Like me, many people I know still have and use their 2400s, retrofitted with G3 upgrades and 802.11b cards. For the longest time it looked as if Apple had decided that the all-in-one was the only way to go.
The introduction of the new iBook shows that Apple still has the wherewithal to produce a fully functional machine in a compact, sturdy package.
Better than the TiBook
Using a new machine is really the only way to get a sense of how well
it's designed. The new iBook is very well designed, and I
found myself quickly liking it more than I did the Titanium PowerBook
G4.
While the higher-end machine has a wider screen, faster processor, and faster system bus, all of which are undeniably useful, the Titanium is also significantly larger, and its AirPort performance, well, sucks. At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference last month, the phrase "AirPort wave" was coined to describe the act of an individual taking a TiBook in hand, holding it up, and waving it around like a dish antenna until it found a usable signal again.
I'd noticed this problem while testing the TiBook back in April and mentioned it to Apple. The response I got was that Apple felt that it wasn't a serious problem and that since the TiBook's AirPort performance was within spec, everything was ok. If Apple wants its flagship technologies to be taken seriously and/or adopted widely, its flagship machines need to showcase them in the best possible way. The TiBook simply doesn't.
Fortunately, the new iBook does. Its AirPort reception (and transmission) is loads better than the TiBook's, and makes this new little laptop thoroughly pleasant to use wirelessly.
Does it go?
I had the good fortune to test an iBook with the combo DVD/CD-RW
drive, but I still am unconvinced about the utility of burning CDs on
a laptop. Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways. DVD playback under
Mac OS 9 worked well enough, although I do wish there were more
keyboard shortcuts for various DVD Player features, and that the
infernal tooltips could be disabled.
Performance-wise, the iBook is an excellent Mac OS 9 machine. None of the mainstream apps I used felt bogged-down, even in speed-reduced processor-cycling mode. That said, I wouldn't be inclined to throw processor-intensive apps at this machine on a regular basis, either. It's just not intended for that.
Mac OS X 10.0.4 is another matter entirely. Apple's new OS runs sluggishly enough on my desktop machine (a 450MHz G4), and it only just skulked along on the iBook. The most frequent example of this was OS X increasingly shrill-seeming exhortation to wait for an app to finish launching before double-clicking on it again. The only reason I double clicked again was that I didn't think it was launching in the first place. We can but hope that a future upgrade to OS X makes it usable on the iBook.
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