Slim, Smooth, And Light On Its Feet
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday June 22, 1999
WALL Street or Lombard? The G3 Series PowerBook or the new, slim, slick machine that Steve Jobs announced at the WorldWide Developers' Conference last month? Though I own the former, and like it very much, I lust after the new one.
At first glance, when they are sitting on a desk, there is not much to choose between the two. Both are black and curved with white Apple logos on their lids.
They have the same footprint, and the same brilliant 14.1-inch screen, but Lombard is nearly 1cm thinner and a kilogram lighter. Road warriors who have lumped 4kg of laptop and their luggage around will know the true value of that weight reduction.
The new machine also lights up its white Apple logo on the lid and has a pretty, translucent bronze-coloured keyboard, touchpad and click-switch. Cosmetics, but nice; like having Bally shoes when the other guy is shod in Doc Martens. The keyboard mechanism is unchanged, though a few keys have been reassigned. Otherwise it is full-sized, smooth and positive.
Of course, the new G3 PowerBooks are still not the slimmest or lightest of notebook computers; the Japanese hold that palm and pay for it in loss of performance. Yet this, too, may change quite soon when Apple produces its low-cost consumer portable, also bound to be a very fast G3-powered machine.
So would I flog my "old" G3 PowerBook and go for Lombard? Yes, I would; mostly for the considerable boost in speed and power at no extra cost, a lot because my load on the road would be significantly less, and a little bit because, like most people, I like having the latest and greatest. Apple has had to compromise a bit on weight because the Macintosh market wants power and is very heavily concerned with multimedia, audio, video and high-end processes such as those.
I came back from the US recently sitting beside an advertising agency executive from Boston who gets his work done in Melbourne. He takes the material back and forth on his PowerBook, so he needs the power and the speed that the machine provides. A Pentium just would not cut it.
The latest, top-of-the-range 400MHz G3 PowerBook is quite as powerful as a desktop machine. It is also beyond doubt the fastest portable on the market. It will render a complex Illustrator file in less than half the time a 500MHz Pentium III will take. That is in real life; not a bench test.
Bench tests vary and the arguments about them are interminable, but those published for the new Lombard PowerBooks are impressive enough to set most of the nay-sayers aside. For instance, using the BYTEmark tests set by BYTE Magazine, the new 400 MHz machine produced a figure of 13.3. The old Wall Street with a 300MHz processor came in at 10.2 and a PC notebook with a 300MHz Pentium II tottered up with 4.7, about a third the speed of the Lombard.
But that's not all. These new PowerBooks use IBM's latest copper-based PowerPC G3 processors (two in the range: 333MHz and 400MHz) which run cooler and longer.
I had the 400MHz machine running all day on my desk and by the end it was barely warm. More importantly, battery life has been considerably extended, partly because of the new configuration and partly because MacOS 8.6, which comes preloaded, is more efficient in its use of hard-disk time. Take out the DVD or CD drive (you may have either), slide in another battery and you could work on the airliner for up to 10 hours, should you be so driven. Or you could goof off and run a couple of DVD movies. The PowerBook screen is vastly better than the little things they have in business class.
Summing it up: The new PowerBooks are the fastest on the planet and, so far, the lightest and slimmest Apple has produced, weighing in at just over 2.5kg, including the battery and a CD drive. They will take up to 384Mb of SDRAM, have a built-in ATI Rage LT Pro video controller and 8Mb of video memory, support for FireWire (plug in your video camera!), two USB ports and built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet. The screen supports millions of colours at 1024 by 768n pixels.
VGA and S-video ports are provided for dual display, which means you can keep your notes on the PowerBook screen and have your PowerPoint presentation on a projector. Very handy.
Third party peripherals abound. You may have SuperDisk or Zip modules to fit into the second bay in place of the CD or DVD options (the 400MHz comes with DVD as standard). Internal storage is 4Gb or 6Gb or even 10Gb in a build-to-order machine. The 333MHz machine is $4,995 and the 400MHz screamer $6,995.
The RJ12 jack for the built-in 56K modem has been moved from side to back, where all ports are now located. Also, there is now only one PCMCIA slot instead of two. This is a fairly sensible economy, though it may not suit those who have the thicker Xircom cards with built-in RJ12 sockets. There's also 4Mbps IrDA for quick file sharing across the board table. Even for an Apple devotee, these are pretty amazing machines.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald
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