[mrtaber]

Just brought home my new PB: 667MHz, 512Mb RAM, DVD player... What a beauty! I think I'm in love The only thing in my life that is just as beautiful is my Movado watch. Sigh. Sorry to gush, but what a piece of work. Thanks for listening. (And to think, just yesterday I was working on an iMac 350)...

[skyman]

Originally posted by mrtaber:
<STRONG>Just brought home my new PB: 667MHz, 512Mb RAM, DVD player... What a beauty! I think I'm in love The only thing in my life that is just as beautiful is my Movado watch. Sigh. Sorry to gush, but what a piece of work. Thanks for listening. (And to think, just yesterday I was working on an iMac 350)...

</STRONG>

Do all of us here a HUGE favor and please post a review of the Ti 667 after you have played (used) with it for awhile. There are many here (like myself) who are sitting on the fence post "thinking" about buying the new Ti PB.

I love my 400Mhz PISMO but the new Ti PB's are oooohhhh so NICE!!

[mrtew]

Originally posted by skyman:
<STRONG> Do all of us here a HUGE favor and please post a review of the Ti 667 after you have played (used) with it for awhile. There are many here (like myself) who are sitting on the fence post "thinking" about buying the new Ti PB.
I love my 400Mhz PISMO but the new Ti PB's are oooohhhh so NICE!! </STRONG>

I just got my new 667Ti/48gig/DVD a couple of days ago and it is perfect. Besides the speed and beauty my favorite thing is that it has TWO apple keys. YES like the new iBook the Ti now has an apple key to the right of the space bar like every apple should have. I never thought that Apple would see the light! Sooooo useful for putting stuff in the trash, going back to the previous webpage, getting info, etc, etc, etc. It also has an enter key where the right option key used to be and the volume controls on the function keys have been rearranged. Otherwize it seems identical to my Ti400 except the latch and hinges seem more solid and the keyboard seems stifffer too. The harddrive spinning is 5 times quieter but the clicking of the harddrive is louder... more like an iMac. The fan is on a lot more but mostly at low speed which is almost unnoticable, but the high speed is about the same as the old Ti fan. The space on the hard drive is unbelievable, and the speed is just GREAT. I can log off and back on in OSX in about 5 seconds! Questions?

Agreed. If you have a pre-Ti book, and you're looking to replace it, don't hesitate -- these are NICE machines. If you have an earlier Ti, I'm not sure it's worth the money for only an incremental upgrade, but if you have a Pismo, I say go for it.

Alex

[sailor41]

15 (20?) years ago when my Woz addition II GS showed up and it was COLOR I was on cloud 9. Moving to this Ti 667/512/30/DVD Airport 2, has put me on cloud 10 ( X ). What a machine!

It has been a pleasure from opening the box to the first bleary eyed shut down.

Even my most hard core PC user friends admit that Apple makes the best quality products both in build quality and integration. And I agree. Tests made:

Set up air port- up and running in 15 min.

Plugged in still camera- instant mount and friendly software led to storage, (still need I-view for serious cataloging and presentations ).

DV Cam- no problem, using I-Movie.

Printing on a HP 4ML (6years old) works.

Speed is just fine in OS X.

In fact it ALL works as advertised with very little if any fuss.

Except- speakable idems in OS-X (it works in 9) Apple says they are working on it.

All in all, I am very happy with this machine and Apple and OS X. Keep in mind that OS X is a baby like the origonal MAC OS was many years ago and look what that has grown to in 9.#. We are lucky to be here while it happens.

Enjoy-B

i love my ti 667. i replaced the hard drive with a 48 gig ibm drive (which clicks incessantly). but the rest of the machine is just wonderful. i didn't have a rev 1 ti, but i'll give you my thoughts and some comparisons to my pismo 400 (which received the 30 gig drive from the ti):

- solidity: the titanium does not flex at all like the earlier ones reportedly did. i've never had a battery disconnect or fall out(!) while picking up the machine with one hand by the side. in fact, i find it remarkably solid. i was just thinking about how much the ti feels like i'm walking around with a monolith from 2001: A Space Odessy. just solid and very substantial feeling. only problem is that the left side of the lid is about 1/2 mm closer to the bottom of the computer than the right side when closed. but it doesn't seem to affect the display in any way. after having the ti for a while, i can't believe how creaky and flexy the chassis/keyboard is on my old pismo (now an mp3 jukebox). and i always felt the pismo was pretty solid.

i guess there were hinge issues on the old ti's. they seem sturdy enough for me. but i also have mine double bagged. so it's pretty protected.

