Simon Willison’s Weblog

#5 I bought my 12" iBook recently (pre recent update, DOH!) and never considered the larger ones, because I figured the smaller size would provide more advantage for travelling than the additional screen space. I've been using it as my primary system for a couple months now and haven't run into any limitations with the size. Therefore, I'm all for the small, cheap, powerful iBook.

#3 I bought my memory from Crucial after getting the lower memory from the apple store and everything has worked fine and I saved a couple bucks. You're able to select exactly what system you have and find memory for it.

Hope that helps.

Edward Dale - 16th December 2003 00:52 - #

I'm cautious of the small ones because I'll be literally living on this machine for at least two years, and although I'll carry it around a fair bit I plan to get a good padded back-pack so the larger size of a 14" inch one really doesn't seem like it will be a problem. I'm ready to be convinced otherwise though if anyone has experience with the 14" ones being too bulky for easy portability.

Simon Willison - 16th December 2003 00:56 - #

A few extra questions:

1. The difference between the 933 MHz and the 1 GHz iBook appears to be $150 (when you factor out the hard drive increase included with the 1 GHz iBook). Am I even going to notice the difference if I go for the 933 MHz one?
2. Wireless is a requirement, so I'm shelling out extra for the Airport Extreme card. The Airport Extreme base station looks lovely, but presumably a Belkin 802.11g router would do just as good a job at giving me wireless connectivity for almost $100 less. Are there any huge advantages to the Airport Extreme base station (like better performance) that I don't know about?
3. I'm almost certainly going to want to plug a real keyboard, monitor and mouse in to this thing at some point. Do I have to shell out for a special Apple keyboard/mouse or will bog-standard PS/2 or USB PC keyboards do the trick?

Simon Willison - 16th December 2003 01:12 - #

#6: IIRC, Microsoft recently announced that you could still run Linux on Virtual PC. They just won't support the use of it on Virtual PC anymore.
(Some Google magic helped with this answer.)

Michel Valdrighi - 16th December 2003 01:16 - #

Macs have never had PS/2, but standard USB keyboards and mice will work fine.

Matt Brubeck - 16th December 2003 01:16 - #

In answer to your few extra questions:
1) Probably not - RAM seems to have more of an appreciable effect than CPU (within reason of course)
2) No huge advantages afaik. I'd save the money and go for the Belkin
3) If you want to plug in an external monitor, consider going for the powerbook - The iBook only does mirroring, but the powerbook can span across the monitors. Remember that although the screen is bigger, the resolution is the same. I find the 12" absolutely fine, but you can always use an external monitor.

I have a 12" powerbook G4 and it's ideal for me. Coding, designing, browsing, development are all fine on this machine. Very portable too :-)

Hope this helps,
Ben

Ben Pirt - 16th December 2003 01:25 - #

I would totally recommend the 12" Powerbook. The keyboard blows away any other laptop keyboard I've seen in this size format, and is surprisingly good. The powerbooks also support video mirroring and monitor spanning, so you can hook it up to another monitor and work off of both - something that the iBooks do not support (at least without a firmware hack that Apple doesn't support).

The school I teach at has almost every single model of laptop presently available, so I've had a chance to try all of them (albeit some were short tests)... and I've found the iBooks to be good consumer models, but kind of chintzy feeling and not very sturdily built. The new powerbooks feel solid and well-built, and the 12" is really nice.

That said, my current laptop is one of the 15" models, which I like, but there has been some problems with build-quality on these - the infamous white spots, some small annoying aesthetic things, and did I mention that they get quite hot? But I'm still pretty happy.

Whatever you buy, definitely max out the RAM if you can afford it - Mac OS X runs so much better when it has lots of physical ram to play with.

Normally speaking, you can get anywhere from 3-5 hours on one battery charge, assuming that you're just doing light CPU work (text editing, browsing, etc.), and the screen brightness is turned right down.

I don't know why you would want to install Linux when OS X can do almost everything you would want to do with Linux (and the X11 environment cleans up the rest), but Virtual PC does support Linux installs. Hope this helps!

Neil - 16th December 2003 01:46 - #

Sorry about the line breaks - I didn't read the instructions before I posted. :|

Neil - 16th December 2003 01:47 - #

I have a 14" iBook. I think it's just 700MHz, which is fine, and I've actually been doing fine with 128Mb RAM, though recently I've been using some applications (like native Emacs) that have been stretching it (oddly, X11 Emacs wasn't a big problem).

