Just A Yuppie Toy? Lap It Up!
The Sunday Age
Sunday January 26, 1997
Once the ultimate yuppie toy, the mobile computer, or laptop, is now becoming an essential business tool. And it's still a great toy. John O'Meara and Garry Barker look at the range of IBM-compatible and Apple Macintosh notebooks.
IT'S not true that you can't take it with you. You can - if you leave your wallet behind. Notebook computers are expensive. They make up only a small fraction of the overall computer market and are costly to design and build.
Whereas clone makers across the globe knock out crate-loads of desktop systems at low margins, notebooks are still largely the preserve of brand-name manufacturers who make up for the low volumes by loading the price tag. We pay not only for the technology inside the slim boxes but, one suspects, for the cachet of toting it. Notebook computers are objects of desire.
The miniaturisation of the parts is a minor prodigy. Inside a high-end laptop is a Pentium or PowerPC processor that runs at a lower voltage to minimise heat, a 2.5in hard drive holding a gigabyte or more of data, plenty of RAM, a high-speed CD-ROM, a sound card and stereo speakers, all the usual input/output devices, ports for connecting an external keyboard and monitor, headphone and microphone sockets and often an infrared connector, and even a network port.
THE SCREEN.
One of the big determinants of price is the machine's built-in monitor. With greyscale displays having gone the way of the Fitzroy Football Club, the choice is not between greyscale and color but between two quite different types of color display.
Passive color display panels are made up of a grid of horizontal and vertical wires, at the intersection of which is a screen pixel (picture element). The chief problem with this type of display is 'ghosting'.
Passive color screens light more slowly than active screens. When a pixel is lit, traces of residual electrical current can partly energise neighboring pixels - and when the current is turned off the pixel takes a little time to dim (the effect is known as persistence). Passive displays have improved greatly in recent years and dual-scan monitors in particular are quite acceptable when the budget is tight, especially if you will be using the machine mostly for word processing or spreadsheeting.
Active color screens have some big advantages and a price tag to match. Each screen pixel is wired directly to a transistor. One transistor per pixel eliminates the problem of current overspill and allows much faster refresh times. The displays are crisper and brighter, can be used more comfortably in sunlight and have a wide angle of view, making them excellent for presentations where more than one person needs to get a good view of the screen.
The drawback is not only cost. Charging as many as 800,000 transistors quickly eats scarce battery power, a big consideration if you need to be able to use your machine for long periods between charges. And with active color, any time a transistor dies, a pixel dies.
The two IBM notebooks sent to 'The Home Page' were pixel perfect but they often arrive in shops from the factory with a few dead pixels. Check carefully before you buy and ask about the manufacturer's policy on the replacement of displays with dud pixels.
THE BATTERY.
Battery life is the Achilles heel of all portable computers, which still struggle to give more than three or four hours' running time. As a result, manufacturers go to great lengths to incorporate power-saving strategies, such as 'spinning down', or sending to sleep, the hard drive after a period of inactivity. Most machines are able to go into a suspend or hibernation mode to prolong running time.
If marathon self-reliance is an important factor in your buying decision, some notebooks can accommodate an extra lithium-ion battery pack - at a cost in dollars and travelling weight.
THE PC RANGE.
IBM has a formidable reputation with its Think Pad notebooks, which come in many variants built around three main models. The entry level is the 365 series; the top of the line is the multimedia-rich 760 series. In between is the ultra portable 560. All come preloaded with Lotus SmartSuite and remote diagnosis tools that allow an IBM technician to dial in to your machine if problems arise.
The cheapest model in the range, the 365, is a Pentium machine fitted with 8Mb of memory, an 810Mb hard drive and an internal CD-ROM drive. Its estimated street price of $3244 is kept down because it employs a 10.3in passive matrix display. Keener prices can be had by haggling.
The 365's big brothers, the 760 series, are true Rolls-Royces, offering a 133MHz Pentium chip, a one or two gigabyte hard drive, a 12.1in active color display capable of a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, a video system that supports MPEG2 full-motion video, a built-in modem, high-fidelity sound and stereo speakers mounted in the wrist rest. The image is sharp and bright, although a little overbalanced towards brilliance at the bottom of the panel.
