Apple iBook Laptop Review
Apple iBook Laptop Review from Peter Sachs. Super-Solid Laptop for Anyone on a Budget, To put it simply, Apple’s new iBook is an engineering marvel. The design is sleek and elegant, yet the case can stand up to a good beating. The iBook comes with an awesome set of features–pretty much everything you might need is already part of the package, including FireWire, CD-RW drive, and 10/100 Ethernet. Despite having a relatively small screen (12.1" diagonal) compared to some PC laptops, it still supports a full 1024 x 768 resolution at millions of colors. The screen is very bright, and the battery, while not quite the 5-hour powerhouse that Apple advertises, still manages about three hours doing normal operations. The 500-MHz G3 processor is spritely and gets things done quickly, although it doesn’t have quite enough power to do a large amount of movie editing or graphics work.
A few drawbacks are as follows:
The internal CD burner is only 8x at this time, which is markedly slower than the 16x and 20x external FireWire burners available now.
The iBook comes with only 128 mb of RAM, which is just barely enough for most things. I would strongly encourage upgrading to at least 256 mb total, as RAM is very inexpensive these days.
The video memory in the iBook is only 8 mb, with a weak graphics controller as compared to what goes into the G4 desktops. As such, the iBook is only mediocre at gaming.
The 10GB hard drive is already pre-loaded with almost 5GB of software and sample mp3′s, so I would highly recommend upgrading to at least a 20 GB drive.
In conclusion, the iBook is a solid purchase for anyone who wants many of the features of a desktop machine, but in a portable package. The drawbacks listed above are mostly forgiveable, as sacrifices had to be made somewhere to make this such a reasonably-priced machine. The new iBook no longer has a built-in carrying handle, but Apple has managed to trim quite a bit of weight and bulk, making it a joy to use on a daily basis.
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