MacReviewZone Discussion Board

[<iyo>]

to all of you that want to buy ibook,

first i am a pc-user..had use toshiba notebooks in the past and i like it.
recently i have a change to try my girlfriend's 14" ibook 800mhz with 640mb ram and boy i tell you it is great.

i have not try photoshop 7 yet but the elements 2.0 and it runs pretty good. unless you are doing heavy workload on photoshop. for working with 20-50mb photoshop files should be okay too.

hmm what else..i am going to hunt for an ibook now. later guys.

[Don]

Hi iyo,

We do a weekly roundup of iBook prices and bundles that you may find helpful. Click here to visit our iBook buyer's guide.

You're right, It's a great little machine...

Don

[<triumph_larry>]

Some food for thought, right now there are some of the previous G4 Titanium Powerbooks (550mhz and 667mhz) going for around $1900 in MacWarehouse and MacMall. If you are doing more computational heavy tasks and can swing the extra cash this would be my recommendation. Otherwise the new iBooks are really good machines.

~ Larry

[<Rich E.>]

I have a 600 mhz ibook, 640 RAM, 8 meg vram. It runs jaguar just fine, certainly not a "click and wait" feeling. OS X is optimized for a G4, so a G3 is never going to be as satisfying, but honestly, there's no performance problem at all. You can have quite a few apps open and see no slowdown at all.
I'd have to disagree with the above post about going for a 550 or 667 titanium. First of all, the ibook is great for most of what has been talked about here; internet, school work, photoshop, etc. Second of all, if you really want a G4 but are on a limited budget, I'd look at the new 12.1 inch model. $1800 instead of 2k, and a much better processor and graphics card than the older models.
Rich

[<bill>]

i too am considering a new laptop and i really want it to be an apple laptop. i'm just not sure what's the best config for me. i want to run mysql, postgresql, tomcat, and probably jboss on it. anybody using their ibook for those purposes that could shed some light on how the ibook handles all those apps?

[David]

Hi Bill.

I don't know enough about those applications to advise you but here are a couple of references for more information:
http://www.macnet2.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=3337
http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql

David

quote:

---

Originally posted by <bill>:
i too am considering a new laptop and i really want it to be an apple laptop. i'm just not sure what's the best config for me. i want to run mysql, postgresql, tomcat, and probably jboss on it. anybody using their ibook for those purposes that could shed some light on how the ibook handles all those apps?

---

[shahidz83]

Hey folks,
I'm currently a college student and I have a desktop PC at home. However, I've been considering buying a notebook recently. The ibook particularly appealed to me because it looked pretty slick and was priced quite nicely too. There are a few questions I have as someone not too familiar with Macs and I'd appreciate if some of you could help out a bit.

First of all, I've been trying to find a site that would provide me with benchmarks for the 800 mhz G3, compared to pentium processors. Do any of you know of any such sites, or at least know what kind of pentium speed the ibook 800 would compare to? B/c in terms of PC's 800 is quite slow and I want to be able to use the comp for at least 2-3 years or so. So I dont know if powerpc g3 800 is equivalent to pentium 800 processor.

My second question is about the video out features. I was surfing the apple site, and it seems like all i need to buy is a 17 dollar accesorry to be able to hook an ibook up to a tv or other screen...is this right? Also, I was reading somewhere about something like the ibook only being able to "mirror" or something..what does that mean?

That's all for now, thanks in advance!
PS, Im really sleepy so forgive my if my post made no sense whatsoever

[shahidz83]

Thanks a lot David!

[David]

Hi,

My attempts to answer your questions are found interspersed with your original message

quote:

---

Originally posted by Z-MAN:
Hey folks,
I'm currently a college student and I have a desktop PC at home. However, I've been considering buying a notebook recently. The ibook particularly appealed to me because it looked pretty slick and was priced quite nicely too. There are a few questions I have as someone not too familiar with Macs and I'd appreciate if some of you could help out a bit.

First of all, I've been trying to find a site that would provide me with benchmarks for the 800 mhz G3, compared to pentium processors. Do any of you know of any such sites, or at least know what kind of pentium speed the ibook 800 would compare to? B/c in terms of PC's 800 is quite slow and I want to be able to use the comp for at least 2-3 years or so. So I dont know if powerpc g3 800 is equivalent to pentium 800 processor.

Check out the following pages:
http://www.techtv.com/freshgear/products/jump/0,23009,3398105,00.html
http://www.upenn.edu/computing/arch/standards/laptop-02-03.html

These pages might be somewhat helpful .. but I was unable to find a direct performance comparison

My second question is about the video out features. I was surfing the apple site, and it seems like all i need to buy is a 17 dollar accesorry to be able to hook an ibook up to a tv or other screen...is this right? Also, I was reading somewhere about something like the ibook only being able to "mirror" or something..what does that mean?

