I’m considering purchasing a G4 PowerBook to replace my aging boat-anchor PC “laptop”. (Sorry, not interested in opinions on why I should buy an Intel box, but thanks for the consideration.) I’ll probably run a dual boot OSX and YDL or Darwin, and it’s going to be used mostly for Mathematica, image processing, and basic word processing and Internet connectivity.
A couple of questions:
Does anyone know when OSX.4 (Tiger) is going to be released, and is it worth waiting? Will Apple offer an automatic upgrade to Tiger, or am I uffed with Apple’s “screw the customer” software upgrade business model?
Are there any enhancements on the way that I should wait for? I’d like to purchase it in the next month, but I can wait two or three if it means a much better price or more functionality.
The G4s are 32-bit whereas the desktop Apples (G5) are 64-bit. I fully expect the next Apple laptops to be G5-based/64-bit. A private purchase of a G4 now would IMO be foolish.
Apple has promised Tiger sometime in the first half of '05, so barring major problems it will be out by the end of June. Personally, I want it now! Apple’s site has some nifty previews of features.
Don’t know about pricing yet, or what the upgrade policy will be.
Sorry for posting three times in a row here, but one more thing: if you’re not up to waiting for a G5, take a close look also at iBooks… at the moment there’s not a gigantic amount of difference between them and PowerBooks, besides price.
I just got a Powerbook, and it’s pretty nifty. I got it instead of an iBook because it has the wide screen (mine’s 15"), and it comes with Bluetooth and an Airport card installed, which don’t come with the iBook, so if you want those, the price difference isn’t that much (you do still have to get the external part of the Airport). I got a wireless mouse, because I do a lot of mousing and the little trackpad thingy is kind of hard on my wrists. It has so many really cool features that I didn’t even know about–it has a backlit keyboard, and the brightness adjusts with the ambient light.
I could keep rambling on, but I’ll just say, I love my Powerbook.
Well, the Powerbook line just got slightly tweaked, so I wouldn’t expect much new for a few months. No guarantee, though.
If you're looking for a decent price, you can check the refurbs at the Apple Store. I just bought a 17" model. Actually, I would probably have preferred a 15" model, but the difference between the 1.3 Ghz 15" model and the 1.5Ghz 17" model made it more worthwhile to get the big one.
From what I understand, the G5 eats up quite a bit more power, and in order to fit it and the cooling system into the chassis of the exsisting G4 laptop will require downclocking it considerably. Also, as Darwin (well, the Mach microkernel) hasn’t been optimized for a 64-bit architecture, I don’t know that it’s going to be that much of an improvement. (Now someone is going to come along and cite where, in fact, Mach was rewritten for 64 bit, and I’ll look like a damn-fool talking through my hat.)
I’m really not worried about having the best and brightest. Honestly, the performance I’ve seen out of the G4 has been pretty impressive under YDL. I expect OSX is going to dope the system down more, but still, it’ll probably be good enough for my needs for the forseeable future. I just don’t want to get X.3 and a week later see them come out with X.4. (And yeah, I know, it’s coming out “sometime in the first part of 2005”, but in MicroSquash speak this means the Christmas 2006.)
I’ll have to look around at reconditioned ones, though. That sounds like a good deal, as long as all the internals are intact.
I wouldn’t wait for G5’s. The current PB’s are very nice machines and unless you’re doing video editing, you’re not going to see a lot of difference in speed. What you would see in a PB G5 is a hotter, louder computer with shorter battery life, in a new, unproven design. (Assuming PB G5’s even ship any time soon).
A 12" Powerbook with external Cinema Display and bluetooth keyboard and mouse makes for a very nice pseudo-dock setup.
I’m not a hardware expert, but my understanding is that the difference between the G4 and the G5 is not as significant as the previous one, from the G3 to the G4.
Or, in other words, a G4 PowerBook is not anything to be embarrassed about.
I know this is a nearly impossible thing to quantify, but what is the “value” of a PowerBook G4?
More to the point, what about it is so compelling that it would make sense for someone who’s looking to replace an aging Dell laptop running Windows XP and MS Office to switch? They want the “best value” for their investment. Their computing needs for this will be fairly light - outside of the occasional Word or Excel document, most of their time is spent on the web. If they weren’t totally put off by the iBook’s white case, it’d be a somewhat easier choice, but they hate the white and are looking at PowerBooks only because they’re not white.
Put another way - why should they spend $2000 for a PowerBook (15" LCD and combo drive) plus whatever it costs to buy MS Office, when they could buy something like an IBM Thinkpad T42 for $1600 or so and not need to buy new software?
