Now for the not so good:

1) If you use this on your lap, invest in some asbestos underwear. It gets hot.

2) It comes with 64Meg of RAM, which is hardly enough to be useful.

3) The Caps Lock key is frequently hit by accident, has no tactile feedback (click down, click up) and cannot be turned off, except with a shareware addon.

4) Processor intensive work (for me, compiling massive C++ projects in CodeWarrior) is far slower than on a G3 desktop.

5) Whether it's software, hardware, or a combination, this is an unstable machine. I've re-installed the system numerous times and lock up the box on a daily basis. Networking seems to be a particular problem.

6) Finally, the case on this beast is horrific. I'll outline that below.

Physical Form Factors:
In making this portable, Apple really, really tried to make it thin. It is considerably thinner than my 400mHz box. At first, I thought that was pretty cool.

But, the point of a laptop is to cart it around. Which I do -- from home to the office and from city to city via plane or car. In moving it from point A to point B, you need to pack it into some sort of carrying case. I have a case that someone at iOmega gave me a few years back, and it's served the purpose quite nicely.

However, over the course of the last summer, all the travelling began to wear on the computer. Because of the thin design, the cover shuts very close over the keyboard. Putting the computer in a carry on makes it worse, as it compresses the computer case even further.

I had begun to see signs of problems after a couple of months, specifically finding the computer dead and very hot after a flight. After a couple times I looked at the machine during the flight and found that it was on. What was happening was that the compression of the case was causing the button on the track pad to be pressed down, which brought the computer out of sleep mode. It would stay on (because the button was down) until it ran out of power.

Easy solution to that, right? Turn it off instead of putting it to sleep before a flight. Yes, that solved it. However, it continued to stress out the trackpad button until, finally in August, the button broke. I took it into the shop, where the technician fixed the button and put a spacer in the case to alleviate the compression problem.

Okay, all is well, right? Not hardly. After a month of that, the case itself cracked where the spacer was. Couple of weeks later and the button is broken in the down position, so the only way the computer was usable was to stick something in the case (a hotel "credit card" room key, usually) and pop up the button and then use a mouse through the useful USB port.

So, back to the shop it goes, where they replaced the case that had broken, along with the trackpad. So far, everything's working ok, but I'm travelling less so that's undoubtably an issue.

One final aspect of this case problem, which they declined to fix -- there are lines on the monitor where the keys are forced into the screen when you close the case.

I'm hoping that they've gone to a different design in the "amazingly thin" new titanium Powerbooks, but at this point, I'm ready to toss the thing and get my 400mHz box back.

If only I could remember who was smart enough to take it when I "upgraded".



Recommended:
No

Amount Paid (US$): 2500
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: PowerPC G3
Processor speed: 401-500
Screen Size: 13
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20