The keyboards are all the same size, so you're only paying for the screen and potentially the bigger battery and such. People complain about Apple's estimates on battery times, but my laptop does a consistent 6 hours with the screen turned down to its lowest. Maybe they aren't turning the screen down (which is like a 2 hour difference), or maybe it's just more of an issue with PowerBooks (which I believe have smaller batteries).

The iBook can do mirroring -- there's a little hack out there somewhere to enable it. I've been using it for four months without any problems (so long as I don't connect or disconnect while the computer is asleep), and it didn't even require any reconfiguration when I upgraded to Panther. I think Apple was just being mean by disabling dual head for iBooks.

While I can use the keyboard for light use, for heavy use it's bad for my RSI. If you have long programming sessions, you might find yourself using a different keyboard anyway. I've been working on it 8 hours a day lately (though not for much longer), so a 14" is nice, but I sometimes wish I had a 12" for better portability. If it was a PowerBook, the 14" might feel more portable. 14" isn't big either -- it's the dual head that will really give you room.

Ian Bicking - 16th December 2003 01:59 - #

That's OK, I fixed them for you :) I want to get Linux on there so I can mess around with it - learn where stuff is, play with weird kernel modules and so on. I don't plan to use it for real work when I've got OS X running natively but I do a lot of stuff with Linux servers at work so it would be nice to have one I can play around with.

Simon Willison - 16th December 2003 01:59 - #

Damn p tags. Why must every comment system be different...

Ian Bicking - 16th December 2003 02:00 - #

I fixed them too. It's obvious that the current system isn't clear enough so I'm going to tweak it a bit this evening.

Simon Willison - 16th December 2003 02:02 - #

I recently bought a 12" Powerbook (refurbished) from the apple store. It is 867mhz, 256 MB RAM (640 max) and has a superdrive. All told it cost 1550. I need to move up to 640MB of RAM. I use monitor spanning, although I can get by fine on 1024x768 (I would have never believed it, but it's true). There are hacks for iBook monitor spanning, it's a firmware limitation (just google for it). I don't have virtual PC installed, though I need to as we do all of our DB schema's in Dia and export them to sql. Dia does not run on OSX. The reason why I mention that is you will inevitably run into X programs that don't run on OSX. It's not a terribly big deal (in fact most you can run remotely from a headless X server), but it happens.

All told it was worth it. Don't be fooled by maclots, the machine will slow down and quickly if you have postgres, mysql, apache, postfix, mail.app, safari+15 tabs, omnioutliner (comes free with powerbook), XFree86, MS Word (forget about openoffice for now), IM client of choice (I use adium), itunes, CSSEdit (you'll love this program), subethaedit or vim or emacs, terminal and cocoamysql (free mysql gui of choice) running at the same time. This is a typical environment for me and can make my pb thrash. I come from a Linux background (FreeBSD in the beginning, Gentoo for the last year) But it is still the most beautiful computing experience I have ever had. Apple has an amazing command of craftsmanship and you will grow to love the little things a Macintosh provides.

A couple of notes:

• Display spanning is cool. You can even opt to have the menu bar on the non-laptop monitor. This is an excellent feature.
• Apple Bluetooth keyboard. No funking around with IR dongles or whatever those things are... If you have a Powerbook, you just configure the keyboard from the OS and set it anywhere close to the laptop. Goes great with the Griffin iCurve.
• There is an amazing amount of cheap or free Mac software. It is truly the coolest shareware community alive.
• Last little bit - For all of the wonderful things to be said about the Powerbook keyboard - the ctrl key sucks. Especially if you live by GNU readline style key-bindings (which incidentally works in many of my favorite applications).

dusty - 16th December 2003 03:34 - #

Simon, maybe autop for the line breaks? It shouldn't mess with existing XHTML. I just updated the version on that page to be current with the one in the WordPress CVS. It used to not be so good about leaving existing HTML alone but I think it's come a long way. Would love to hear your feedback as well.

Matt - 16th December 2003 05:56 - #

I have owned a new 12" iBookG4 for a month now and am very pleased with it. I personaly find it has more advantages than disadvantages over the similarly sized Powerbook.

When at home I use an external monitor to display additional content. It is not true that the iBook only supports screen mirroring. Screen spanning can bea acheved with a simple AppleScript.

