One Week With the 17" PowerBook
Well, after using my 17" PowerBook for one week I thought I would follow the recent tradition of posting a review of my experience. Why am I doing this when there are already hundreds, if not thousands, of such accounts floating around the Internet? Well, why not? I figure that if people don't care then they just won't read. So here it goes.
Edit: I forgot to mention that you can see a pic
here. It's SpyMac, so you might have problems if you're not registered (free).
Pre-ship experiences
When the new PowerBooks were first announced I thought they were impressive but not for me. I knew the 12" would be too small since I couldn't stand the size of the screen on my friend's iBook. It's not because I'm old and have crappy eyes or anything; I'm just 23. I do, however, prefer to have enough space for a browser window and one or two chat windows at the very least. I thought I wasn't interested in the 17" because it would be too big. An examination of my desk also convinced me that there wouldn't be enough room for the beast. I figured I would wait for the inevitable release of an updated 15" PowerBook.
As time went on I realized a refreshed 15" PowerBook was less and less likely to come in the near future, and the failing hard drive in my Ti 400Mhz was turning the wait into an agonizing affair. I reevaluated my criticisms regarding the size of the 17". Travel isn't something I do often. Since I started my new job in November the farthest I've gone with my Ti was to and from the office, just a mere 10 mile drive. And since I don't have a desktop Mac I thought the 17" PowerBook might make a good desktop replacement. Finally, I rearranged my desk and found I had plenty of room for it, so I decided to go ahead and order one.
After initially placing an order with MacConnection I quickly canceled that once I found out that Power Max had bunches and bunches in stock. I had my new toy the day after I placed the order, and MacConnection still didn't know if they would ship theirs before May.
Finally Holding It
Last Thursday was the big day. I arrived at the office to find my PowerBook sitting by the door, waiting for me. The elevator operator (it's an old building) had done me a huge favor by signing for the package herself. I quickly brought the box in and opened it with my coworker watching. As I opened the box the beauty of the machine was evident right away. Unlink the Ti, the new PowerBooks are much more industrial, which just a few months ago was hard to imagine. The Ti has a tricolor theme with grey, white, and black. Nice, but not nearly as refined as the single color of the 17" PowerBook. Just last Christmas I thought the Ti was the best looking laptop out there, and now I almost think it looks cheap.
Ok, enough with the aesthetics of this machine, time to actually use the thing. The first thing I did was to run the hardware test that comes on the software restore DVD. I was pleased and relieved when I didn't see any problems. We've all heard people complain about one or two dead pixels and what Apple's (and everyone else's) policy is on this issue. I personally think that horse has been dead for more than two years now, but I was still glad that I didn't have a single dead or stuck pixel. Recently I've read reports of bright and dark regions on some displays, and I don't have any of those either.
After the hardware test I partitioned my drive and reinstalled OS X. I've done this dozens of times, so there were no surprises here. Next I shut down my Ti and fired it up into target disk mode to transfer my files over. Personally, I think this is one of the greatest features to come to the computer since the Internet. I transferred about 20GB of data in about an hour. There are lots of backup gimmicks out there these days, including .Mac, but this beats them all hands down. I also settled on a name for my new behemoth. I now call it Babbage in honor of Charles Babbage, who designed the first universal computer back in the 1700s.
Since I was at work I decided to get put the 17" away for the day and finish up later. When I got home I played with the speed of the machine. Now, I'm not going to waste any time and space with benchmarks or anything like that. There are plenty of sites out there with information like that already. I'll just say this. When I got my Ti 400Mhz it felt like a laptop. Not as fast as a desktop machine, but fast enough to get work done. That's definitely not the case with the 17" PowerBook. I could use this as my one and only computer and not have any desires for anything else. Now I know that will change in a couple years, but in the here and now this machine is as fast as most of the desktops out there.
Putting it through the paces
I don't know about everyone else, but I feel the true test for speed in any computer is it's gaming performance. So far I've only played a couple on Babbage, WarCraft III and Ghost Recon. In WC3 the performance was spectacular. I never once noticed a skip or jump, even in large battles and with video settings at their maximum.
Ghost Recon was a bit of another story. With the video settings generally at a medium level and the resolution at 1152x720 I got an average of 50-60FPS. That's not shabby in the least, but in scenes with lots of trees and such the frame rate would drop as low as 12FPS. To be fair, I had 512MB of RAM at the time, there was a bit of a battle going on, and I was hosting the game (multiplayer) wirelessly. I have since brought my total RAM to 1024MB, and that could improve the performance, but I haven't been able to test this yet.
Is the 17" PowerBook a dud when it comes to games? Absolutely not. Even with the less than average performance in Ghost Recon I still would not hesitate to use Babbage as my only gaming machine at a large LAN party. I helped organize a LAN party of around 300 people the last couple years and the PowerBook could easily outperform half the machines that were there. Unfortunately I won't be able to find that out for sure this year, since the event has lost all of its leadership due to graduation (it was run by a college student organization).
Miscellaneous
Another task I've used Babbage for is watching DVDs on my television. This isn't really anything new since I did that all the time with my Ti. However, I no longer have the problem of Apple's DVD Player telling me that the current resolution isn't supported. This has to be due to the improved video card and nothing else. The 8MB ATI Rage Mobility in my Ti simply can't measure up with the GeForce 440 Go, and that's evident even in daily tasks. I now finally understand why everyone thinks Quartz Extreme is such a big deal.
AirPort reception is improved in the new PowerBook. This would have been a big deal to me a year ago when I was in college and trying to get a signal on campus. However, now that I've graduated I find myself only using AirPort at home, where I usually am relatively close to my base station. However, I now get a full signal in the basement, where I used to get none on my Ti. Not really a big deal since I never go down there anyway, but it may be nice to know that I can still use the Internet in the coolest part of the house this summer.
One minor annoyance I've discovered while writing this review in Word is that there is a slight pause when the computer tries to play a sound, but has to wake the sound card to do it. To make matters worse, OS X decides to do this even when the sound is muted. This is especially annoying in Word since the folks at the Microsoft Mac Business Unit decided Word should make a sound every time you make typo. I'll have to try the utility that's floating around that keeps the sound awake.
Finally, I was pleased to discover that I can burn CD-Rs at 16x instead of 8x like Apple says. I was even more pleased when I tried to burn a DVD-RW and it actually worked. This increases the usefulness of this computer a great deal in my eyes. Instead of having to burn 6 or so CD-RWs for backups I can just burn one DVD-RW. That will make things much easier to keep track of.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I love my new 17" PowerBook. Yes, the screen is huge, but I knew I would like that before I even considered buying the machine for myself. What I'm most pleased with are the speed of the processor and the graphics card, and the versatility of the SuperDrive. I'm sure I'll also enjoy the gigabit Ethernet and FireWire 800 once I get the chance to use them (my PCs at home and work are only 10/100). If you're on the fence about buying the 17" I definitely would say go for it. I have a feeling Apple's ad with Mini Me and Yao Ming, while really funny, may have had a negative impact in the minds of consumers, making the 17" PowerBook look bigger than it really is. You really need to see this machine for yourself before you write it off as being too big. It really isn't, except for those true road warriors out there. As for performance, you're not going to find anything out there in the form of a laptop that's better. Finally, some recent debacles regarding one-in-a-million defects have convinced some that the quality of Apple's products is sub par. This is ironic since Apple has been known for superior quality for years. One or two accounts of poor quality and service shouldn't change this, no matter how well publicized. If you're considering taking the leap and switching, do it. You won't regret it, and the 17" PowerBook is the perfect machine to get you started on your journey into the Mac world.
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