- heat/fan: well, the ti's fans do come on a lot more often than the pismo. the bottom of the machine can get fairly warm. i would not consider it hot or uncomfortable. but it definitely gets warm. the slow fan comes on pretty quickly. and second fan is quite loud and has come on a few times when i've been doing intensive photoshop work while the computer was on my lap.

- display: while i wish the display was a bit higher resolution, it's still adequate (since i just also bought an 18.1" sony lcd for spanning). the screen is very bright. sometimes uncomfortably so. no dead pixels.

- sound: the speakers are just okay. they don't get very loud at all but i guess the upside is that they also don't distort.

- cd/dvd: the slot on mine does not work perfectly. i have to manually shove the disc in about halfway for it to catch, but that's not a big deal to me. when i first got it i tried to let the motor suck the disc in, but that just wasn't happening. no problem for me, but it should work better.

- battery life: well, i also installed a 48 gig drive in mine that spins faster than the 30 gig that came with it. so bear that in mine. i don't run it without the power supply that often, but it seems to be running around 3 hours of normal usage for me. okay, but not great. probably couldn't get a whole dvd in on a flight.

- performance: it's fast... yes, it's fast. don't play many 3d games, so i can't comment on the game performance. tony hawk demo seemed to run pretty well and smooth. 10.1 performance is much faster on here than on my pismo400 (which is to be expected of course).

- knick knacks: the new power cord is okay. i don't like the flip out prongs used for wrapping the cord and i also don't like that they've now supplied me with two extra pieces that i feel compelled to keep track of and carry: a clear plug cover and the adapter that makes the brick into a plug directly (it's my own deal i know). the power brick has no "bottom" so it gets scratched. since it's shiny white plastic, this tended to bum me out as i was using it in a parking lot during a shoot and it got a bit scuffed. the brick also gets quite warm itself. the light on the power supply socket on the back is cool! plus it changes color to show the status of charge on the battery. the extra apple key rocks.

there are now indications on the flap down door that give info on what socket is on the machine. i understand the previous ti didn't have those. it makes plugging in mice and firewire harddrives much easier. of course, my pismo had those, so it doesn't seem like a real breakthrough.

that same door is more spring-loaded for closure now (from what i've read about the rev 1 ti's, the door wasn't springy). so the door doesn't remain open very often when there's no plug in it. at first, i found it irritating that the door kept getting in the way, but i'm used to it now and it's probably saved me from snagging it on clothes and such while moving it.

i love the magnetic latch. i know it's a small thing, but it's a detail that they put some thought into and i find it vastly superior to the extended plastic tab of the pismo. when it's closed, pressing the button pops the lid open just enough to grab hold of. but the screen hinge has enough resistance so that it doesn't flop around. and closing it is just cool. it closes with a nice little "whoomp!" and then the apple logo dims. very solid.

conclusion: well, i was waiting for faster proc/bus speeds and an improved video chip over rev 1 to buy the titanium. i'm glad i waited. i opted for the dvd drive since i plan on buying an external cd-rw which would be 4x faster than the one that is built into the ti (if i would have bought it). so that's not an issues for me. i'd prefer to be able to watch dvd's while i travel more than being able to burn cd's slowly while on the road. already put in the 48 gig drive and should be putting in the gig of ram next week. i'm maxing the thing out! i'll upgrade again probably when the speed is significantly better and the screen is higher rez. but i could use this machine for a couple years probably.

[MoKoNa^]

Originally posted by skyman:
<STRONG>

Do all of us here a HUGE favor and please post a review of the Ti 667 after you have played (used) with it for awhile. There are many here (like myself) who are sitting on the fence post "thinking" about buying the new Ti PB.

I love my 400Mhz PISMO but the new Ti PB's are oooohhhh so NICE!! </STRONG>

I thought I'd do you the favor and post a short review of the TiBook 667 - 512 MB - 30 GB - DVD

As an avid pc user I've had my share of apple related problems... Turns out the problems were due to windows inflexibility. But regardless I've argued that macs were too much high priced junk with too much plastic.

I have now changed my mind completely. The TiBook is nothing short of amazing. With Office V.x running on the widescreen I'm simply in heaven. I thought I was going to use it (the widescreen LCD that is) to play dvds, but look at the desktop! amazing... You can fit anything onto there...
Using Excel a lot for school these days, I was just breathtaken with how much faster everything went than in the traditional windows environment. I could fit more columns on the screen, the interface was so much easier to work with and of course it has those awesome shading effects... Looks nice and feels nice.
Of course, the speed of the processor and the 512 Mb of Ram did it's share...

