IBook vs 12 inch Powerbook

L

Lord09

Registered
Hello,

I'm considering either a 12 inch IBook or Powerbook and would appreciate any advice which system would be better for my situation. I've been a long time PC user and love Windows XP, the registry can be a mess and unstable at times, but I'm an experienced user, so that doesn't bother me at all.

I'm currently in school and majoring in CS. I've been away more and more from home and have decided to get a laptop to be more productive away from home. Plus the bonus of having a wireless connection at school is quite appealing.

I've been looking at the Centrino line of PC laptops, but for some reason I'm drawn to the 12 inch IBook and Powerbooks. I've read up on OS X and it seems VERY interesting. I do a lot of programming work, and being that OS X is built on Unix, it seems like a good environment to develope on.

I'd probably be surfering the web and doing mostly programming work ( Java, C++, PHP ) primarily. Also I'd like to use IDVD to edit and encode a DVD since I have a MiniDV camera, though I don't expect to do this frequently and very rarely.

My question is what laptop or more precisely, what processor would be more suited to my needs? The G3 seems quite old, but still capable. I'm leaing towards the G4 simply because its newer and faster than the G3 at the same clock speeds. What does everyone think? Price is a concern, but I'm pretty sure I can swing either laptop since I can get educational pricing. Though, the 1000-1200 dollar pricetag of an IBook is really nice.

My last question has to do with gaming. Though this won't be my primary purpose, I love Warcraft III and was wondering if performance would be noticeably greater with a G3 or G4 processor. Also how does the Ati Mobility Radeon 7500 compare vs the Gerfore4 420 Go on the Powerbook? Running at 900 mhz, would the G3 IBook keep up with the 867 mhz G4 powerbook?

Sorry the length of the post.

Thanks all,

Daniel
 
Hello Daniel and welcome to the Mac world!
Have you also concidered the 14" iBook? There are two advantages with it and one disadvantage over the 12" iBook. The advantages: bigger screen and longer battery life (about an hour). The disadvantage is that it is a little bigger overall.
I have a 14" iBook, and I just helped someone get a 12" Powerbook, here are my impressions (in no particular order):
1) The screen size on my iBook is a real bonus, I like it a lot.
2) Her Powerbook's battery ran out just sitting downloading an update while mine still had two hours to go.
3) I didn't actually do any work on her computer, just getting her software up to date, so I didn't get to test the performance much. However, on my iBook things like Fireworks and Dreamweaver run just fine. I don't have Photoshop though, so I haven't tested that.
4) Her laptop didn't come with any games. Mine came with Diemos Rising and Otto Matic.
5) If you don't get the Powerbook, you can't burn DVDs, period. The drive in the iBook doesn't burn them, and most (all?) external drives don't work with iDVD.
6) I have used Warcraft III with my iBook, and most of the time it runs just dandy. If you get too many units on screen, sometimes things will get a little laggy, but the only place where I actually noticed this was when trying to move the pointer (the movement gets pretty jerky). If you were to use it much, you would want to get a mouse. Using the trackpad isn't very satisfactory. I wouldn't say that the performance of the game would be a deciding factor though, especially since you said you wouldn't be using it a whole lot.
7) I am not qualified to compare video cards, I'm sure someone will happen along who can though.
8) The iBooks have just been updated (albeit very little), so they probably won't be updated again for several months. The Powerbooks, however, are about due for an update through the whole line. This probably doesn't matter, but I thought I'd just throw it in anyway.
9) About speed: the G3 is a fine processor, though fairly old. The G4 is also a good processor, though it is quite old too. The G3 has actually been shown to match, and in some cases beat, a G4 of the same clock speed when running applications that are not AltiVec enhanced (AltiVec is a 128 bit subprocessor that all G4s have. It significantly increases performance if an application is optimized for it). Most 'big' applications (i.e. Adobe, Macromedia, Apple) have been AltiVec enhanced. I think that the G3 will be just fine for what you want to do.
10) Have you concidered the 15" Powerbook? If you can afford it, that would be a a good compromise between screen size and speed. (I love the Powerbook 15", if I had the $$$ I would have got that instead, even with the smaller battery life)

Sorry for the higgeldy-piggeldy nature of this post, I hope you find something that will help you in there!
 
A couple of additional points...

The 14" iBook does have a bigger screen but it has the same maximum resolution as both the 12" iBook and PowerBook. Also, you'll be able to find a comparison of the the Radeon Mobility and GeForce Go somewhere but one thing I noticed is that although they're both 32mb, the GeForce has DDR RAM. The PowerBook 12 is AirPort Extreme ready as opposed the the AirPort on the iBook (802.11b instead of 802.11a, I think anyway) although if you're uni only has standard 802.11 (is it a?) then that won't matter too much. The main upgrades on the PowerBook 15 is higher resolution and a level 3 cache, which is especially useful for games. Although as dlloyd said, this should be getting upgraded soon (probably June at WWDC I imagine).

Whatever you get, you'll find OSX is lovely for programming. The development environment is great and includes support for Java, C++, C, Objective C and AppleScript. There's also Ada available for it.

http://developer.apple.com/tools/
 
Yes, I forgot the part about screen resulotions.
Clarification on the Airport part: Airport is 802.11b, Airport extreme is 802.11g. Apple never used 802.11a because it was too limiting (not backwards compatible for one thing. It never really caught on elsewhere either). 802.11g can be used on a 802.11b network, but not the other way around.
The 'standard' that monktus refered to would be 802.11b.
 
