately transferable, along with my data, and so I went to the various manufacturers web sites to see what was in the offing.
The first thing I noticed was that 12" machines were essentially stunted at birth in order to make them as light as possible (very light indeed, in some cases). A few were beautiful and some had things I liked, but not a single one of them met all of the criteria above. The most glaring omission was that of an internal DVD drive - not a single 12" sized model included a drive unless it was an external model. Once I added the media slice or external drive necessary to complete my system, the weight started creeping up (as did the cost) and so did the P.I.T.A (Pain In The A**) when dealing with cables and other peripherals when traveling with the laptop.
The second thing I noticed was that 12" notebooks generally had terrible video cards. They were fine for 2D office work and while my needs for gaming are actually quite modest, what was available was universally poor. Most manufacturers had amalgamated the video card into the main circuit board and therefore shared system RAM to operate. The few that actually had separate video cards maxed out at 16 MB video RAM, which in this day and age, isn't going to cut it. It was starting to look as if going from a 128MB ATI video card in my old PC was going to be like going back to 1995 era computing.
The third complaint was the quality of the keyboards. Nothing bugs a touch typist more than keyboard flex and every competing notebook I tried in the store drove me batty with it. I couldn't honestly see writing for a couple of hours in a park on one of them without getting ticked off. I know my limitations.
Finally, the actual performance of the machines left a lot to be desired. The smallest and lightest laptops had PIII-M chips under 1 GHz and were visibly slow when processing data in large chunks. Some, like the Dell X200 my friend purchased (1.8 GHz), were a lot quicker and were acceptable when running more than a few applications at a time, but the thought of needing to pack around the media slice to watch a movie wasn't thrilling to me at all.
So, after digging for a few months, I basically wrote off getting a laptop. It was either move up in size to get the included DVD drive or live with the glaring limitations of the 12" models on the market. Not an exciting prospect.
Of course, we know what happened - Apple released the 12" PowerBook. On paper, it seemed to have everything I wanted and so I went to my local Apple dealer to grab a look. It wasn't there to play with and the lengthy waiting list for that model told me that I would likely never see one in the flesh prior to paying for it. I played with the 15" model, though, and really liked what I saw. I went home to think some more and, a couple of weeks later walked in to see that Apple had reduced the price and that the retailer was offering a $200 CAD mail-in rebate at the same time. I considered it a sign from up above and bought it sight unseen. Yes, I am an impulse shopper.
In the week before it arrived, I managed to sell The Beast along with all of my AV equipment and this helped to offset the cost of the notebook, which with the price drop and rebate, ended up less than most of Apple's competitors in this strata.
In the Package
PowerBook
Software and Hardware warranty information
OS Proof of Purchase Coupons for upgrading later
Getting Started Manual
Bluetooth Certification
2 Apple Logo Stickers
AppleCare pamphlet
Empty CD-R Disc
System Software Disc
Apple Hardware Test Disc
Dongles:
Power Adapter w/extension
VGA Adapter
Composite and S-Video Adapter
ordinary telephone line
Software:
OS X 10.2.6
numerous included Apple bits from iLife
Quickbooks (New User Edition)
Microsoft Office for Mac (30-day Trial)
OmniGraph and OmniOutline
Acrobat Reader 5.0
Art Director's Toolkit
Graphics Converter US
FAXstf X
Purchased Options:
Airport Extreme Card $159 CAD (Self-Installed)
First Impressions: Gosh Yur Purty in the Light, Miss
Apple deserves kudos, not only for making a damn good-looking notebook, but for the quality and professionalism they put into the packaging and the design of their literature. From the pleasing heft of the notebook itself, to the packaging where every dongle had its place, to the well-written Getting Started Guide, this is a product that exudes pride and craftsmanship. The notebook itself is beautiful and it is plain to see that Apple's manufacturing process is first rate. Opening and closing the notebook is like closing the door on a fine automobile - there is a satisfying thunk that you can feel. The other laptops I saw during my shopping seem like cheap plastic toys in comparison.
After reading the Getting Started Guide, it became clear that setup was going to be a breeze. The only hitch was that I had to completely power up the battery, then completely drain it while off the AC adapter until the Powerbook shut itself down. This procedure was supposed to 'set' the battery for optimal use later and once it was done, the computer could be connected or disconnected from the AC at will.
I purchased an Airport Extreme card at the time of the purchase and had to put this in myself because the clerk (admittedly not an Apple expert) gave me the older Airport Card, which was not compatible. Installing the correct card involved removing the battery, opening the Airport slot thus revealed, connecting the antenna dongle to the card, and then sliding the card into the slot until it was firmly seated. I then replaced my battery and was essentially finished. Thirty seconds of work, and I was ready for my wireless network.
