So, Panther is out tomorrow and it seems Apple have beefed up the iBook as well as their OS.
I’ve been looking for a laptop for a while and this looks like a deal right in my price range. My gripe with the old iBook was the G3 processor, which felt dated, but with this upgrade you essentially get last week’s Powerbook, processorwise. I know that they are very different machines, but I can’t really afford even the low-end Powerbook (for the record, I’m looking at the 12" iBook).
I’ve been researching PC laptops as well, and am currently a PC user with some experience with OS X. Neat little OS, by the way. The iBook wins on size, noise level and battery life, which are high priorities as I want real portability if I am to pay for a portable computer. I haven’t been able to find a 12" PC for less than around one-and-a-half the price of the iBook and then it’s usually a Pentium II or III - that would feel like a step down the ladder from my current desktop AMD 2000+ (800MhZ G4 might be as well, but the OS and sheer style of the Mac would make up for it). Larger models, 14" and 15", especially the cheaper ones, are quite noisy as well.
But I have a couple of questions.
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I’m working a great deal with graphics and I’ve noticed that both the new and the old iBooks are locked at a screen resolution of 1024x768, even with an external monitor. This doesn’t make sense with 32 MB of video RAM. I’ve read of hacks and workarounds for the old iBook models to this limitation that seems imposed by the manufacturer. Can I expect to be able to do something about it, preferably a software patch, sometime in the future? A Linux partition, perhaps, for critical graphics work so I can use my 19" monitor?
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Should I delay my purchase (further than the month I’m looking at now) to allow Apple to weed out the bugs in the soft- and hardware?
Your thoughts on these matters and anything else I might need to know are appreciated.