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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

12-inch PowerBook 1.33 GHz

So I finally purchased the PowerBook last night, at the Apple Store in Chestnut Hill. Overall, it was a middling affair: The Chestnut Hill store is kind of crummy, and the people there were alternatively irritating (trying to get me to purchase every add-on on the planet) and idiotic (warning me not to touch the PowerBook's box or open it at one point). Guys, I'm spending $2000 here. Maybe you could treat me slightly better than crap. Also, they didn't have the extra battery in stock (despite promising me that they did when I had called before going to the store); I'll just grab one the next time I'm out and near a CompUSA or Apple Store. Overall, the store experience was lousy, but the Chestnut Hill store is a lot closer than the nice Apple Store at the Cambridgeside Mall. Ah well.

As for the PowerBook itself, Apple packs the machine in its standard ultra-clean and organized box, complete with the lofty "Designed by Apple in California" claim on the top sheet as you open it up. Ahem. Anyway, so far so good: I took the machine out of the store, opened it up on a bench and used the store's wireless to complete the registration process and make sure there were no dead pixels or other issues. The machine seemed fine.

Once I got it home, I installed the extra 512 MB of RAM I had purchased earlier at Crucial.com and got to work. After installing 150+ MB of product updates and rebooting twice, and hanging once, requiring a third reboot, all was well with the PowerBook's world. So far, I've only installed Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and some .Mac-related downloads on it, but I'll get to everything else today when possible. In the meantime, it's interesting (for me, anyway) to compare the size of this thing to my previous Mac portable, an aging 500 MHz iBook. As you can see from the pictures below, even though they seem to be about the same size, when you place them together, it's clear that the PB-12 is considerably smaller. Nice!

Overall, I'm happy with the purchase, though I'll want to do some performance comparisons to see where this machine falls within the range of portables I've got here for review currently. My guess is that it will be faster (in some cases, much faster) than the IBM ThinkPad X40, which uses a lowly 1 GHz ULV Pentium-M, and much, much slower than the 1.6 GHz Dell D800 and 1.8 GHz ThinkPad T42. This isn't a slam, by the way: Only the X40 is comparable, size-wise, to the PowerBook, and it's not exactly a stunning performer. The other machines are much larger and arguably in a totally different class. I'll test it with PhotoShop Elements 2.0, Word 2004, and, possibly, a few games. Should be interesting, but I can already tell this machine is a lot snappier than the iBook. Of course, it should be with a clock speed almost three times that of the iBook. I'm hoping its also a bit snappier than the 1 GHz iMac it's replacing.

[ Posted at 9:00 AM | Permalink ]