The LCD screen is reasonably bright and, to my eyes, pretty color accurate. I used to set televisions to the NTSC standard and nothing drives me over the bend like white that is really blue because the color temperature is out of whack. Nothing like that here, thank you. It shows a bit of light falloff in the corners, but for the most part the illumination is respectable across the screen. It is very good for viewing angle from side to side and I can read text pretty acceptably for approximately 165 degrees. Color shift when off angle is to the magenta range of the spectrum but is slight and, IMO, more than acceptable. Vertically, however, the LCD shows significant brightness loss when even slightly off of optimum. I find myself constantly adjusting the screen to provide the best picture possible from my sitting angle. While not the best LCD panel in the 12" crowd (Sharp's Actius was beautiful and Panasonic's is supposed to be nice, too) it is as good as anything else in it's price range.
The keyboard layout and action is very nice and miles better than the other notebooks I compared to when shopping. The keys are full-sized and have about 2-3 mm of travel, which when combined with the complete lack of keyboard flex (thanks, Apple, for that change from the old PowerBooks) makes for a very pleasant typing experience. The action is on the stiff side, which I like as I prefer to have a lot of tactile response from the keys when I type. I find that I can really motor along when I am in the throes of writing. The delete key is a tad small and when you make as many mistakes as I do when typing, that can be significant, but if you touch type properly, you aren't using this key until you are editing the document anyway.
I love the dual-use Fn keys in that the stuff I use most - LCD brightness, volume and monitor mode are all right where I want them at the top of the key layout. An eject button for the DVD/CD-RW drive is also top right in the keys, making life easier than finding a software equivalent on screen. A set of directional arrow keys is found to the lower right of the keyboard, making navigation within a document a lot simpler than constantly relocating your hands to use the touchpad.
The touch pad itself is responsive and accurate enough that I prefer to use it instead of a mouse most days, with one quibble. I rest my palm to the right of the touch pad as leverage when 'scrolling' through a long document, and the pointer often jumps just from the pressure of my hand on the body of the notebook, which I assume is flexing the touch pad panel ever so slightly. If I am more gentle, though, this is not a concern. The one thing I really miss is the second button for input. After years in the PC world, I find that right-clicking is a lot more intuitive than finding a context (Apple) key in the keys to press when clicking the 'left-click' button in order to call up context menus. Old dogs have trouble learning new tricks, I guess.
The speakers are on the back side of the notebook, facing away from someone typing at the keyboard. A third speaker is hidden away in the hinge mechanism for the LCD and reveals itself when the laptop is open. Sound, as one might expect, is pretty mediocre through such tiny speakers and rather quiet. A normal conversation in the room almost drowns out the sound, even with the volume cranked. I would highly recommend a good set of headphones. A tiny microphone is located above and left of the keyboard and so no external microphone is needed for, say, AV conversations using iChat AV. Sound quality, like that of the speakers, is pretty poor and so a good headphone/microphone combination might be in order for heavy chatting or Internet telephone use.
The battery compartment is located on the bottom and the battery itself is sculpted to conform to the body of the notebook - no cheap plastic cover for Apple. It is easy to remove with a quick turn of the latch (needs a coin) and with the size of the battery, it is easy to see where carrying a second one wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience. Lifting out the battery reveals the Airport Extreme card slot, the installation of which I have already detailed. No slot for a second battery is supplied (like some Toshiba notebooks) and so running for extended periods requires swapping out the battery for a fresh one mid-session.
Also on the bottom is the slot for the RAM. Included is 128MB of system RAM and the version of the Powerbook I opted for had a 128MB DIMM in addition, for a total of 256MB. Replacing the DIMM is as easy as unscrewing the plate covering the DIMM slot, pulling two sprung tabs holding the DIMM in place outward and lifting the DIMM out. This, of course, should never be done with the power connected or with the battery in place.
Connections run along the left side of the laptop when facing the screen, with (from front to back) Kensington Security slot, headphone jack, audio line in jack, VGA adapter slot, 2 USB 1.1 slots, a FireWire 400 slot, 10/100 Ethernet port, internal modem port and finally the power jack. The arrangement is satisfactory, but I found that headphones or the power adapter sticking out to the side made it difficult to put the laptop actually on one's lap with folded legs, as my legs put pressure on the dongles which could easily damage the ports. Sitting with legs straight helps the issue, of course, but makes sitting for extending periods uncomfortable in the extreme.
