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More of my sitesWinInfo Daily News
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About this siteFor 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 Friday, June 04, 2004The new 15-in. PowerBook: A laptop for all?Computerworld: "With this version of its sleek aluminum laptops, Apple has really hit its stride.The 1.5-GHz processor shows its stuff in day-to-day tasks. Versatile? Very much so. With AirPort Extreme now incorporated across the PowerBook line, wireless connections are made easy. The SuperDrive allows for easy CD and DVD burning. The backlit keyboard is useful in dimly lit places. Portable? You bet. You get a bright and clear 1,280-by-854-pixel widescreen LCD, full-size (and solid-feeling) keyboard, all in a package that weighs 5.7 lb. Add to that the fact that Apple dropped the price of the faster of its two 15-in. models by $100, to $2,499, and what's not to love?"Well, $2500 is a lot of money, for starters. You can get a Dell 15" widescreen--albeit in a heavier package--for just about half that, and it outperforms the Mac pretty handily. Anyway. The author goes on some nonsensical rambling about screen resolution and then, ... "So what we have here is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, update to the midrange PowerBook line. The 1.5-GHz chip manages to make this the fastest 15-in. model yet from Apple, a laptop reasonably good on battery power and, most important given the other goodies included (wireless networking, 64MB of video RAM, Universal Serial Bus 2.0 and FireWire 800 ports), one that's reasonably priced." Except that it's not. And honestly, that's the biggest problem I have with these machines. Yes, Apple has lowered the prices. Yes, they're beautifully designed, though I still prefer the elegance of the TiBooks to the bland stateliness of the aluminum PowerBooks. The battery life isn't great (the aforementioned Dell lets you put two batteries in the unit simultaneously and makes the roundtrip plane flight from Boston to Seattle with over two and a half hours of battery life left. Think about that for a second. If you're watching a DVD movie on the 15" PowerBook, 2.5 hours is literally all the battery life you can expect under optimum conditions). But, that said, I'm still drawn to the widescreen, and unlike the author of this article, I think the 1280 x 854 screen is fantastic. (The Dell is 1280 x 800, and most HDTV displays are 1280 x 768; why are these things all so close and yet different?) But (And there's always a "but") ... the smaller 12-inch PowerBook is cheaper, allowing me to immediately buy a second battery (and it gets slightly better battery life to start with). It's much smaller and would be much easier to pop in my bag with whatever laptop-of-the-month PC laptop I'm carting around at the time. And it performs identically to the 1.33 GHz version of the 15-inch PowerBook. It burns DVDs. Hmm. [ Posted at 9:52 AM | Permalink ]
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