This isn’t really a discussion germane to the OP, but just FTR, here are the reasons I’m avoiding an Intel box.
[ul]
[li]Reliability: My company leases Dells, which are (I guess) considered a premium quality brand. Premium, my unwashed anus; we send these things back by the crateful for LCD panel failures. I’ve heard some talking about the sturdiness and reliability of the ThinkPads, but my experience with IBM from backintheday was so piss-poor that you’d have to threaten to kneecap me in order for me to take another chance on them. Apple owners seem largely impressed by the reliablity of the PowerBook, with just a few negative anecdotes.[/li][li]Build Quality: Aside from the “style” design, the Apples are just damned well thought out machines. Serviceability, location of ports, general functionality, robustness of construction all seem very high. I can’t make that observation about comperable Intel-based laptops. They either seem light and flimsy, or robust but enormous.[/li][li]Features: Apple charges a premium price, no doubt, but they also seem to come with gobs of features (how much would it cause to put a standard Firewire port on a PC, anyway) and little BS regarding hidden charges. (Oh, yes, this Compikt comes with wireless networking, but if you want a 802.11g card, you need to pay $200 more.")[/li][li]Size: Again, for their size, I don’t think you can beat the iBooks and PowerBooks for power and robustness. [/li][li]OS Compatibility: This has been a big pain in the arse for me; I’d like to run FreeBSD but have yet to find a single laptop that will run that OS without major workarounds. I’ve had better luck with Mandrake (and marginal luck with Debian/Xandros), but I refuse to be stuck with a Windows abortion as my only OS. I’ll use it when I have to, but if I can get a computer that runs Darwin natively, so much the better.[/ul] [/li]
I really have no desire to become part of the Apple Collective. Frankly, their lifestyle marketing approach irriates me and many of their adds with the self-identified technophobes creep me out. And Janie Porche can go stick her head in a pig as far as I’m concerned; is it really that hard to download drivers?
But I have to acknowledge that Apple has their act together on the hardware, and they offer an OS that isn’t inherently unsecure. I’ll pay the bucks if it means I don’t have to deal with any more Microsoft mediocrity, though I do hope they do well enough to keep Steve Balmer in chinos and cheap blue oxford shirts, bouncing across the stage and making a monumental ass of himself. I’m hoping they have him host the Oscars next year.
Back to the OP, are there any other ideas, information, opinions on the G4 PowerBook? Anyone have any negative experiences?
I second the suggestion to look at an iBook. Unless you really want the bigger screen, there’s not a lot that a $2000 powerbook will do that a $1000 iBook won’t.
As far as free upgrades to the new release, IIRC, Apple has historically offered the upgrade for free to those who got their computer in the last month before the upgrade. And Apple’s been pretty on-the-ball with release dates as far as I know.
I have a 667MHz TiBook (compliments of my employer) which is going to be retired in May. It’s certainly getting long-in-the-tooth speed-wise, but after three years of almost non-stop use, and a fair amount of abuse (dropped the poor thing hard on a couple occasions), it has, quite simply, never failed. Not once. I struggle to think of anything I have made such regular use of that has held up so reliably. I’ve run MacOSX on it the entire time, and I think I’ve had to do a hard restart twice during the three year period I’ve had it.
I am agonizing over what to do next. I have the choice to get another PowerBook, or get a top-of-the-line dual G5 tower. I could really care less about 64-bit (I don’t need to manage terabyte databases or anything nutty like that), but the extra GHz, not-to-mention the dual processors, are pulling toward the G5. I do tons of image processing, and major speed will just make like so much nicer.
I will likely fork over the money for my own laptop to replace the laptop I’ve had the pleasure to posess through my job. I’m thinking maybe a 12", but that’s another agonizing decision.
All-in-all, I’m wildly impressed with mine. Granted, it’s a dinosaur compared to what’s out now, and Apple certainly had some hardware issues with an earlier iteration of the Al books (especially grey patches in the screens that required replacement); but I’ve read and been told those issues have been resolved, and nothing new has cropped up. That means the current crop should be as robust and reliable as the one I have now, and I’d recommend one to anybody in a heartbeat.
Let me just echo some others here and urge you not to wait for a G5 PowerBook. There’s no indication any such thing will be released within the next six months, if not longer. The PBs recently had a minor feature bump so now is a good time to buy.
Secondly, there are a few signs that Tiger is coming sooner rather than later. Evidently those who’ve seen recent developer builds say that it’s entering the fit-and-finish stage and that most of the outstanding issues have been resolved. I wouldn’t be surprised to a release this month, or at least an announcement of an April release. If you can afford to wait a few weeks, it might be worth it. (There’s also a chance Apple would hold your order in the pipeline in order to ship it with Tiger if the release were imminent; I’ve heard of such things happening before.) I don’t think it will take them until June; they’ll want it out and in people’s hands before the next developer conference.
