[Paezley]

I am going to be stuyding abroad and the idea of a small, affordable notebook is very appealing to me. my question is, is it naieve to think that I will be able to use photoshop and my favorite editing program simultaneously on the new ibooks? I know the 64MB of RAM won't cut it, but if I upgraded to 192MB of RAM on the 500MHz G3, will it be enough? (and on a side note totally unrelated to web dev, anyone know what kind of power adapter i need to get for the ibook??)

[IceEnclosure]

Certainly it will be powerful enough.. 192 MB tho is kinda silly.. what, are you gonna go buy a 128 for like $30 US? buy a 256 doggonit..

I have 100MB allocated to my Photoshop alone, so 192 would be insufficient I'd say. Although true, web work takes up less ram than print work, and web is what you'll be doing.

The iBook says it can take up to 512 (in the top model), but people have had problems finding a low pro chip that'll work.. Check around, but you can have up to 512MB of ram in that lil badboy.

Unsure about the power adapter

[Raman]

Originally posted by Paezley:
<STRONG>I am going to be stuyding abroad and the idea of a small, affordable notebook is very appealing to me. my question is, is it naieve to think that I will be able to use photoshop and my favorite editing program simultaneously on the new ibooks? I know the 64MB of RAM won't cut it, but if I upgraded to 192MB of RAM on the 500MHz G3, will it be enough? (and on a side note totally unrelated to web dev, anyone know what kind of power adapter i need to get for the ibook??) </STRONG>

I would go for the 512.
I maxed out my Pismo's ram to 1 gig and now I have no problems in IS 9.1 using:
iTunes
Dreamweaver
Fireworks
MRJ Tools (java)
IE 5
Simpletext
BBEdit
Photoshop
Mactella
Aimster
AIM
and a few other things all at the same time. I'm even thinking if I can put the scratch disk on a RAM disk that might help speed up some things in Fireworks/Photoshop.

I usually have an external 15" monitor at 800x600 for my web stuff, but since you can't do that, you might want to drop the res every once in a while to test, if your sites are being built to look good on 8x6.

[Paezley]

I should have mentioned before my, well, predicament i suppose.

I have used windows ever since i got into computers back in middle school. and up until this summer, i had no friends who used macs, and the midwest is a little mac shy, in that most computer retailers don't usually stock many macs. so this past year when I went out to seattle, wa for college, i was quite surprised when the people i fell in with were all mac users, leaving me the odd-windows-man out.

the more I was around macs, the more i liked them. this summer i got a job here in indiana working with the webmaster at the local university. Ben is an ardant mac user as well, and as such, i have been working exclusively with mac machines here at work all summer long. this is what has prompted my interest in an ibook, kind of as my gateway, my raft, to begin to try to bridge the gap from windows to mac.

long story short, i do not know very much about macs yet, especially as far as hardware goes. so my question really is, how does RAM work with macs--are there specific DIMMS that only work on macs, or is RAM RAM and will any DIMM work? If not, where should I look for cheap mac RAM? I don't know much about apple, but i know enough to know that RAM directly from apple is just about the biggest rip off i've seen as far as markup goes. any sugestions? (and i know this is off topic from this board, but i figure its a basic enough question that you will all forgive this fledgeling mac user )

[Joshua]

I believe the iBook's use typical laptop RAM (SO-DIMM's). You can get 256MB for around $90 from Crucial.

As far as an iBook for web design... it's certainly possible. I used an older iBook for a couple months earlier this year, and it can do all the things you'll need to do. My only problem with it was screen size (I like to have BBEdit and at least one web browser side by side), but this might not be as much of an issue with the new screen resolutions on the iBooks.

For serious professional web design, I guess I'd still recommend a desktop with a big CRT/LCD, but the iBook is still a good option.

[graphiteman]

Originally posted by Paezley:
<STRONG>...and on a side note totally unrelated to web dev, anyone know what kind of power adapter i need to get for the ibook??) </STRONG>

The iBook comes with a power adapter in the box (nice looking too). No need to buy one unless you have two locations for the iBook and hate carrying adapters with you . If you do need to buy one, they're $69 US and you can get them at the apple store (http://www.apple.com/store).

[funkboy]

I've just gotten my iBook recently, and it seems to be more than fine for web development - if you can get past the color-shifting LCD (which gets more shifty the less the brightness is set) , it should be ample for you (unless you're conditioned to something like a dual G4) . I just came from a 333 G3, and I'm very happy with the performance of the iBook (and I only have the stock 128 in here!) - however, OS X will need some real performance gains to be used as the main OS on here - doing anything in the background will at least make AIM not even be able to keep up with my typing!