Switching Questions

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The last time I had an apple was in the late 80s when I got my hands on an Apple IIe, but since then I've been using PCs and now, I'm switching back to a Mac. And no, those commercials had no weight on the matter. :p

Anyways, as I was looking through the Apple store online, the 700MHz iBook caught my eye. What I was wondering is, what would be it's equivalent in PC specs? Because as most know that simply a higher clock speed does not make a chip superior to another.

And another one. I also plan on getting an airport card installed on it. If for some reason i can't find an Airport network around, does the airport card also do 802-11.b? or will I have to do something else to get that?

Thanks in advance :D
 
I had an iBook 500 for about 8 months, which I loved. I don't know much about different computers and their speeds, but it was comparable to my roomates Pentium III 866 (I think). I was using OS X with 640 mb of ram. It ran just fine, I'm sure the 700 runs even better (duh!).

As for the Airport card, I had one as well. It worked great with my BaseStation at home and connected flawlessly to my school's wireless network and even my mom's Linksys Wireless Router. I think those are all 80211.b or whatever.

Good luck! You won't be sorry!
 
I bought an iBook 500 about a year ago now, and have never regretted it. Even though I'm running the original specs (66mhz bus, compared to the 100 in the current models, and only 128 mb of RAM) I find the performance pleasing and the system responsive ... not blistering, I'll grant, but it never-ever seems slow. Since your 700 will have the faster bus as well as the 40% faster processor, you should find it a significant step up from your 500 (assuming the same amount of RAM).

As a rule of thumb, I think you can pretty much double or even triple a PPC clock speed to find the equivalent on Intel. This is pretty vague though, as the PPC will perform even better on some apps (such as Photoshop) and a little worse in others. I could say, though, that you won't find yourself wanting for more processor power. Maybe more graphics power if you're a gamer, but then I don't pay too much attention to that.

As for Airport, it is in fact 802.11b compliant and works well with most any wireless network.
 
I have an iBook 500 that I love, although it is slow at times with 10.1.5. It is roughly equivalent to my Compaq 750 mHz desktop machine.

The new machines have a better graphics card and other performance improvements. I think it would be fair to compare the performance of the 700mHz iBook to 1 - 1.5 gHz PC laptops.

Keep in mind that hard drive speed matters about as much as cpu speed. The graphics card is very important as well.
 
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