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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, June 11, 2004

A few thoughts on my 12-inch PowerBook

After a few days of using my new 1.33 GHz 12-inch PowerBook, I thought I'd provide a few preliminary thoughts on the experience.

Packaging and out of box experience: Excellent
Apple does an amazing job of rewarding the customer with a great out of box experience. The packaging is incredibly well done, and this is something PC users could take note of. I've never seen any PC--and I've got Windows-based PCs coming through here every month--that are packaged anything like this.

Fit and finish: Excellent
The PowerBook is clean and elegant looking, with excellent fit and finish. The aluminum-based shell appears to be of much higher quality than any PC notebook I've ever seen; most PC notebooks use obvious plastic parts, as do cheap American cars. The PowerBook says quality through and through. The keyboard, while similar to that on the iBook, is obviously held down much more firmly, and Apple has taken away any reason to get under the keyboard by placing the RAM and AirPort Extreme expansion areas on the bottom of the chassis, which was smart.

Expansion: So-so
The PB-12 comes with a full complement of ports, but they're all on the side of the unit, and there's no docking station or port replication options (on any PowerBook, for that matter). This is a huge mistake. Many PC notebooks include a dedicated, proprietary slot on the bottom of the unit that provides these capabilities, and it's sorely missed on the Apple. Indeed, even third party solutions like BookEndz are bogus, because they require a weird side-mounted dealie that must connect with every port on the unit. Apple really needs to fix this. I'd really like to dock this with a nice monitor and easily take the machine when I was on the road. This won't be possible.

On a more positive note, memory access was simple, and the machine is relatively well endowed otherwise, with built-in 802.11g wireless and Bluetooth.

Heat: Good
The PB-12 is cool to the touch when it's not running, which is kind of neat. But it runs fairly hot, especially to the left of the touchpad. I've read that this generation of PB-12 is far cooler than its 867 MHz and 1 GHz predecessors, and I believe it, but this machine runs much warmer than most PC laptops.

Battery life: Decent
Obviously, I haven't had a lot of time to test the battery yet, but I will do so more next week when I go to New York. However, I did calibrate the battery per Apple's instructions (I ran it with an iTunes Internet radio station playing and the visualizations set to run full screen). It looks like I'll be able to get 3 to 3.5 hours of battery life with the screen turned down a bit and the Energy Saver set to handle CPU power. With a DVD running, it should be a bit over 2 hours. Again, I'll test this more soon, but today's Centrino/Pentium-M-based PC laptops get oodles of battery life, often up to 6 hours per battery. There is definitely room for improvement here.

And stupidly, there's no extended battery option, because of the way the battery sits in the unit (and because the optical drive is non-removable; a good example of looks over functionality). And in the PB-12, unlike other PowerBooks, you can't remove the battery while the unit's sleeping, which is a shame; you must shut down, change the battery, and then restart instead.

Hardware compatibility: Excellent
The PB has handled everything I've thrown at it, including my USB printer, Palm OS-based PDAs, scanner, digital camera, keyboard, mouse, and external monitor. It won't work with the Dell DJ, of course, but I do have a few iPods.

Software compatibility: Good
While the Mac doesn't have the epic software library found on the PC side, there's enough there for me to get work done. I've installed Microsoft Office 2004, Mozilla Thunderbird (an email client), Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2.0, MSN, a few games, and a few other applications on the machine, but it already came with a decent software selection, including the excellent iLife 04. Safari appears to be compatible with most Web sites I visit, though there are glitches (in Blogger, for example, Windows IE users get more options when posting).

Performance: Decent
Overall, the PowerBook's performance is decent. On the business applications I'll use most often--Office, Safari, Thunderbird--the performance is excellent. In fact, I'm tempted to install Office v. X to see whether the Office speed improvements--which are considerable, by the way, are because of the PowerBook or the new Office version. Office v. X performed like crap on my 1 GHz iMac.

On more demanding applications, like PhotoShop Elements 2.0, however, the PB-12 reveals some deficiencies, even with 768 MB of RAM. Here's how I tested PS Elements: Using the product's automation capabilities, I convert a folder full of 3.2 mega pixel photos to 500 pixel wide JPEGs (Maximum quality setting), rename them, and place them in a different folder. This is an activity I perform fairly regularly for my many Web sites, so it's a real-world task I'm familiar with. On the PB-12, each image loads, resizes, and then disappears, slowly, in real-time. On desktop and Pentium-M-based laptops, this task happens much, much more quickly, almost blindingly fast. However, on the slow ULV Pentium-M-based IBM ThinkPad X40, it's also quite slow (the unit has integrated graphics with shared graphics memory, by the way, and just 512 MB of RAM), but still a bit faster than on the PB-12, which is disconcerting. On the other hand, the PB-12 is faster, overall, than the X40.

For gaming, the results are also decent, given its relatively rinky-dink video card. It handles the older Quake III Arena with aplomb, even at the internal screen's maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. Running the built-in demo, I was able to achieve 3.53 FPS, which doesn't sound like much, but it feels much better in real life. Unreal Tournament 2004, however, is another story. This is a much newer title, but it's notable because it runs really well on both my son's aging 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 at low resolution (and looks great too), and on my monster 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 with all the effects cranked up as high as they can go. On the PB-12, this game is basically unplayable, even at 640 x 480. So it's not a game machine, which I figured ahead of time.

In short, for the applications I'll need to run, the performance is excellent to acceptable, depending on the app. Overall, it's decent. I don't have the iMac here to test any more, but I suspect it's as good, or a bit better performer overall. I tend to expect more from desktop machines, of course, and am willing to accept performance tradeoffs for portability. Speaking of which...

Portability: Very good
The PB-12 is tiny, though not quite as tiny as the IBM ThinkPad X40, though you could make a valid argument that the X40 requires a media slice in order to work with optical disks. Point taken, but this is another area in which PC makers offer so much more choice than Apple does: If you're on a plane and don't need the optical drive, that's some optional weight and power loss you can discard; on the Apple, it's just there whether you need it. Also, the IBM offers other portability niceties, like an extended battery option that makes the machine a coast-to-coast performer. Good stuff.

Anyway, the PB's small size and weight are undeniable. Only its battery life and lack of portability options keeps it from getting an "excellent" grade.

Conclusions
Overall, I'm quite happy with the little bugger. It's a bit smaller and a heck of a lot more professional looking than the iBook it's replacing. The performance is much better than that of the iBook, though it still lags the PC notebooks I'm used to. I'll see how it holds up on the road, but I fully expect it to become the same type of reliable road companion that its predecessor was. So far, so good.

[ Posted at 5:11 PM | Permalink ]