Battery last me well over 5 hours when reading or writing, with the display brightness turned down to about 75%. Good enough for me.

Nickolay Kolev - 16th December 2003 06:27 - #

• I'd have to reccomend the 14" powerbook over the 12". iBook screens aren't amazing quality, and OS X takes up a lot of screen real estate, so the extra size really makes a differance. It also makes the iBook feel faster...
• Buy from Apple. Check to see if you can get an education discount--that's more than you could save at any alternative vendor (non-Apple vendors may throw in extra RAM or a printer... usu. poor quality, but I wouldn't know). Also, the Apple store has 14-day price protection. Afaik, Apple doesn't cut prices after Christmas, only after new products come out.
• I'll second Edward's mention of Crucial for RAM. I recently bought RAM from them for as good a price as anywhere else, not including shipping (free 2nd day).
• You can use whatever USB keyboard you want, my priority was price when I bought Keytronic's a decent but dirt-cheap 105 key (Mac) keyboard. iBook usb ports are on the left, so Apple mice are not usable with iBooks if you're right handed: the mouse's cable is only around 24" (too short to reach to the right side of the iBook and still be maneuverable). Apple mice are also very pretty, have a nice solid feel to their click, and are way too expensive.

If I sound somewhat down on Apple, it's because I hate to oversell things I like.

rebecca - 16th December 2003 06:38 - #

It's true that there is an applescript which patches the firmware to enable spanning with the ibooks, but as I said, it's not supported or sanctioned by Apple. There are reports I've seen of people turfing their machines using this - even those that supposedly have "supported video cards"... so YMMV.

That said, the keyboards between the iBook and the Powerbooks are so different in quality. The iBook keyboards are flimsier and have a lot of flex - this is mainly because you can lift the keyboards out to install stuff like Airport cards, etc. I'm pretty sure the new iBook form factor still has this design.

The new Powerbooks, on the other hand, do not have any installable parts that go under the keyboard, so the keyboards are much firmer and more pleasant to type on.

Neil - 16th December 2003 07:49 - #

A bunch of thoughts, hope they are helpful!

• Keyboards on all Apple laptops are the same size. They are also all very good. Now that I have an external monitor I went out and bought a full size keyboard with apple-laptop style keys.
• The built-in screen on the 12" iBook, 14" iBook and the 12" PowerBook all have the same resolution, 1024×768. Which isn't very much. But it is usable. I did it for two years.

Since you plan on getting a monitor + etc. for desk use I definitely recommend a 12". They are just darned totable! (I've owned both a 12" iBook and a 12" PowerBook).

Battery life: I've gotten quite respectable battery life on both machines. 3-4 hours of normal (web-dev + music) use with the screen at full brightness. Although my iBook's battry pooped out (25mins tops) after 2 years of heavy use.

RAM: For desktop machines, I always recommend filling it out with non-Apple memory. Laptop memory is generally harder to find, and not as grossly cheap. So I've always gotten what I wanted BTO.

Regret: It is unlikely that apple will upgrade any of the portable line at the MacWorld Expo in January. Expect big PowerMac upgrades instead.

Apple vs Mail Order: They sell for the same exact price everywhere. To compensate, mail order companies will almost always throw in free (for price of installtion!) RAM, printers, cases. Stuff like that. But mail order places don't offer Apple's generally very nice educational discounts. It's a toss-up really.

Mac/PC keyboards are generally interchagable (USB only) but Designed for Mac keyboards give you the special buttons (volume+eject). Not a big deal ether way.

iBook vs PowerBook: I made this decision just a couple of weeks ago. I ended up going with the PowerBook. Reasons include screen size and speed. I wanted the 12" and the 12" iBook is only 800mhz. The PowerBook has twice the L2 cache, and more RAM than I could possibly get in the iBook. All of which makes for a very peppy computer. The construction is also better, not that the iBook is shabby, but the 12" PowerBook is a brick. I also wanted the non-hacked display spanning, and the DVI out. I have a blog post about my current setup. I'm very happy with it all.

To dusty: Your speed problems running all of those apps has nothing to do with the platform. It is because you only have 256mb RAM. I run all that plus PhotoShop, Illustrator, and QuarkExpress under classic and I don't have any speed issues at all! I have 768mb RAM.