There were some neat touches: when I discovered, by accident, that there was a little light near the latch that pulsed when the unit was in sleep mode, I found myself almost excited. Gone is the possibility of moving the laptop when the HDD is in action - the light lets me know when it is safe to move the laptop around. The Apple logo on the lid also glows when the laptop is in use, which is a neat, but essentially unnecessary touch just to impress people in the vicinity. The power adapter, when plugged in, glows orange when the battery is charging and green when the battery is fully charged, saving one from opening the laptop to determine if the battery is ready to go.
Grist for the Mill - Daily Use
Setting up what I consider to be essential settings was not quite as easy as I thought, though no more difficult than with my old PC. My wireless network, run through a D-Link 714P wireless router, required some reconfiguration before I could get the 128-bit encryption to work properly with my Airport software. Once some diligent digging found out that D-Link's up speed wireless products (denoted with a Plus in the name) use a proprietary protocol, ramping down the transmission rate to normal 802.11b standards had my network running fine. The antenna built into the notebook is good enough that I can go approximately 25 feet away before I see significant signal loss. I normally surf out on my back porch at night and I have no problem with connection through the walls of my condo.
Setting up my existing peripherals was generally a very simple thing. I had purchased Mac friendly hardware to begin with, so drivers and support software was a non-issue. I had all the USB hardware plugged into a combination USB 2.0 and FireWire hub already, so simply putting the USB wire from the hub into the side of my laptop added the whole shebang to my system. Half an hour installing software and I was scanning and printing to my heart's content. Everything should be this easy to set up and this alone showed me what great design can do for a system; nothing worked this easily when putting together my PC.
On to the keyboard. The more I use this keyboard, the more I like it. My nightmare was that the keyboard would be so poor that I would find touch typing a chore, thus making traveling with the laptop less satisfying than I would like. The exact opposite has happened and I find myself out in my local park writing more often than not (I wrote this review outside). The keyboard is not perfect, and for any long writing sessions I would use my MS Natural Elite to cut down on wrist pain, but it is by far and away the best keyboard I have seen on a notebook, especially a notebook this small.
As other reviewers have noted, the lower left portion of the laptop does get warm with use, though I find the descriptions of the temperature a bit extreme. I am quite happy typing for extended periods on it without any discomfort in either my wrists or my lap, and it is a far cry from the 'too hot to touch' description some reviewers are using. I even use the notebook on my bare legs and do not find it at all uncomfortable. Perhaps, being Canadian, I welcome any source of alternate heat ...
The 256 MB of RAM compliment is enough for me to run my normal batch of 4 applications (browser, chat, iTunes, text editor) and when my usage increases editing photographs in the GIMP, the notebook seems to handle it OK. I would feel happier with the RAM maxed out (640 MB) because OS X is a very heavy RAM user, but my usage is so light that I would be content with 256MB for quite a while - I have other things I need to buy before RAM. In normal use the CPU seems snappy, but not lightning quick like my old PC used to be, of course. In comparison with some of the other 12" notebooks I examined, it seemed faster than almost all those I tried (Sharp Actius, IBM X31, Sony VAIO) and about as fast as my friend's Dell X200, which has a clock speed nominally twice that of my PowerBook. I have not yet run into a situation where the computer seems to bog down, so I have been pleasantly surprised.
The video performance has also been pretty good, despite my initial misgivings about laptop video cards. DVDs play without skipping and look pretty decent even full frame on my external monitor. I do not have any 3D games for the notebook as of yet, but the arcade and Commodore 64 games I play on a regular basis go off without a hitch. I can definitely see that if my tastes ran to cutting-edge first person shooters, I would see a difference between this and my old PC, but for the games I play, it seems just fine. When I think that I could have opted for the other notebooks I looked at, many of which had trouble even playing a DVD without hiccups, I think that I made the right choice.
The notebook, like I suspected, is just the right size for me and for travel in general. I can port it around without too much trouble and when I get my Booq slip case, the computer will travel with me on a daily basis. Weight is really less of a concern than some other reviewers have made a point of - if you can't easily carry a 4.6 lb. computer, you need to hit the gym. Besides, add in a media slice or an external DVD drive and those ultralight systems weigh just as much as the PowerBook and are much less convenient to port around. Battery power is acceptable and I seem to get around 2.5-3.0 hours from a charge, depending upon what I do. Some may find this short, but it is enough to cover my commute on the bus, so I am generally content. On some days in the park I would welcome a second battery, and this will likely be my first accessory purchase with my next paycheque.
