[RealMac]

I decided to get my thoughts together and post something that encompasses almost everything as far as my PowerBook goes and post it to this forum. Hopefully you'll be forgiving of any grammatical mistakes. Here goes..

For the past few weeks, I've been the owner of a new PowerBook G4 15". It has proven to be an interesting experience.

Let's start off with a bit of background. Macs have been my dominant computer platform for the past few years. It started off in 1995 with a Performa 550, then moved onto a 6400, G4/400, iBook/500, G4 867 dual, ibook/800 and what is now my 6th PowerBook G4. My main reason for using Macs for so long is because of the operating system.

I'd purchased a 20" Cinema display for my desktop, probably for no other reason than to spend money, or somehow deal with my insecurities elsewhere. That was about a $1200 purchase. This was a pretty decent rig. However, the tower was too noisy for my tastes and naturally wasn't very portable. I brought it to a linux user group meeting once out of what was probably some momentary lapse of sanity. The dual g4 system and cinema display was now heavily used to start a newspaper in Illinois.

For years, I'd felt isolated by my computer system in a way. You see, I spent so much time sitting in my room chatting away on IRC, or doing other computer-related things that it felt like much of the outside world was passing me by. I thought that getting an iBook would address this, but those systems clearly showed their limitations (for me) after just using them for a few days. The 800MHz unit was almost tolerable, the 500MHz unit, lacking Quartz Extreme support and having only a 10GB drive was just awful. It was my first laptop though and definitely a learning experience.

In early September, I registered to be in Apple's Student Developer Connection program. You get some great tutorials on how to work with Apple's developer tools, such as Project Builder and XCode. Not to mention free OS upgrades and a steep (approximately 20%) one-time hardware discount.

Initially, I ordered a Titanium PowerBook G4, cancelled that and ordered a Dual G5. Thinking that the performance benefits offered by the G5 would just be too much to pass up. However after about 2 weeks of waiting for the thing to ship and the introduction of the 15" Aluminum PowerBook, I changed my mind yet again. Ordered a 15" superdrive model with an 80GB hard drive. Due to some stroke of bad luck (or was it good luck in retrospect?), the order wouldn't go through. It would be another week's wait till I went back through the queue and the order would be processed again. At this point, I get tired of using the family Dell Dimension 4550 XP-equipped tower (windows 'works' to get certain jobs done, but it clearly lacks the elegance of Mac OSX) and decide to swing by my local Apple Store and pick up a model then and there. With the edu discount, the 15" combo model was $1799 plus new york state's high 8.75% tax rate.

I pick up the unit, get an Airport Extreme Card with it, drive to COMP-USA to get some notebook memory and come home. The ram worked fine, but the Airport Extreme card is not working. I honestly thought I broke something (flashback to 2002 on my sawtooth g4 unit, I bent a pin on the airport connector rendering that aspect of the hardware useless), but it turns out that it wasn't my fault. Guy from the Apple Store there put the card from a working unit into my machine and it still wasn't working.

As a sidenote, if you ever have to send a machine to Apple for repair, make sure you take out any hardware that wasn't shipping with the machine first.


Sixth??!! Yes, that is not a typo, this is my 6th PowerBook G4 system. The Apple Store has a policy that if any defects show up within 10 days of purchase, you will get a replacement. As for the next 5, they were all affected by the infamous white spots issue. The folks at the Apple Store were very understanding with my problem. One guy even put a bunch of different units on a rolling cart for me to pick from. I kinda felt bad when I had to keep going back. They definitely did their best to ensure that I was a happy customer though, outside of offering a free upgrade to the next higher system. Even one of the Geniuses at the store had his machine affected by the same issues. He just hasn't sent his out for repair yet.

Ok, let's move into more positive territory.

Apple is the probably the only computer company that ships its machines in suave packaging. The box the unit ships in, is a a black box with a handle on the top. Inside are two thick pieces of plastic. The top has the system manual, cables and restore dvd. The bottom holds the powerbook unit itself. The portable is wrapped in some kind of foamy liner type material. More of it is used to cover the keyboard and trackpad from the screen. I use the keyboard cover religiously. Although these units aren't supposed to get the keyboard marks I saw all too common with the iBooks and Titanium PowerBooks, it doesn't hurt to play it safe.

Getting the system up and running was a breeze. If you're a touch typer and already have Internet access setup at home, you'll literally be on the net within minutes. No annoying serial numbers and activation codes required, unlike the windows boxes I've used.

The unit comes with a 15.2" wide XGA TFT display. It's just the right size as far as I'm concerned. Fits into a backpack quite fairly well and is totally awesome for viewing DVDs. I don't have to squint at all in order to see what's on the screen, unlike some screens I've seen delivering 1600 x 1200 pixels in a 15" area.

The audio on this machine is good for a portable I'd say. It doesn't sound too tinny, like with the ibook and gets loud enough to fill up a room even when others are talking in the background. A midrange-enhancing third speaker under the keyboard definitely helps here.

Most portables today can get hot enough that you don't want them in your lap. If you've read about the lawsuit bought about by a man who burnt his member, you'll start to understand why. This PowerBook is no exception. Playing a DVD and doing work in the background brought the CPU temperature up to about 145� Fahrenheit. Around this point, the internal fan kicks on. As the rates of data being transferred goes up every year in the portable space, it doesn't seem like this trend will end anytime soon. With normal usage, and on a hard top, such as a wooden desk, the system is far within acceptable limits for temperature.

