[abundrefo]

In the notebook (laptop) world, users who search top line machines to work with graphic design, Quark, Pagemaker, Potoshop, etc...should look for POWERFUL STUFF, of course.

Apple is top line stuff, of course.
Anything beyond a 15" Apple PowerBook, I think, should be better than any Pentium or AMD notebook.

...but what about the 12", with no L3 cache?

Which one would do a better work dealing with those programs above, the 12" PowerBook or a top of the line Pentium notebook?

Thanks
Andre.

[Michel_80]

Apples are quiete slow. Actually the Ti 1ghz encodes DivX slower than my 933 p3 laptop.

So any pentium M (banias ) will be faster than any Apple laptop.

However, despite this, the 12 inch remains probably the best 12incher in laptop world. Sony, Toshiba, IBM have not shown 12" with fitted optical drives and until they do, the PB12 remains a hot machine.

[juanpacolopez]

Originally posted by Michel_80:
Apples are quiete slow. Actually the Ti 1ghz encodes DivX slower than my 933 p3 laptop.

So any pentium M (banias ) will be faster than any Apple laptop.

However, despite this, the 12 inch remains probably the best 12incher in laptop world. Sony, Toshiba, IBM have not shown 12" with fitted optical drives and until they do, the PB12 remains a hot machine.

What you say about DivX encoding is simply not true. My 1ghz TiBook encodes DivX at just over 1x... by comparison my best friend's Athlon 1.6Ghz (desktop mind you, much faster than the 933Mhz p3 you suggest) is only about 3/4 of that. I've done side-by-side tests... the only thing his machine is truly "faster" at is games.

While there are a couple of instances where his machine is slightly more responsive in a given app, when it comes time to render or export or what have you... my little Ti keeps pace brilliantly. And don't even get me started on how much faster FCP is than the windows version of Premiere on equiv. hardware... realtime G4 effects shouldn't be taken with a grain of salt... that's USEFUL stuff

Just my thoughts...

[Michel_80]

Working in YV12 colorspace using Avisynth I could get to 1x with my deceased PC laptop.

I refuse to believe that Athlon 1600+ encodes at 3/4 realtime. That is unnaceptable and you should tell you friend to use better software (avisynth + vdubmod)

Thanx

[The Placid Casual]

Without wishing to be flippant;

Argggg! another Powerbook vs PC thread.

[MacNStein]

<affecting best Scottish accent> If it don't run OSX, it's CRAP! </affecting best Scottish accent>

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by abundrefo:
In the notebook (laptop) world, users who search top line machines to work with graphic design, Quark, Pagemaker, Potoshop, etc...should look for POWERFUL STUFF, of course.

Apple is top line stuff, of course.
Anything beyond a 15" Apple PowerBook, I think, should be better than any Pentium or AMD notebook.

...but what about the 12", with no L3 cache?

Which one would do a better work dealing with those programs above, the 12" PowerBook or a top of the line Pentium notebook?

Thanks
Andre.

On a serious note, we are talking Apples and Oranges. The comparison is useless in terms of Apps, and to an extent hardware aswell...

If you are 'serious' graphics person, you won't use a laptop of any type for work. You'll want much more RAM expansion, PCI cards, cutting edge chips, changable graphics cards, multiple hard drives, multiple optical drives, gig ethernet etc etc You would not touch a notebook either PC or Mac!

The trick is, how much of balance a notebook can give you...

For what it is, th 12"PB is an awesome little machine that will run Photoshop, Quark et. al. like a champ.

I have a 12" and it performs really well for what I need. (It is not as quick as my old DP867 for graphics work, but my Powermac couldn't go to the beach with me so easily!) It is IMHO the best 12" on the market...

As for comparing it to a 'top of the line PC notebook', well for a start they don't run OS X so what is there to compare?

More to the point would be to examine exactly what you need the machine for. Then look at your price range. Then look at expenses such as software. If you have to buy all the Apps for PC the possible speed gains are soon outweighed by $1000's of dollars of software...

It's pointless saying 'how do these compare' when you don't know what to examine, aand under what conditions...

Peace,

Marc

[juanpacolopez]

Originally posted by MacNStein:
<affecting best Scottish accent> If it don't run OSX, it's CRAP! </affecting best Scottish accent>

Couldn't have said it better myself. No speed vs. speed argument could ever top that simple little truth.

[Michel_80]

So far, in my opinion the best overall laptops in the world are (in order of size):

Toshiba R100
PB12
IBM T40
PB15
PB17


As for speed, there are some cheap 3.06 P4 laptops which are not really laptops.

[marumari]

This probably isn't the best place to have a poll of this sort if you're looking for unbiased results, you know.

That said, there are a number of machines out there that compete quite well against the Powerbook 12". For my money, the best machine in the PC world of that size is, unfortunately, discontinued. That would be the HP Omnibook 5xx series. Wonderful laptops with keyboards that are even better than what you get on the 12" Powerbook.

If we're looking at current machines, the best machines are probably the IBM X31, the Fujitsu S-Series, and perhaps the Toshiba Libretto series. I'm not a big fan of Toshiba's ultraportables - they always use their funky tiny drives (the ones in the iPod). They're not exactly cheap, if you know what I mean (compared to other laptop hard drives).

[power142]

I really hate to chip in on such a nonsensical debate, because as The Placid Casual pointed out, they are apples and oranges

I recently went through the laptop buying dilemma. Thinkpads and Dells, while nice machines, didn't do it for me, and to get decent 3D graphics performance in a *nice* laptop compatible with Linux (life is too short for Windows) costs arm+leg. In the end, I plumped for the PB17 and I'd never go back.

I'm fairly tall, so the PB17 doesn't feel big at all.... a friends PB12 feels so small by comparison, but is a great little machine.

[marumari]

Well, provided we pretend that we are living in some fantasy world where every machine can run MacOS X (or Windows/Linux, I suppose), then I think it is perfectly reasonable to compare the machines. The 12" PB is an amazing machine, it really is solid. The X31 (and most Thinkpads) are usually overpriced and underspecced (as opposed to Apples being merely overpriced). Both the PB and the X series are solid, reliability-wise. If only they had a Windows key on their damned keyboard - I need the extra Meta. Blah.