Also to dusty: Yes, the ctrl is unfortunately placed (although arguably the ctrl is in the right place. and the fn is just on the wrong side of it :) ). But the wonderful uControl allows you to remap your troubles away

Xian - 16th December 2003 07:51 - #

Buy a powerbook not an iBook and wait for Macworld, they're probably going to announce new stuff. Processor speed doesn't do all, look at the video card as well. See if you can have an extra screen, not only in mirror mode but also in extended desktop mode.

Virtual PC still supports Linux but I don't see the point as Linux can be installed on another partition (Yellow Dog Linux, Mandrake PPC, Linux PPC...). And why would you want to run Linux when OSX has it all and more ?

Bertrand Mansion - 16th December 2003 10:02 - #

I'm in a very similar position, although I have definitely decided on the 12 inch form factor as I value portability above all else.

I've got a Linux box at home so I'm not as interested in Virtual PC as Simon, its the native apps (iPhoto, iTunes, etc) that are drawing me towards an Apple machine. I'm looking for a stable, portable platform for my digital artifacts mainly. Oh, and a bit of Python hacking as well ;-)

So my main question is what are the differences between the iBooks and the Powerbooks? Scrolling through the assembled comments the only major difference seems to be display spanning. Is there anything else to justify the higher price? I've got a video camera and notice also that only the Powerbook has a DVI slot, is that worth the extra money?

I'm not sure that it is, so I'm thinking of getting the 12 inch iBook with the memory and hard disk maxed out, because its about 500 quid cheaper than the equivalent Powerbook.

Andy Todd - 16th December 2003 11:00 - #

Simon,

I bought a 15" TiBook back 2 years ago and haven't looked back. Originally I went with a MacMall purchase, only having found you can occasionally get better deals from non-Apple dealers (getting service on things becomes more difficult). If you can use any of the educational discounts through Apple I would certainly suggest looking into using them.

One catch about the memory upgrades, yes you can buy Mac memory for cheap, but remember to buy as low a CL level as you can (it will make a speed difference). Crucial is typically a good supplier of memory (as already noted here by someone else).

The PBs also tend to have a lot of little features that make a big difference later on. For example the larger cache, and the auto-sensing GBEthernet ports have proven to be infinitely useful.

Dan Kalowsky - 16th December 2003 12:50 - #

Are there additional advantages to getting a PowerBook over an iBook that I haven't considered?

You can burn to DVD. Some models have a backlit keyboard. They're slimmer.

There was a point-by-point comparison in last month's MacFormat. Really, they liked both and saw speed vs. cost as the factor to consider.

My ibook is slow, and it's not the most basic model - but it has the old processor, of course. I'm told the powerbooks do get hotter. I once heard of someone burning his privates with a laptop. But that was a Wintel machine, and I guess you don't have to put a laptop on your privates.

Michael - 16th December 2003 14:00 - #

I'll just agree with others, buy RAM from someone else, I've used Other World Computing in the past. Monitor resolution would be an important factor for me, I prefer my old G3 PowerBook with decent resolution to the early iBooks. Oh, wait for Macworld in January before making a purchase, and if you can get the educational discount, go for it. Oh, and PowerBooks last, my old PowerBook is from 1998, and runs Mac OS X 10.1.5, it's not exactly speedy, but still works for occasional browsing, email, and basic editing. (Not a day-to-day development machine, but still quite usable.)

pete - 16th December 2003 14:57 - #

Not to beat up a topic already mentioned many times over, but buy your RAM from Crucial. Rumor has it that Crucial is Apple's vendor for RAM in the first place and, as such, doesn't void any RAM-specific problem support (meaning Apple will support machines that use Crucial ram). And I've used Crucial to update my PC at home and both Macs and PCs at work.

(Rumor would be the same as people in my office talking to Apple support one day, mentioning a RAM upgrade and recieving the suggestion to use Crucial from Apple support. Also, I bought a PowerBook (15'') last spring and have loved it)

Rob Ballou - 16th December 2003 15:18 - #

I have always used Apple and I love them. You're doing the right thing by asking around first.

About 8 weeks ago I went out with the sole intention of getting a 15" Powerbook. So I went to four Apple resellers with and experienced the most shocking service from each of them. The biggest howler: One reseller didn't know what a browser was. Another tried to sell me a product which won't be available till next year and they didn't know what quarter of 2004 it would be on sale. Interestingly none of the resellers had any of the funky-looking iBooks on display.

Ultimately even though I did my research beforehand I started to wondered that if they couldn't get the basics straight, I mused on how unreliable the after-sales service could be.