OS X, while not technically a part of the review of the hardware, has been a dream and I am glad I made the switch. Almost all my daily computing chores are easier to do, from installing software to updating the software I have already. What a difference from Win2K! I ran the laptop from the day of my purchase through to yesterday (22 days) before I had to restart my computer due to a crash of some sort. Considering I have a bunch of freeware on my machine, that is not bad at all. Once I weed out the bad apples - pun intended - I am sure I will start breaking all my old PC's records for robustness.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Notebooks have one major flaw in that they are nowhere near as expandable as desktop systems. USB and FireWire have gone a long way to ameliorating this concern, but not the whole way. The fact that I can hot plug my notebook and be up and running with essentially all the toys of my old desktop system shows how compatible this notebook is with existing technology. My goal is to add another external HDD for all my music and pictures and perhaps even an external DVD-ROM. In residence the notebook sits on a shelf under my monitor at about knee level. Getting underneath everything to slip a DVD into the notebook is a giant pain, so an external drive at eye level would be perfect for home use.
Nonetheless, I would honestly have liked to have USB 2.0 in this notebook. I could have purchased a large USB 2.0 hub and been prepared for virtually any type of peripheral I could want to add, from hard drives to optical drives to the minor stuff that I have now. The hub for all of those peripherals could have connected to my system with one single cable - my goal of simplicity could have been one step closer to perfection. Instead, my current low bandwidth peripherals connect with USB 1.1 and my high bandwidth peripherals will have to connect with FireWire, meaning there will be two cables running from my combined hub to the notebook instead of one. No big deal, but the notebook has really piqued my idea of a simple, neat system. More wires means more mess.
I may end up going the Bluetooth route, as it is a standard feature on this laptop. With more printers, scanners, phones and other peripherals picking up this feature all the time, it might become very possible to replace all my equipment shy of keyboard and mouse with wireless models. This should certainly help with the mess of wires I have now. If heaven drops down to Earth and Bluetooth keyboards and mice show up, I might have a completely wireless system shy of the more bandwidth intensive peripherals like hard drives or optical drives.
The Nits and Bolts
1. The heat issue. The laptop does get hot and while I don't personally find it to be too much of a nuisance, some certainly do. My concern with the heat is not one of comfort, but one of longevity. Heat and dust are the enemies of computers (or any electronics) and so I don't like to see any excess heat around something I paid this much for. My friend's Dell gets hot, too, but not quite as hot as the Powerbook.
2. Early wear and tear - There is a thin pad that sits underneath the actual keyboard. The keys ride on arms that poke out of this pad and just underneath the space bar, the pad has started to lift from the base a tad. It is cosmetic more than anything, but as this is my baby right now, I'm a bit upset that it is lifting when less than a month old. I'll be taking it in to have it looked at, hopefully under warranty, when my case from Booq arrives for transportation.
3. Headphone Port Noise - I wear headphones all the time and my speakers in the home system plug into the same port. If the male jack from the speakers or headphones isn't seated just right in the port, there is a buzz that I find very annoying. It isn't loud, but it is most definitely present. I am not sure if this is simply a badly grounded outlet, but it will be getting looked at the same time the pad under the keys will be. It could very well be the result of my earlier reported problem - my legs press on the jacks when sitting cross-legged and put pressure on the ports themselves.
4. VGA cable adapter - It works fine and I use it every day, but the picture is slightly softer than the picture I used to get on the same monitor from my old PC. Both systems used analog connectors and the same nominal resolution, so I used some trial and error and determined that the adapter is to blame. It is far from horrible, but it isn't what I am used to seeing on this monitor, and I am wondering if a digital connector might have helped the issue.
5. USB 1.1 rather than 2.0
6. Apple Tech Support - Apple is the only company I deal with that doesn't provide e-mail tech support. I work during the hours that most companies are open for phone support and so rely on e-mail support to get problems solved instead. With Apple, I was forced to dig around on the discussion forums to figure out my wireless issue and an issue I have with the built in firewall in OS X. I don't mind finding my own solutions, but I guarantee it would be quicker with someone completely up on the product and the known issues surrounding it.
7. DVD Playback - This is more of an issue with iDVD than it is with the laptop, but as one of the defining considerations for my purchase, I thought I would include it. Apple, for some reason, still hasn't figured out how to properly display interlaced scan content on screen. It isn't a big deal because my old TV was interlaced, too, but when I watched a DVD on my old PC, it looked as if it was a progressive scan signal, and all of that was done with software ...
8. No port covers. This is an inexcusable omission on a mobile system.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1510.81
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: PowerPC G4
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 12 inches
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
blackguard
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.