Any recommendations for inexpensive things to make using the laptop in my lap a more pleasureable experience are welcome. I've used a Podium CoolPad with the iBook, but that thing looked like it was for a kid. Not to mention it didn't really seem to do a whole lot. Just transferred the heat to my lap a little more slowly.

95% of the time I use the laptop, it's plugged into a power outlet of some sort.. However, the few times I've run off battery, I was satisfied with the overall life. I've read that Panther is much better than Jaguar here, which makes sense. Kernel has been tweaked further, code has been streamlined where possible, etc

I've had a few people ask me about my laptop on campus, two who use the Mac and one who is a windows / linux guy. The Mac-using folks (I've only seen two others) are happy to see me representing, but most of the Windows users don't say a word to me. Perhaps its fear of what they aren't used to, or just my bleached blonde hair, I'm not sure. Some observations here though... The Dell laptops I've seen them use make this really loud sound when you close them, halfway between the closing of a door and the snapping of a button. One guy's noisy laptop fan kept going on and off in the lab, sounding like a jet engine ready for take-off. I wanted to ask him why it did that, but refrained from commenting.

[RealMac]

I've been using a Booq 15" Powersleeve (insert image here) which goes inside my backpack, for protection of the unit. It's got a lot of room for DVDs, papers and pens, but clearly isn't something I'd feel like carrying around with me all the time. The top is slightly exposed, which could be problematic if it's raining or snowing outside.

The 15" PowerBook feels very solid, though I treat it with care on a consistent basis. I never squeeze the lcd to the base of the unit, always placing force on the bottom of the case. I use iKlear Apple Polish on my screen with the lint-free cloths my kit came with. One bit of advice about this. Never use it on a screen that is still warm and use it very sparingly. If you do not, you may notice marks left over on the screen even after you've sprayed the polish on the screen and have "buffed" it off.

It's truly one of the more elegant laptops I've seen. Aluminum feels much better than cheap plastic, but is easier to scratch off and naturally conducts more heat. This case doesn't have a whole lot of room for the addition of more internal devices (other than PC card, ram and wireless), unlike those thick PC bricks that let you swap the CD-ROM drive for another battery and what not. This isn't a major concern for me or most of the other people who might be purchasing a PowerBook though.

The keyboard is far improved over what the pre-g4 ibook line. It doesn't bounce up and down while I'm typing on it and it's not spongy, like the first line of keyboard shipped with the iMac. Some call it one of the best keyboard they've used in a laptop. While I'm not sure about that, it doesn't leave my wrists aching any more than 99% of the other keyboard on the market out there. As a sidenote, don't rest your wrists on the palmrests while you're typing, unless you want to get carpal tunnel syndrome and look at Apple's Ergonomics page (http://www.apple.com/about/ergonomics/)

A full array of ports means this unit will prove useful for quite some time. Bluetooth, two USB 2.0, firewire 800, firewire 400, s-video out, dvi, gigabit ethernet, modem, audio line in, headphone out. Not to mention a built-in microphone.

It has substance to it, but is not very heavy at 5.6 pounds. In other words, you'll feel a little more worn out carrying it with you around the city, but it's not going to break your back..

After running ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo in terminal.app, here is my output:
IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=4568,"Amperage"=1200,"Current"=4550," Voltage"=12506,"Flags"=1090519045}).

The PowerBook ships with HFS+ journaling enabled. This makes things slightly slower overall but helps in the event of a system crash and speeds up the time it takes to boot after a kernel panic or system crash (quite rare, but it happens).

I've used FileVault under 10.3.0, which was quite nice until I decided I wanted to turn it off. Then some of my preferences were lost.

Some concluding thoughts:
-Get an external hard drive for backup if at all possible. You won't regret it.

Am I satisfied with my purchase? Yes. If I wasn't such an avid mac fan, might I have switched to a windows portable? It's very likely I'd have gotten totally frustrated and vowed to never purchase an Apple product again. Let's hope the white spots don't come back!

[RealMac]

My powerbook is still going strong as I head closer and closer to a year elapsed since purchase. I baby the machine and other than the white spots issue inherent in many revision A units, I haven't had to take it into an apple store to get any problems rectified.

The unit gets sluggish at times, but usually only because of one app that I have way too many windows open in. Running top and hunting down the cpu cycle sucking app and terminating is usually restores the machine to full performance. When I use the machine in public, I still get looks from people about what a nice laptop it is. Having everything integrated in the box for the most part is great when you're like me and don't like to fiddle with things outside the case.

Battery life has dropped somewhat, though I usually just run the machine off AC power. A total refresh might improve upon it, but I still am happy with the unit overall. I ran this today and go the following output.

$ ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo
| | | | "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=4091,"Amperage"=1200,"Current"=4078," Voltage"=12451,"Flags"=1090519045})

The 1.5 models are almost tempting if for no other reason than the CPU is 50% faster than the one in my unit. Otherwise, the new models really aren't compelling to me. Now when the G5 PowerBooks come out, that'll be a totally different ballgame.. Hopefully Apple won't charge outrageous prices for them.

Changing the energy saver setting from automatic to highest with AC power has done wonders for the machine's performance as well.

Some other advice I would give you. Make sure you don't wear a watch or ring / something that will impact the wristrest area, otherwise you can easily scratch the finish. Watch out for the machine near animals (read too many horror stories about how Garfield or Rover knocked the PowerBook onto the solid tile kitchen floor, either intentionally or just by yanking too hard on a cable. Getting a protective sleeve / bag to protect your investment is never a bad idea also.