| Product: |
Apple PowerBook G4 |
| Date: |
10/12/03 (651 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Powerful, incredibly portable, gorgeous design
Disadvantages: Smaller screen size
There are two types of people in this world - those who love Apple Macs, and those who are wrong.
i jest, of course. Mac devotees love being part of a select group as much as PC users find Mac-people cliquey and, for all i know, snobbish.
If you ask me, we Mac-ophiles have plenty to be snobbish about, but we'll come to that shortly...
GORGEOUS
Macs tend to be things of beauty, and the G4 PowerBook range is no exception. The 12" model shares the sleek "Titanium" appearance of its larger relatives (the aluminium casing is tough, light, and an effective radiator for the heat the machine generates), but packs the same power into an extremely cute package. This is one tiny portable, all right! The 12" is small enough to fit into much more compact spaces and carrying devices than its siblings. The trade-off here, of course, is with screen size. If you're used to a 15" PowerBook, the more bijou viewing area does take a few moments to get used to - but having designed web pages and even edited video on this model, it's an acceptable situation. It's not ideal if you like to keep multiple documents open and tiled on screen, but the ease of switching between applications in OS X compensates for this too.
WELLY
The PowerBook is Apple's professional range of portables, capable of mighty feats of multimedia processing as well as your everyday data crunching. For RAM, or working memory, 256Mb is inbuilt, with a spare slot that carries another 256Mb - a total of 512Mb that can handle complex graphics and video editing with ease. To upgrade the RAM, the additional 256Mb can be replaced with a 512Mb chip, giving a total of 768Mb - only really necessary if you're going to spend the vast majority of your time in outrageously memory-intensive tasks.
The 867Mhz processor has got some welly, too. While that figure might not sound uncommonly fast to PC-fans, you should remember that App
le's processor's perform better than Intel chips with the same nominal speed - and have the added advantage of not being promoted with that awful "Blue Man Theme" that comes up every time someone mentions Pentium in a commercial. ("Doo-dah-dee-doo" my shiny metal ***!)
Anyways, back to the point. With 512Mb of RAM and an 867Mhz G4 processor, the PowerBook can handle pretty much anything you care to throw at it. It's OS X native, which means you can run older applications in the Classic system-within-a-system window, but you can only boot the machine in Apple's most recent operating system (the aforementioned and utterly cool OS X). i've created large graphics files in Photoshop, tinkered with audio in ProTools, and edited heaps of video quality in Final Cut Express - and the PowerBook has handled them all with ease. Rendering video is the only really time-consuming task, as you would expect, when we're talking about a laptop computer generating broadcast-quality video!
SLINKY
The smaller keyboard of the 12" G4 takes a moment to get used to, if you're used to the 15" model. However, the keys are so sleek and well sprung that the machine is a dream to type on - especially for me when i get back from working on a PC with a hard and disgustingly clunky keyboard.
The TrackPad (i.e. the rectangle beneath the keys that replaces a mouse) is responsive and easily adjusted in System Preferences.
ROOMY TOO
A 40Gb hard-drive as standard, though not astounding these days, is still impressive for a portable with a 12" screen. i've stored a back-up of my 10Gb iPod music library on the PowerBook, and still had acres of storage space for digital photos, music videos, and scores of applications. The only way i have ever taken up the majority of the space was during video editing - when almost 90 minutes of digital video was saved on the hard drive. Incredible.
(
NB: if you are editing video projects on a regular basis, the usual method is to use a Firewire hard drive as the scratch disk, where all the footage and render files are stored.)
CONNECTY
Modem, Ethernet, 2 x USB and Firewire ports are lined up on the left of the machine, rather than at the back as with the older 15" PowerBooks. The Ethernet will connect you to the office or home network, the USBs are handy for digital cameras and certain printers, and the Firewire will transfer audio or video to your iPod or digital camcorder at blazing speeds (that's Apple's phrase, but it absolutely true - mp3s fly over to an iPod in the blink of an eye).
Setting up an internet connection in OS X is incredibly straightforward - the entire system is so intuitive. Even connecting to a PC can now be done without recourse to manuals, such has been the improvement in interoptibility between the systems.
WIRELESS...LY
One of my favourite discoveries on this Mac has been the Bluetooth, which comes as standard on all 12" and 17" G4 PowerBooks. i previously thought: when am i gonna use that? It's a short-range radio connection, which the PowerBook can use to transfer data to and from mobile smartphones, palmtops and the like. Having got hold of a Nokia 7650, i had to give it a whirl, however, and was instantly sold. Firstly, you can keep the same v-card contacts on the computer as are on your smartphone, which means not having to write all your numbers down when you get a new phone (so long as it's a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone, but i wouldn't go for anything else now). Secondly, you can share diary notes in the same way - there is a slight hitch here as the Nokia 7650 doesn't send the details in a format the Mac can easily read, and the Nokia site doesn't address the issue of Mac-connectivity, whereas Sony-Ericcson smartphones can update contacts & calendar from one machine to the other automatically,
and can even be used as a mouse... This is enough to make me question my brand-loyalty to Nokia and consider switching handsets (such is the desire to get the most out of this superb Mac!). Moreover, with Bluetooth pictures and text files can be shared between laptop & phone, and applications to install on the smartphone can be downloaded from the 'net onto the computer, then transferred to the handset. This has all proved much handier than i imagined it would.
The PowerBook is ready to accept a WiFi card that can give broadband-speed connectivity with a wireless network. There are WiFi hotspots springing up around London, in coffee bars and even covering the area around Piccadilly (expect to hear plenty more about this technology in the coming year). i've not yet got and installed this - but it is only a matter of time.
CONCLUSION
Can't really fault this portable. If you've picked the 12" you know the (well-balanced) trade-offs you're making with portability against screen size. Yes, it's pricier than a PC of comparable spec, but it performs way better (and there are less Mac-targeted worms, viruses (virii?) et cetera out there) and is a much more intuitive environment to work in. Add to that the Apple standards of sexiness in design, and you have an offer that's too good to refuse. Unlike the computer itself, the decision is a no-brainer.
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