So I bought a Sony laptop. The black onyx screen is beautifully clear and the transition from Mac to PC was very straightforward. What's more Mac laptops are the (most beautful and thereby) most desired laptops for thieves so at least having a PC makes me less of a target as I live and work in London's West End.

Incidentally this new article in MacWorld expresses concerns about quality control issues with 15-inch PowerBook G4s that hopefully will soon be resolved.

My view is that you should wait a couple of months after xmas. Apple's marketing has made their laptops the product of the moment and they are having problems keeping up with demand. I have read about another couple of powerbook issues in the last few months so waiting till quality control is stable may well be the best move. What's more resellers will be more anxious to do a better deal in the New Year when trade is quieter.

irritant - 16th December 2003 17:12 - #

Some advice, from a trusted source. (Sorry, I saw your post and didn't have time to read the comments, so pardon any repetition). Below are my opinions, colored by, let's say extensive experience.

Vendor: Buy from Apple, or SmallDog.com. Buying from Apple will get your academic discount ($100 on iBooks, $200-300 on PowerBooks, pricing for US uni's only, each country has their own set up, I believe). If for some reason you can't get it through Apple, get it through SmallDog. They're the nicest people on the net. Places like MacMall are shady at best. Don't be swayed by "free" junk. Because it is. Junk.

Timetable: traditional wisdom has said "Never buy within a certain period of time before a MacWorld or other announced conference when a new product could be released." This has been made less of an issue by Apple no longer releasing hardware strictly based on that timetable. Now its much more random. Most Apple employees can't even predict anymore. You've been warned.

RAM: buy only from a Mac-trusted resource. Try datamem.com . Many a problem has been had with value RAM in Apple machines, since they have a low tolerance for low quality. 2.5CL (that's a quality rating) minimum. Buying third party reseller will save you money vs. through Apple directly, and done right, will not impact your performance. Buy as much RAM as you can afford (old computer adage). Seriously. BTW, (I just scanned some of the comments) Crucial maybe one, but is not the only supplier of RAM to Apple. They are however, an excellent choice.

Battery: Expect 2-5 hours from an Apple battery. Worst case: you'll usually get closer to 2 (for example, a whole DVD video should work on battery life) but with all energy saving features on, and managed brightness of screen, and low impact activities (say hand coding), you'll get longer. I don't feel a second battery is necessary (how often are you that far from a wall outlet?) but you might.

iBook v PowerBook: Both are very well built. The biggest difference I think you should consider: check out the 14"'s screen res. 1024x768 is unusually low and some people are bothered by this (not older people, who appreciate it) for having many things going at once, the 15" PB is highly recommended. Your student discount brings the price down nicely. Highly recommended. The ability to add and extend your desktop via 2nd screen is a great thing. Hacking this ability into an iBook voids your warrantee, and that's a bad thing, unless you can afford two iBooks. BTW, nice discount on AppleCare for educators/ees, which many uni's recommend for their Apple users. Good deal should something break. Check out for insurance as well: things happen to portables. A credit card may offer this, as well as many renters/home-owners' insurances. Screens are really, really expensive. Really. Other than these considerations, the rest is personal preference. Get to an AppleStore and spend some quality time with each machine. If iBook, make sure to get bluetooth built in (custom order), PB's have this already.FWIW I have a 12" PB, but sometimes wished I had waited for the new 15"

VPC: rumor has it that VPC 7 is progressing well. This isn't first hand knowledge. I imagine you can find the Linux kit for VPC somewhere in the near future, until it completely dissappears. Also, consider the X11/SSH route, run stuff on an old PC over a network (wireless, btw, is worth every penny. The Apple Base Station is more expensive, but much, much, much easier to set up, secure, and admin. The software's already in the OS. The chip powering it is one of only two on the market, so the insides are more or less the same across the board. Plus w/ the APxBS you can plug your old PC-cum-new-linux-box into its extra ether-port, and have it on your net). Or you could always load YellowDog Linux on an external drive and boot to it? Maybe... haven't tried that last route.

That's all. Enjoy the new Apple.

anon - 16th December 2003 17:43 - #

Oh, forgot, that whole 15" white spot thing is really over blown. If you get one with spots, Apple replaces it. That's simple enough. I wouldn't let it stop me, personally...

anon2 - 16th December 2003 17:45 - #

I've got a 600MHz, 12" iBook that I've bene toting around for nearly two years now. It's logged far too many air, train, and car miles, has been dropped down the stairs, thumped, smacked, tossed around, and has had coffee spilled on it at least twice. For a good portion of that time it's been my primary machine. All I can say is, if I had to buy one again... I would. In a heartbeat.

