12" Powerbooks drop $200

aah excellent to see kendell's back to his inane best. AE not as revolutionary as airport? well nice spotting professor (profanity edited even before fryke could get to it). i think your skewed figures completely belie your credibility. 600mb in ten secs? what a bunch of (more profanity edited pre-fryke).

phew. and more on topic - g3joel's right, prices on powerbooks have dropped across the board, even though the 17" hasn't dropped in price in the US. it seems that apple australia are wising up to the exchange rate, which has made it pretty attractive for people to buy overseas (before now):
17 PB: US$3299 -> AU$5067 (RRP was AU$6995, now AU$6295)

We should see price drops across the board now down here, even though they may not be reflected over in the states. Zonino!
 
Over a gig? I didn't say that - but I would be transfering gigs when I do backups of my user folder (I lost a drive, and lost precious data! Not going to happen again!)... But mostly I'd be transfering original scans (LARGE) and large PSD files.

Among other things I do, I'm a Graphic Designer and have been known to work with files around or larger than 100MBs (altho not as of late).

Originally posted by cf25
dont yell at me, but what kind of files are you transferring around that are over a gig? and i'm curious, but why do you have to transfer them?

i'm trying to wrap my mind around what type of work you would be doing that requires to to use files that big much less have to tranfer them frequently.
Click to expand...
 
100 MBs is not big. That other guy was talking about it taking long to copy GIGAbyte files over airport--that's 10 times your 100 MB file. 100 MBs won't take very long--whether via Airport, AE, or ethernet. So relax--get what works best for you.
 
kendall: If you don't like AE, don't fryking use it! If Sogni wants a computer with AE, then he can get one. Just leave the issue alone.
 
Hey, if' you're gonna go wireless, you need to go extreme. There's no good reason to pay 3/4 the price for 1/5 the speed. But I would also say that having wireless at home is sweet for lan gaming and convenience, I usually get up off my lazy but and grab hold of a cable coming out of my 100Mb hub if I want to transfer anything sizeable. Powerbook and a tower with a crossover cable both doing gigabit ethernet, you could expect to get like 25MB or so per second, about the max speed of the notebook drive. Wireless is good for convenience and connectivity, wire is good for speed. Why not just have both?
 
why even go AE though? With the final specs for 802.11g being dropped by the final specs, you gain what?

Not too much in real world throughput.

Anyway, I still think that the prices are too high for the PB 12".
 
The specs for 802.11g didn't drop when the standard was confirmed, IEEE just wanted manufacturers to quote actual throughput instead of thoretical. Its not like anyone hadn't been doing the same with 'b', everyone quotes 11Mbs. And how many internet newbies expect to get 512k a second downloads on their DSL? :)

AE is still substantially faster than Airport when you take into consideration that 802.11b doesn't run at 11Mbs in the real world.
 
Truth be told, Airport (and AE) are fine for surfing the net, but for any Mac to Mac transfers they are hideously slow (compared to Ethernet).

I don't have exact figures, but one of the more memorable transfers I did a few weeks ago involved shuttling about 4GB from one Mac to another.

The Finder reported that it would take 11 hours to complete. I'm not sure if that was true, as I set it up, and went to bed. Later the next day it was done. It would have taken me less time to burn a DVD-R worth of stuff and use sneakernet.

As for the 12" PB being too expensive... Compare it to simliarly equipped PC laptops and you'll see it holds up pretty well...

Personally, I would wait on any Mac laptop purchase. The Powerbook line is set to be refreshed and the 15" model is going to be updated to the new enclosure. This all should happen in the 30-45 days if Apples usual timetables stand.

I think the 12" is a great machine. I really would like one, but I'd like to see the fix a few things about it...

1-640MB is not enough for pro laptop, especially when running OS X. The 12" should accomodate at least 1GB. This makes the current model a deal breaker for me.

2-I'd like to see Bluetooth built in. Not a huge deterrent, but it would be nice.

3-The 256 L2 cache is puny, especially when there is no L3 cache. This seriously hinders performance under OS X. They should increase the L2 to 512K and include 512MB for the L3.
 
Originally posted by serpicolugnut
Compare it to simliarly equipped PC laptops and you'll see it holds up pretty well...
..
1-640MB is not enough for pro laptop, especially when running OS X. The 12" should accomodate at least 1GB. This makes the current model a deal breaker for me.

2-I'd like to see Bluetooth built in. Not a huge deterrent, but it would be nice.

3-The 256 L2 cache is puny, especially when there is no L3 cache. This seriously hinders performance under OS X. They should increase the L2 to 512K and include 512MB for the L3.
Click to expand...
you are right on my man (apart from bluetooth - i think you'll find it's smack-bang built-in)

1. true true, ALTHOUGH - the 12"er, believe it or not, supports the new 1GB SODIMMS which are starting to become available (at a hideous price). so in a few months they should be affordable and you'll have 1152MB RAM! Wohhhoo!!!
2. duh..
3. Too bloody right! My old 800 Powerbook kicked the creamy pants off my 12"er in games like Ghost Recon. Don't know if it's the video card or L3 (or both), but frame rates are, in a word, completely BOG on the latest games.

So I reckon all the 12" needs is a L3 cache (to be a true _Power_book) and better vid card.
 
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