Yep, thanks for clarifying the Airport stuff, I looked it up later and remembered I had it wrong! I knew what I meant but... :)
 
Also: I've heard it said in this forum that the PB 12" gets a little hot. I've got a 12" iBook myself (500Mhz - one of the first) and do a lot of Java programming on it. Its great. Especially coz its such a great network citizen :) I can connect to almost every network I encounter - which is a bonus where I work, because I'm often switching locations. Oh - and the heat thing I brought up, because I often work for hours with my iBook on my lap, and although it gets warm (which NB doesn't :)) it never gets too warm for it to be uncomfortable.

Anyway - just my to (Euro) cents :)))

C
 
my new iBook intend to get too warm to have on my lap for a longer time..

just my two cents..

alex.
 
You think the iBook is warm?
Any Powerbook is going to be about three times hotter! :)
 
Hi Daniel, and welcome.

I bought an iBook 500 about 18 months ago when I was doing a little work for IBM. I have since gone back to university to study Information Technology.
The little iBook was my first, and so far my only Mac, and I love using it. Even now, when I have access to much faster PCs, I still use my iBook as my primary computer simply because it is so much more convenient. There is no point in having a PC that runs at 2ghz if you have to muck around for an hour to get simple tasks done, right?

The most important advice I can give is to get as much memory as you can afford. Mac OS X really needs 256mb minimum to be bearable, but once you get past about 350-400 mb it runs like a dream. It is well-built, light, and easy to live with. The screen is bright and clear, and the keyboard is the best I've seen on any laptop.

If I were buying a laptop now, I would go straight for the 12-inch powerbook for the superior processor and graphics chipset ... but if price is a factor, the iBook is still a sweet little machine.

As part of my university course, I study Java, HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, Perl, Bash, C and C++. I've never come across a project I wasn't able to do on my mac more easily than my PC wielding classmates. Where they needed to install software and fuss around for hours, my iBook was ready to dive straight into the work.

Whichever machine you choose, you will be very happy with the Mac. Don't dismiss the iBook too readily, but if you can afford a PowerBook, then that would be the better option.
 
Oh, one other thing:
Comparing the keyboards on the iBook and 12" Powerbook, they are similar but I think the Powerbook's is superior:
1) Slightly crisper
2) Keys are closer together, preventing as much hair and dust and stuff getting under the keys. Purely asthetic, but just a point.

Both have strong points and weak points, but you will be happy with either, I guarantee it! :)
 
Very interesting, I need a laptop for when i go out and talk to clients or when I just want to get out the house but still be able to do a little work.

1. Will a G4 iBook ever see the light of day? As in this summer.

2. Is it hard to read text on the screen? I noticed on the Apple LCD's if you switch the resolution, the text quality blurs when not in the default resolution. Does that apply to the iBook?

I'm looking at getting one next month, I don't need all the bonus software, this and that. i just need to be able to show what I'm working on to clients. I doubt if i will use it as much as my desktop, but if i can go chill on the porch in the shade and kick back and do a little work, this will be a great summer. :)
 
1. Maybe, maybe not. It seems unlikely to be launched this (Northern hemisphere) summer, though, so soon after the launch of the new PowerBooks. And remember that when Apple does launch a new product, it can take a while to actually reach consumers.

2. You have to remember that the LCD display actually IS the default resolution ... that is to say that if you have a 1024x768 LCD display, that is the number of LCD pixels there.
With a CRT display, if you change resolution, the actual number of pixels on the screen more-or-less change. An LCD can't do that, though.
If you use the display in another mode, it has to resample the display onto the LCD screen, which will result in some blurring. Thats why you should stick to using only the recommended modes, and it works best in the maximum resolution. The lower resolutions are really only for games (and they work great for that, come to think of it).
 
I keep going over prices and features, and i know i want the DVD option, and the price gets closer to the lower end powerbook, but I don't want a 12" PB, if i would get one it would be the 15. Then I think what i can do with the money, i have a thing for muscle cars, i can get my Cutlass painted something crazy for the summer and get those 20 in rims i wanted for some time now.

These decisions are never easy.
 
This is an easy question. If you want to use iDVD, you need a superdrive--thus the Powerbook. iDVD won't run on any current iBook.

Chris
 
Not iDVD, standard DVD playback. The low end iBook doesn't have DVD, so you have to pay and addition $300. Which moves me closer to the lower end PB.
 
I got a chance to play with the 12" Powerbook. It does have a better keyboard than the iBook, and the aluminum exterior is a thing of beauty.

The G4 will generally kick the cr*p out of the G3 for several reasons, not the least of which is that OS X itself is optimized for the G4.

That said, the new iBooks are decent machines.

Doug
 
I picked up a PowerBook 12" about a month ago and I love it. I have a strong *nix background so I'm right at home in OS X. I had a 14" iBook to play with for about a week before I made my purchase. While I did like the iBook, I decided to go for the PB 12" for these main reasons:

o G4 processor vs G3 processor

o Airport Extreme (802.11g) vs Airport (802.11b).

o PB 12" has a dead sexy design.

o integrated bluetooth

o better bundled software (for me...I wanted GraphicConverter and OmniGraffle in particular)

Overall, I am very, very pleased with the PB 12". Battery life has been great. The resolution (1024x768) is quite adequate since the screen is only 12". If it where a 14", a higher resolution would be much better. I have not had terrible heat issues like some. I am just extremely pleased. :)

- G!mpy
 
does the smaller screen size bother you? I think I will go to the local apple dealer and take a look at them side by side and see. I need enough screen space to work effectivly.
 
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