As for my own PowerBook story, we have one here in our office (a TiBook rather than the new aluminum one), and while I don’t use it much, it’s definitely a great machine, really sturdy and well designed. No horror stories here. (Though even I, an Apple fanboy, was surprised at the reaction I got when using the PB in public: complete strangers would stop and comment on what a great machine it was or how much they wanted one. Which may or may not be a good thing for you. ;))
Everyone seems to have straightend out the technical errors in posts above, let me be a third guy to recommend you look at the ibooks. I wanted a 12" laptop and the ibook won, hands down, even compared to Wintel equipment. IIRC, the only thing you can get with a PB that you can’t with an iBook is a Superdrive. My iBook is currently driving a second monitor (there’s a patch to the video card), and if I need to burn a DVD, I’ll write it to an image, and transfer it over to my desktop PC to do so.
In short: You’ll not see a G5 laptop this year, and if you do, it won’t be appreciably faster than a G4, iBooks all now include WiFi, You can expect 3+ hours out of an iBook’s battery. Wait for Tiger if’n ya want. I’d recommend an upgraded harddisk, my 30 gigger is frequently bursting at the seams.
You may not even WANT to dual boot. OS X’s compilers and tools work really well with OSS software, and Darwinports and Fink are great package management tools.
I got one of the first 17" Al Books the week it shipped. It became my powerhorse for the next 2 years. Not once have I had a problem with it, and the thing looks as new as the day I bought it (they clean up nice). It looks sexy as hell, they’re solid as hell, and I’d still be using it if I didn’t finally break down and buy a dual 2.5 G5.
Since it seems like you’re going to be doing a lot of floating-point operations, and image manipulation, go for the PowerBook. This will be a machine you’ll be spending a lot of time and energy on, so any boost in Mhz, you won’t regret. Not to mention bigger screens and beefier video cards.
Also, I believe if you buy a new computer, and Apple ships a new version of their OS, usually they put out a 90 day grace period. So if you bought the computer in April, and they came out with Tiger in May, you should be able to get the upgrade at no cost. At least that’s what they’ve done in the past. If not the upgrade usually costs $129, and they’ve been pretty reliable (they’ve learned their lesson) as to when they say the OS will arrive. Unlike OTHER OSs… ahem.
I bought a 17" Powerbook last summer. It’s not the very latest version but the one just before. I’m extremely happy with my purchase. Been a Mac fan for a long time so it wasn’t a question of what OS to shop for. The Powerbook that replaced mine came out just about a month or so ago and wasn’t a major upgrade. A little faster processor, a bigger hard drive and few other minor features. Plus it was cheaper than the price I paid.
In my opinion, I’d wait for the next version to come out. That’s if you can wait. I’m willing to bet that the next one will be a major update. I’m not saying it’ll be a G5 but you can never really know with Apple. But I’m pretty sure that OS 10.4 will be out by that point and you won’t have to worry about updating. And if the next one isn’t that major an update, you should be able to purchase the current version at a reasonable discount.
Apple’s famous Shroud of Secrecy does indeed make it well-nigh impossible to predict what’s coming next until the release is imminent. I suspect they keep the lid so tight for one of two reasons, depending on the product:
The fact the line is stagnating and they’ve got no major updates in the near future is a huge embarassment.
or
They’ve got a major update, something so insanely great the Mac Faithful will squeal like little girls getting a pony when it’s unveiled. Trouble is, there’s all that damned inventory. How can you sell it at a premium when the Biggest Thing Since Sliced Cheese is ready to take the world by storm? Easy. Keep 'em totally guessing until the next MacWorld keynote, and maybe they’ll find that cash burning through their wallets too unbearable, and plunk down top dollar for yesterday’s news in a fit of desperate impatience.
Moral of all this: Buy Apples only when you really need them, and at no other time, for no other reason. Predicting the future is damned near impossible, given the paucity of information Apple deigns to share with its consumers. Go with what you know, and forget about tomorrow, because what it holds is a mystery within a puzzle within a reality distortion field.
I got it instead of an iBook because it has the wide screen (mine’s 15"), and it comes with Bluetooth and an Airport card installed, which don’t come with the iBook, so if you want those, the price difference isn’t that much (you do still have to get the external part of the Airport). I got a wireless mouse, because I do a lot of mousing and the little trackpad thingy is kind of hard on my wrists. It has so many really cool features that I didn’t even know about–it has a backlit keyboard, and the brightness adjusts with the ambient light.