First, if you're going to be travelling you definitely want the iBook rather than the powerbook. It's a lot sturdier, and even with massive abuse it doesn't show the wear nearly so much. You'd think mine was clean and nice until you looked close and realized that the top and bottom surfaces (especially the bottom) is a mass of scratches. If I had a painted or coated laptop (like the Powerbook or most x86 laptops) it'd look like absolute crap, but it doesn't.

Second, the 12" and 14" systems have the same size keyboard (or they used to, at least) so there's little difference there, and the screen resolution's the same. I don't think it much matters unless you've got vision issues or the 14" has an option not in the 12". It might, depending on what you're looking for, I suppose.

Whoever designed the iBook has definitely had issues with spilled liquids. While I wouldn't dump it underwater, the keyboard and underlying surface are designed such that if you spill a reasonable amount of liquid on the surface you'll not have a problem. (well, besides the odd key sticking) The keyboard traces are protected and the spots under the keyboard where the liquid would run are safely sealed. Very nice.

You might want to check with Apple -- it's distinctly possible you qualify for developer discounts. Can't hurt to make some calls and send some e-mail. However you get the thing, buy the extended AppleCare warrantee! Really. It's worth it.

Dan Sugalski - 16th December 2003 20:34 - #

Re #6: If you want to run Windows on your [i|Power]Book, get VirtualPC. If you want to run Linux, DON'T. VPC translates x86 instructions into PPC instructions. It's SLOW. Instead, install Linux directly and run it natively -- dual-boot either into OS X or Linux.

Here's how:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/03/29/i book_linux.html

which builds on (and links to) this:

http://people.debian.org/~branden/ibook.html

As you noted, a lot of the apps you'd use under Linux can be had directly on OS X, either from Apple, via a ports system like Fink, or by compiling them yourself. So most of the time you'd not need to fire up Linux at all. But if you want to emulate closely the environment you use at work, then restart directly into Linux.

The only downside to this approach (and depending on what you value, it may be a fairly big one) is that you can't run Linux and OS X side-by-side. OTOH, if you use VPC, you can run the side-by-side -- but you may find the VPC environment untolerably slow. At home, I have a 400MHz G4 tower with 768MB RAM. We use VPC to run Win2000 for doing QA on Web sites under IE. But it's so slow that I usually just go camp out on the PII 333 in the other room until the QA is done.

Re supplemental #2: use a 3rd-party 802.11g router, but avoid Belkin like the plague! They did some incredibly stupid and customer-unfriendly stuff that came to light recently, and I have no confidence they've learned their lesson, or even understand why what they did was so wrong. They may be fine for dumb products like cables (tho I now avoid giving them any $ whatsoever) but I don't trust them to process my data. Instead, buy a LinkSys or D-Link 802.11g router -- same price, better track record.

Val Cohen - 16th December 2003 22:14 - #

My worry with the iBooks is the 640Mb RAM limit. The Sony VAIO that I bought a few years back is still going strong, but is lumbered with a 256Mb limit, rendering useless for doing anything more than browsing on. It didn't seem like a problem at the time of purchase, but became the reason for needing to replace an otherwise perfectly good machine.

I wouldn't configure a new machine, especially a Mac running OS X with anything less than 512Mb today. That means your almost at that 640Mb ceiling from new. I'd be looking for at least twice the current requirements as a ceiling. Basically, that means a Powerbook.

Drew McLellan - 17th December 2003 11:01 - #

A few points:

• the 14" iBook uses the same keyboard as the 12", just as the 12", 15" and 17" PowerBooks share a keyboard. Apple's got some stick for this, but I find the keyboard is a fair size anyway. (It was about the same size on my old 14" PB and a new 15" PB.)
• If you (think you'll) care about Bluetooth, buy from Apple and specify it as a build-to-order option. It's added to the motherboard and can't be fitted later by a third party. It's the same price as a dongle and I'd say it's worth it.
• The main thing you get from the AirPort Base Station is a really nice configuration interface (AirPort Admin Utility). On the other hand, I'm sure you're that if you're smart enough to make your way through Linux a bad HTML interface to a router won't phase you, and yes, the AirPort card should work fine. After all, you only need to configure these things once in a blue moon. You also have the advantage that if your Mac is ill, you can still configure it.
• iBooks can run Linux fine as a dual boot option, although you may have to wait a few months for the kernel to catch up to the latest motherboard/ video card drivers.
• Memory: get just the 128MB Apple supply and add third party stuff later. If you do look at PowerBooks and can afford it, specify all the memory on one DIMM, as one of the two isn't user-replacable.
• iBooks can do monitor spanning, but it's an Open Firmware (ie BIOS) hack. If it saves you $300, though, it's worth a try.

