IBook vs 12 inch Powerbook

[Lord09]

Hello,

I'm considering either a 12 inch IBook or Powerbook and would appreciate any advice which system would be better for my situation. I've been a long time PC user and love Windows XP, the registry can be a mess and unstable at times, but I'm an experienced user, so that doesn't bother me at all.

I'm currently in school and majoring in CS. I've been away more and more from home and have decided to get a laptop to be more productive away from home. Plus the bonus of having a wireless connection at school is quite appealing.

I've been looking at the Centrino line of PC laptops, but for some reason I'm drawn to the 12 inch IBook and Powerbooks. I've read up on OS X and it seems VERY interesting. I do a lot of programming work, and being that OS X is built on Unix, it seems like a good environment to develope on.

I'd probably be surfering the web and doing mostly programming work ( Java, C++, PHP ) primarily. Also I'd like to use IDVD to edit and encode a DVD since I have a MiniDV camera, though I don't expect to do this frequently and very rarely.

My question is what laptop or more precisely, what processor would be more suited to my needs? The G3 seems quite old, but still capable. I'm leaing towards the G4 simply because its newer and faster than the G3 at the same clock speeds. What does everyone think? Price is a concern, but I'm pretty sure I can swing either laptop since I can get educational pricing. Though, the 1000-1200 dollar pricetag of an IBook is really nice.

My last question has to do with gaming. Though this won't be my primary purpose, I love Warcraft III and was wondering if performance would be noticeably greater with a G3 or G4 processor. Also how does the Ati Mobility Radeon 7500 compare vs the Gerfore4 420 Go on the Powerbook? Running at 900 mhz, would the G3 IBook keep up with the 867 mhz G4 powerbook?

Sorry the length of the post.

Thanks all,

Daniel

[dlloyd]

Hello Daniel and welcome to the Mac world!
Have you also concidered the 14" iBook? There are two advantages with it and one disadvantage over the 12" iBook. The advantages: bigger screen and longer battery life (about an hour). The disadvantage is that it is a little bigger overall.
I have a 14" iBook, and I just helped someone get a 12" Powerbook, here are my impressions (in no particular order):
1) The screen size on my iBook is a real bonus, I like it a lot.
2) Her Powerbook's battery ran out just sitting downloading an update while mine still had two hours to go.
3) I didn't actually do any work on her computer, just getting her software up to date, so I didn't get to test the performance much. However, on my iBook things like Fireworks and Dreamweaver run just fine. I don't have Photoshop though, so I haven't tested that.
4) Her laptop didn't come with any games. Mine came with Diemos Rising and Otto Matic.
5) If you don't get the Powerbook, you can't burn DVDs, period. The drive in the iBook doesn't burn them, and most (all?) external drives don't work with iDVD.
6) I have used Warcraft III with my iBook, and most of the time it runs just dandy. If you get too many units on screen, sometimes things will get a little laggy, but the only place where I actually noticed this was when trying to move the pointer (the movement gets pretty jerky). If you were to use it much, you would want to get a mouse. Using the trackpad isn't very satisfactory. I wouldn't say that the performance of the game would be a deciding factor though, especially since you said you wouldn't be using it a whole lot.
7) I am not qualified to compare video cards, I'm sure someone will happen along who can though.
8) The iBooks have just been updated (albeit very little), so they probably won't be updated again for several months. The Powerbooks, however, are about due for an update through the whole line. This probably doesn't matter, but I thought I'd just throw it in anyway.
9) About speed: the G3 is a fine processor, though fairly old. The G4 is also a good processor, though it is quite old too. The G3 has actually been shown to match, and in some cases beat, a G4 of the same clock speed when running applications that are not AltiVec enhanced (AltiVec is a 128 bit subprocessor that all G4s have. It significantly increases performance if an application is optimized for it). Most 'big' applications (i.e. Adobe, Macromedia, Apple) have been AltiVec enhanced. I think that the G3 will be just fine for what you want to do.
10) Have you concidered the 15" Powerbook? If you can afford it, that would be a a good compromise between screen size and speed. (I love the Powerbook 15", if I had the $$$ I would have got that instead, even with the smaller battery life)

Sorry for the higgeldy-piggeldy nature of this post, I hope you find something that will help you in there!

[monktus]

A couple of additional points...

The 14" iBook does have a bigger screen but it has the same maximum resolution as both the 12" iBook and PowerBook. Also, you'll be able to find a comparison of the the Radeon Mobility and GeForce Go somewhere but one thing I noticed is that although they're both 32mb, the GeForce has DDR RAM. The PowerBook 12 is AirPort Extreme ready as opposed the the AirPort on the iBook (802.11b instead of 802.11a, I think anyway) although if you're uni only has standard 802.11 (is it a?) then that won't matter too much. The main upgrades on the PowerBook 15 is higher resolution and a level 3 cache, which is especially useful for games. Although as dlloyd said, this should be getting upgraded soon (probably June at WWDC I imagine).

Whatever you get, you'll find OSX is lovely for programming. The development environment is great and includes support for Java, C++, C, Objective C and AppleScript. There's also Ada available for it.

http://developer.apple.com/tools/

[dlloyd]

Yes, I forgot the part about screen resulotions.
Clarification on the Airport part: Airport is 802.11b, Airport extreme is 802.11g. Apple never used 802.11a because it was too limiting (not backwards compatible for one thing. It never really caught on elsewhere either). 802.11g can be used on a 802.11b network, but not the other way around.
The 'standard' that monktus refered to would be 802.11b.

[monktus]

Yep, thanks for clarifying the Airport stuff, I looked it up later and remembered I had it wrong! I knew what I meant but...

[dlloyd]

LOL, but we didn't!

[LordCoven]

Also: I've heard it said in this forum that the PB 12" gets a little hot. I've got a 12" iBook myself (500Mhz - one of the first) and do a lot of Java programming on it. Its great. Especially coz its such a great network citizen I can connect to almost every network I encounter - which is a bonus where I work, because I'm often switching locations. Oh - and the heat thing I brought up, because I often work for hours with my iBook on my lap, and although it gets warm (which NB doesn't ) it never gets too warm for it to be uncomfortable.

Anyway - just my to (Euro) cents ))

C

[alexandr]

my new iBook intend to get too warm to have on my lap for a longer time..

just my two cents..

alex.