The only game I've tried out is the Return to castle wolfenstein X demo. Works like a charm though I need to set down the resolution a bit (I use the "fast" setting), otherwise I get connection failures and such.

The trackpad is a bit awkward, never could get used to those, so I got a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer. Works great as well. No problems there... I do wish that you could temporarily disable the trackpad since I seem to touch it by accident while moving the mouse.

The OS itself... Well, I'm not a big MacOS fan, but I love Unix. MacOS X is perfect. (except for a few problems, nothing serious though) Now we just need more software for it. The apps that come with it are very useful and there is a terminal, of course...
I wish that virtual pc 4 would work better in OS X than it does... (Using testdrive version now) It's a bit on the slow side.

I also wish that Quicktime could use fullscreen... Instead it can use "Fill screen"... Not really the same thing, now is it? I'm also missing a zoom function in the DVD player, in order to get a more full screen on old DVD's that were encoded in normal size, although they were widescreen.

The fan is not very noisy. Compared to my previous PC laptop the highest fan noise I've heard so far sounds like almost like the pc normal mode. It does sound a bit like a hairdryer, but put on iTunes and you should have no problem. It usually stops within five minutes. I haven't heard it for two days now, so it doesn't come on very often.

The casing is very nice! One problem though... The keyboard does touch the screen. Although gently, this puts all the grease off of my fingers on to that lovely screen. I put a sheet of paper between the two when I close it and that seems to work... The casing feels rigid, wouldn't want to drop it though, feels like it dents. It doesn't flex and it doesn't get very hot. The part that gets the hottest is ironically the on/off-button in the top left corner. The one thing on the computer I never use.

It wakes from sleep in under half a second with Classic not running. Just amazing piece of machinery and I am indeed a very happy camper!



Hope you didn't fall asleep while you read this post... Now it's finished... Phew....

one more thing: the airport reception is not very good. if it's improved from the previous ti, it must have been dismal in that machine. i'm working in a facility that has airport stations all around the building and the ti is VERY sensitive to its position in relation to the station, even when it's very close (15-20 feet). sometimes i can raise it off my lap and get a full signal, then put it back on my lap and lose the signal completely. and no, i'm not wearing lead underwear.

[skyman]

Thanks to everyone for the reviews. This information is very help for myself and others.

Please keep those reviews coming.

Thanks again!

[Powerbook lover]

You can use fullscreen on Quicktime if you have Quicktime 5 Pro. I had it on my Pismo and it was great. I love my 550mhz Powerbook as well. It's an awesome machine. I can't stop smiling when I use at my campus' library. Everyone that passes by stop and just stares at it.

[cbr600f4]

Just tried my Airport out today and it seemed to work great. The building I was in had two base stations and I could access both fine. Only tried using the internet from the closer one, had 5 dots and it was super fast. Going to love having this thing in the lecture auditorium. No more nap time for me.

Nick

[seanyepez]

Long live the Pismo!

I have a 500-megahertz Pismo and, though I have a 667-megahertz Ti, I still use the Pismo more often.

Something about the Ti makes me feel uneasy about using it. Sure, the build quality is much improved over the original Ti, but it still feels all too delicate.

You might have read about my wonderous Pismo and its exploits around the world in other threads, but I'll rehash them...

This Pismo was bought in late June of 2000, thirty minutes before I was scheduled to go to Japan. I stole two fully-charged batteries from my Lombard and was a happy camper on the flight to Japan. I watched the few DVD's I had (four of them, namely). It is definitely the best Mac I've ever owned (for its time). The PowerBook was quick, stable, and perfect. The only time it crashed there was running Microsoft applications (Internet Explorer, namely).

The "shiny new computer" glow soon disappeared, but it was still an excellent machine. Upon returning to the United States, I had to organize a LAN party for "memory lane" on a boat. My company was merging with another company, Entrust, and to celebrate the past, we had "memory lane", a section of various photo albums, summaries/remnants of past gatherings, and this LAN setup to resemble those nights when the graphics artists and engineers would play Marathon or Quake I over the LAN at our office. We had four 500-megahertz Pentium III machines, and our computer supplier was nice enough to lend us top-of-the-line graphics cards at the time (GeForce2 GTS AGP cards with 64 megabytes of DDR-SDRAM). My PowerBook hosted the Quake III server. At times, I would hop into the game using nothing more than a touchpad and the arrow keys, dominating the better-equipped individuals wiith 19-inch CRT screens and over 100 frames per second alone. It was one versus four. I believe the score was somewhere around 59 to -6 after four minutes.