paul mison - 17th December 2003 18:05 - #

Hi Simon
I was having much the same questions some time ago and this article on MacOPINION helped me a lot.

traumwind - 17th December 2003 21:01 - #

I have the G4 933 14" iBook.

A few notes:

• It does support dual monitor spanning, and you CAN put a 1GB SO DIMM in the machine, despite what Apple says. Gives you 1152MB !!
• Get you memory from http://www.crucial.com/uk
• Battery life is excellant, over 5 hours.
• It seems to be more solid and resiliant to knocks than the Powerbooks.
• For a unix coder it is the best value. The power books have better displays and graphics card which are geared toward the typical photoshop user.
• PC USB keyboards and mice work fine. I have a special resource file which allows you to get proper key mapping on PC UK keyboards. I use a PS/2 to USB adaptor at work with my iBook. I even run an old IBM clicky PS/2 keyboard. Email me if you want a copy, I never found another way to get a UK keyboard working properly.

Will Macdonald - 17th December 2003 21:34 - #

Lots of good advice here already. I'd add to it this: if you want dual-boot, look into getting a cheap Firewire drive, install Linux on that, and figure out how to boot into it using Open Firmware. That should give you a safe Linux sandbox with no icky MS products. Besides, it's just a geeky-fun thing to do. I haven't messed with this myself, but some Googling should prove informative.

The iBooks are more robust than the previous 15" Powerbook, but the current crop of PBs seem pretty sturdy too. If you plan on using with an external monitor (which sounds like a good idea), go for the PB 12".

Adam Rice - 17th December 2003 23:58 - #

A couple of comments:

* Uptime: One comment I haven't seen is the amazing (for laptops) uptime OS X and iBooks give--combine the uptime with the battery life & you have a winner. Most recently I've had 63 days without a reboot, simply closing & opening the lid as I go. Completely changes the way you work, and gets you to complain about apps that crash once every thirty days or so... :-) (Moz & Terminal...)

* Backpack: Take a look at the Eastpak laptop backpack, I have one of these (although by a different name I think) and it fits well with an iBook: http://www.ebags.com/eastpak/mastermind/product_de tail/index.cfm?modelid=10439 The best thing about it is that it doesn't *look* like a laptop bag & the brand isn't immediately identifiable as a laptop bag maker (like Targus and the like are). (A little security through obscurity but still...)

* I bought a refurbished 14" 800MHz iBook from http://expercom.com/ and have been mostly very happy with it. Unfortunately this model (from ~Nov 2002) seems to have design/manufacturing fault that causes the graphics hardware to fail requiring replacement. I also had the DVD drive die on me. A if you're looking at getting a refurbished model might pay to check out some of the boards to get an idea if there are known manufacturing flaw. As mentioned elsewhere buying AppleCare seems to be a must but you have up to a year after purchase to do so. If you're into such things Expercom also give you frequent flyer miles for your purchase.

P.S. This comment entry mechanism really is sub-optimal... :-)

Phil - 18th December 2003 08:49 - #

One more point I forgot to mention; if you plan to use Bluetooth any time in the future get it now. The iBook can be supplied with an internal Bluetooth adaptor, but it can NOT be fitted retrospectively.

Will Macdonald - 18th December 2003 12:29 - #

If you want to purchase reliable RAM, you may want to give a try to transintl.com.

Michael Guitton - 18th December 2003 16:25 - #

If you do go the Virtual PC route, go ahead and spring for the PowerBook because you'll want the RAM capacity. A VPC "container" really sings if you can give it upward of 512mb of memory. But it shares with OS X so it's tough to run a VPC container and anything else with much speed if you have less than 512mb on board the machine total. I prefer a gig of memory. Good luck!

Jay Small - 19th December 2003 16:35 - #