Yes that is correct the iBook has a video out port ( I believe that adapter is $19)

Mirroring means that if you hook up a second monitor the second monitor is an exact copy of the 1st monitor. This is different from monitor spanning where the 2nd monitor is an extension of the primary monitor .. thus increasing your overall screen space. The iBook is not capable of monitor spanning. The PowerBooks can ..

David

That's all for now, thanks in advance!
PS, Im really sleepy so forgive my if my post made no sense whatsoever

---

[andymichael]

Hi everyone,
I'm on the edge of walkin out the door and buying a new ibook tomorrow (800mhz 12" G3.)

I have a few questions though...

1. How upgradeable (is that a word?!) is the ibook? If it comes with 256 megs of ram and want to expand it to its full capacity - how do I do that, and what kind of ram do I need?

2. Sound quality...when I looked at the ibook in the store the speakers seemed unusually quiet. Has anyone else found this to be the case? I have apple pro speakers already but I dont think I can plug them into the ibook.

3. Display calibration...my imac has been an absolute nightmare to calibrate the display to the same as the lab I use to print my images. Is the ibook any easier to tweak? Whatever happened to good old manual contrast/brightness adjustment?!!

Thank you for any replies!
You guys know everything!!!!

Andynull

[bob]

A bunch of the tests were dependent upon mainly hard drive performance, which in turn depends largely on drive fragmentation, how much of the drive is used, and where on the drive things are installed; as with CDs, speed is faster on the edge of the "disc".

The operating system versions and memory configurations of the the included Macs were all unspecified, and most likely varied quite a bit. This can have a significant effect on results...

Also, I had an 800Mhz iBook for a while, and I now have a 12" PB. The iBook burned CDs at 4 to 8X all the time, even though it had a "16x" burner. My PB has a "24x MAX" burner, and it burns WAY faster than my iBook did.

[Matt (guest)]

Hi,

I am a Windows PC user... and to be honest am fed up with it. Windows is always crashing, too slow, etc etc...

So I thought I'd look about buying an iBook but as I'm only a student (14 years old) I can only afford the most basic model. Now the fact that it only has a CD ROM drive and no disernable means of backing up data doesn't bother me as I intend to connect it to a wireless Windows network (if that's possible, which it should be) where I can back it up to. But, however, what I am concerned about is that fact it's such a low spec, 800MHz G3 and 128mb RAM... I make websites and I edit a lot of graphics for them and am concerned it won't be able to cope. In addition to that I don't know how fast it will be, like if it'll be laggy at all or slow to boot up as I have never unfortunatley used one.

Someone who has, or knows of, iBooks could you please help me and tell me of its speed etc.

Many thanks,
Matt.

[Tombox]

I am a college student (soon to be graduate student) looking for a good laptop, and I am 80% certain i will be getting the IBook 933mhz 14 inch for myself as a combo (birthday, xmas, spoiler) present to myself. I've been a PC user all my life, but always admired a mac and always wanted to have both systems for bragging rights and overall cool factor.

I've found I can get a student discount of 100 dollars and also if i couple the purchase with an Ipod i can get a 200 dollar rebate on the applestore. I was wondering if anyone knew if this was the best deal i could get, or perhaps i could find one even better than this (being a college student requires a level of frugality).

Secondly, I run a DLink 2.4 ghz wireless router out of my house to help keep my brother and I connected to the internet in different rooms. I was wondering if there would be any problem using an airport wireless card on this router, or if i had to use an airport router in order to use the airport card.

Thanks alot
Tom
Boston, ma

[rrnowell]

The base price of Macs is pretty stable. The exceptions to this rule are refurbs, open boxes, discontinued models, and the education discounts. Since retailers are allowed to go much below the base price, they seem to offer "freebees" of RAM, cases, s/w etc.. to try to sweeten the deal and edge out the competition.

The iBook G4 doesn't have a lot of performance data out on it yet for purposes of comparing it to lets say the PowerBook 12" 1GHz. Obviously a number of preferences would influence your choice. The iBook maintenance is $249 and the PB is $349. Anyway, the best deal depends on what you need it for and how important money is. Here are some performance sites that are attempting to compile data for comparison purposes:

www.barefeats.com

www.xlr8yourmac.com

and of course this site. There is another discussion thread where several people have tried to provide additional info as they come across it.

Hope this helps. Others please chime in on this as I have only a very limited knowledge.

Robert

[achohol]

I just ordered a 12'' g4 ibook on the Cram and Jam offer and whilst I wait for it, I'm quite interested in finding a carry case which isn't really a carry case.

See, I plan on carrying it in my rucksack but obviously, i don't want a pile of textbooks, pens and other crap scratching it's precious surface. Basically I want a case for the ibook which is very minimalist, with no huge pockets, straps or so on.

Could anybody recommend one?