Soon after that, I went on a family trip to Hong Kong where I acquired my Sony DV camcorder (I believe it is the PC-100).

It served me well at an informal LAN party with limited space (one where we could only fit laptops around the table), as I dominated the games once more. I suppose it's not the machine, but the man, but the Pismo, having one of the best graphics setups at the time (only to be bested by my friend's Toshiba Tecra 8100's 16-megabyte S3 Savage) really helped.

Throughout the next school year, I got a lot of work done on my PowerBook. My machine fell off a counter onto marble, but it was fine. AirPort signal was awesome from anywhere in my house (we have two base stations). I even dropped it in the pool once (some idiot splashed me, not knowing I was browsing the Internet wirelessly and had a laptop in my hands). Everything was fine, surprisingly. A good half of it, including the batteries, were submerged.

It went with me to Florida on two occasions, Hawai'i twice, and spent 3 weeks with me in Peru once. It kept me warm when our Hyundai van died at about 5,000 meters up, the summit of the Andes mountains. I just had to fire up SETI@Home.

It once fell from my desk onto my PC desktop. The PC desktop crashed, but the Mac was still ticking.

Now, I'm in San Diego, posting from a hotel room with a crappy dial-up connection. I'm sure it's done a lot for me, but its escapades are so frequent I surely have overlooked a few. In fact, I left the Ti at home because I felt it might not stand up to the rigors of travel.

The machine is a wonder of the world. Everything is still functional. I cannot believe how I took for granted the AirPort reception on this machine. The 667 gets about two thirds of the reception my Pismo does at any given point in the house (compared to my mother's 500-megahertz Ti's half). I actually feel this machine can be jostled around. The Ti is very delicate and scratches easily. Also, the battery life is yet to be surpassed.

Forget you Ti users. As I said, long live the Pismo!

[mftalon]

I had a Pismo 400, my first laptop. Shortly after that I had an opportunity to buy a used (original) ibook for peanuts from a pc buddy that only needed it for school and had since finished. That was my 2nd laptop. The ibook was much more durable than the pismo and the airport reception was superior. The Pismo flexed if you picked it up by one side, where the ibook didn't.

That being said the Pismo was a far superior machine and I used it daily for a little over a year.

An opportunity presented itself to sell the Pismo and I did so. The original Ti books were still the new model. I couldn't see going from a 400 pismo to a 400 Ti. So I waited, Apple lowered the price and I almost jumped. But again I waited, wanting the better features rumored to be coming for the next rev Ti book.

Boy am I glad I waited, this Ti book is awsome. I picked up the 667Mhz /DVD 30GB model and feel it was well worth the upgrade from the Pismo. I have a G4 450 Sawtooth at home and this laptop is definitely faster. I was afraid the laptop version of the G4 wasn't going to fare well against the desktop machine, but it does.

While I thought the Pismo was pretty solid and I liked the subtle curves of the design I think the Ti Book is even more solid. It's case doesn't flex or creek when I pick it up by one side like my Pismo would. I don't travel much like the guy posting above so I can't say that I have as much experience with durability as he does but the Ti book feels pretty solid to me, it just looks delicate because it's so thin and high tech looking I think...

The airport range isn't as good as the Pismo and the Pismo isn't as good as my original ibook but it still gets reception all over my house so I'm satisfied.

The only time the fans come on is during 3D gaming, my guess is the video card must get hot. When it does kick in, it is rather loud but I'm gaming and really don't notice. It's amazing that much fan noise comes from something so small...

It doesn't get hot when you are running on battery alone, easily comfortable in my lap. However, plug in the power cord and after a while it gets to hot for my lap.

I use OSX on it exclusively although I do have classic installed for Photoshop and a few others. I have illustrator 10 and it works quite well in OSX.

Mine did come with 2 dead pixels, at first that really bugged me but since I couldn't really do anything about it I've gotten over it. My Pismo once had a dead pixel and I was able to massage the back of the display and it went away. No such luck with the Tibook, luckily the dead pixels are kind of out of the way and barely noticeable.

I love the look, feel and size of the tibook. I say if you are on the fence with a Pismo, you will probably feel good with the upgrade. I know I am.

[milhous]

PISMO!

[Macfreak7]

Originally posted by milhous:
<STRONG>PISMO!</STRONG>

aaaaahahhahahahhaha

pismo's kick Ti's ass
esp. with the TWO firewire ports!