Slim, Shiny, Full Of Grunt

The Age

Tuesday March 13, 2001

GARRY BARKER

I'm sitting in the shade of my backyard figtree, sipping a cool glass of bubbly and watching my all-time favourite movie, the original Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway and what may be one of the best scenes ever starring a sailplane. McQueen and Dunaway are just getting into that powerfully sexy chess game and I find my left hand, the one without the glass, gently caressing the silver-grey case of the new 500MHz G4 Titanium PowerBook, on which the movie is playing. Is it the power of the movie or the computer that has me entranced?

Truly, the Titanium is a paragon among notebook computers. One may wax lyrical about its slim design, its elegance and its power, the sheer size, breadth and sharpness of its 15.2-inch screen and the clarity of its stereo sound. I admit to bias in favour of Macintosh but, by any standards, this is an exceptional machine. It is lighter and more powerful than any previous PowerBook by quite a margin. It has all of Apple's now legendary design style and quality of manufacture, right down to the beautifully fitted lock to the lid.

Certainly, one may offer criticisms. The now-standard round yo-yo power adaptor is slightly smaller than its predecessor, looks nice and the cable wraps away nicely around its rim, but the old rectangular adaptor supplied with my Wall Street PowerBook was smaller and easier to pack.

Also, because they have moved to a clover-leaf power socket, away from the old standard figure-8, my APC portable power-spike protector won't fit. Progress has a price.

There is no expansion bay for a floppy or Zip drive module, though I don't know anyone who still uses floppies and for large files I find email and an online file storage facility more useful. The machine I borrowed carried 256MB, which I think is about right for a machine of this industrial strength. Multimedia professionals, for whom this machine will be an essential, will probably need more. But then, they've always known that.

Titanium's nearest rival in terms of elegance, slimness and power is probably the top of the line Sony Vaio. In introducing the Titanium to Macworld in San Francisco earlier this year, Steve Jobs used the Sony laptop as a comparison. The PowerBook is slimmer by 15 per cent and it is lighter overall if you include with the Sony the separate CD drive you would have to carry to match the Apple's specifications. The PowerBook also is a good deal more powerful and it has that veritable CinemaScope of a screen that makes the Sony look myopic. The Sony (in fact, any quality PC notebook even remotely as powerful as the PowerBook) is also more expensive.

But, in the end, this is a computer, a tool, so why would you buy it? If you now use a Toshiba, an OmniBook or a ThinkPad, or even a Sony Vaio, would you move to the ``other" platform to gain the beauty and the power of PowerBook?

There are good reasons to do so, particularly if you spend a lot of time in airport lounges and international aircraft. For a start, you can take along your own DVD movies and view them on a screen nearly six times bigger than the one the airlines give you. The 15.2-inch screen is lower than the old PowerBook because of the slim surround, but is wider than any of its rivals it has a ratio of 3:2 instead of 4:3, making it nice for spreadsheets, video presentations and watching The Thomas Crown Affair.

If you need Windows, then run ConnectixVirtual PC. The Titanium's 500MHz G4 processor and its slick architecture are good enough to let you run Windows as fast as your old PC-notebook could go, and the battery will last a good deal longer. I ran the full movie and still had plenty of charge left. Apple's claim of five hours on a full charge is probably pretty close to the mark in average use. If you just use Excel, Word and PowerPoint, you're still OK. Microsoft Office 2001 for the Mac is fully compatible with PC formats of the same applications.

In a week of living with the Titanium, I used it on trains and trams, plugged it into our Windows NT network, ran movies, wrote stories, sync-ed it with my Palm Pilot, hooked up my CD-RW drive through the FireWire port and burned some CDs, ran iMovie 2 and iTunes, listened to Mozart and Mark Knopfler, loaded some images from my digital camera and did a little tweaking in Photoshop 6. It performed serenely throughout and did not crash once, even using Internet Explorer.

The keyboard is nicely responsive, and the touchpad has been considerably improved over earlier PowerBooks. Sound from the two tiny speakers on either side of the keys is slightly sharp to my ear but notable for its clarity. Generally, the machine is silent in operation. The fan is temperature sensitive and runs only when the machine heats up.

The Titanium comes with FireWire, Ethernet, serial and two USB ports built in. The slot-loading DVD is a wonder of slim design. Some say they'd like to see a CD-RW burner. I doubt it's really necessary in a notebook, but there's no accounting for taste.

Overall, I had a lovely time with the Titanium. It's not the tiniest notebook around, but for its power and capability there's nothing on the market to touch it. In the end I found myself in a desperate midnight debate with myself over whether I could sell my old black PowerBook and my Graphite iMac and maybe get enough money to buy a Titanium. With a machine like that, who would need a desktop machine?

The machine comes in three models, one with a 400MHz G4 and 128MB of RAM and the others with 500MHz chips and 256MB. Hard drives range from 10GB to 30GB. All have DVD-ROM drives with DVD-video. 56k modems, of course. Airport wireless antennae are built in. Current models come with MacOS 9.1, though Mac OS X will be installed later in the year. Bundled software includes iTunes, iMovie 2, QuickTime 4, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Netscape Communicator, Palm Desktop and FAXstf. Prices start at $5,495.

gbarker@theage.fairfax.com.au