As in all Think Pads, the mouse function is controlled by a highly accurate pointing stick, a nipple-like device mounted slightly proud of the keys in the centre of the keyboard.
The TrackPoint III responds smoothly to finger pressure and is easy to use in combination with the two mouse buttons, which are mounted just below it on the wrist rest. Left handers don't despair; you can switch the single-click mouse button to the right-hand side so you're not dislocating your wrist every time you move and click.
Fully configured with the 2Gb drive, the 760ED has an estimated price of $11,070. Like the high-end Apples, the 760 is an admirable replacement for a normal desktop machine, especially when connected to an external (and larger) monitor and keyboard.
For more portable computing, the 560 weighs just 4.1lbs and stands 1.2 inches high (notebook specs are invariably non-metric, in tribute to American imperialism in all its forms). With an 800Mb hard drive, the 12.1in active color model is estimated at $7097. The cheaper passive display is also available.
THE APPLE MACS.
For many tasks, the fastest notebooks on the market are the Apple PowerBooks, partly because of the clock speed of their PowerPC chips and partly because of their architecture. The other advantage is that they also read and write PC disks and, if you load SoftWindows onto their capacious hard drives, you can run all the Wintel programs, too.
Since Apple's last price cut, the PowerBooks also represent very good value, with the new basic model 1400 at a bit more than $3000 on the street (rrp is $3995) and the top-of-the-range 1400c - with all the bells and whistles and a PowerPC 603e chip running at 133MHz - at a bit more than $6000. In between is the 1400cs, with a dual-scan screen and a street price of around $4500.
Apple's new 11.3in screens are among the best of their kind. Indeed, such improvement seems to have been made to Apple's cheaper dual-scan display that it rivals the more expensive active-matrix model.
Colors are bright and vibrant and the annoying lag, which could give you four or five cursor arrows across your screen as you moved the thing, has been all but eliminated.
Battery life in the new 1400 series, and presumably also in the forthcoming Hooper, is good, partly due to battery technology but also to the low demands made by the low-voltage PowerPC 603 chip. Depending on how much you use the CD drive, a charge ought to give anything up to five hours' steady use.
The 1400 series weighs three kilograms, which is about average; not so much that it breaks your arm but enough to keep the machine steady when you type. Like all the Apple products, finish and quality are top-drawer.
The cheapest PowerBook of all is the model 190, which runs a 68LC040/33 chip and may be had, brand new in the marketplace, for about $2000. This machine is of the earlier generation of PowerBooks but is still a very capable machine and, at the price, excellent value.
In a week or two the latest model, so far still code-named Hooper, will be released in Australia with a PowerPC 603e chip running at 200MHz. It will have a removable CD-ROM drive whose connection could also be used for an optional magneto-optical drive or a Zip drive (very useful device, the Zip).
The hard drive will have a capacity of at least one gigabyte and the screen will incor-
porate the latest active matrix technology. In short, for the first time, the modern all-flying, all-dancing business executive will be able to dump his desktop machine and carry his entire portfolio around with him.
Linking up in the office will be through a high-speed infrared sensor, now built into all the latest PowerBooks, through the built-in 28.8kbps modem, or directly through one of the ports on the back.
Still on the market, but fairly obviously about to be phased out in favor of the new, improved versions, is the 190cs - which was top of the pre-PowerPC machines. This model covers the 5300 series and the Duo 2300 with its very useful in-office dock, allowing direct connection to a full-size monitor, full-size keyboard, the office network and so on.
These are also capable machines and may be had at pretty favorable prices. The basic version of the Duo 2300c, for instance, with 8Mb of RAM and a 750Mb hard drive, has an rrp of only $2695.
Oh yes, and the PowerBooks have stereo sound, too, so you can get good results out of RealAudio links and, with the microphone accessory, make use of the Internet for phone calls.
MISSED BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.
This is week four of our special series on buying a computer. Copies of previous stories are available by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope (not the small ones, please) to The Home Page, The Sunday Age, 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne 3000. Please specify which story you would like:
Week 1: Which should I choose, PC or Mac?
Week 2: PC best buys.
Week 3: Apple Macs.
© 1997 The Sunday Age
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