Here’s to my fifth Apple portable, live from Mangia!
Last week I blathered on and on about achieving my silly little goal of posting at least once a day for 100 days. Course I pulled it off so I gave myself a reward,…this new MacBook (the Intel-based successor to Apple’s iBook line). Well, getting a new MacBook was in the cards as soon as I received my 401k money from Kenny’s. I made a deal with Somara, if half the money went to her smallest student loan (codename Alan Shepherd), I could use the remainder to buy the computer while making up any difference with overtime.
What exactly is this thing? It looks like a wider, white-colored iBook but it has a 2 GHz dual core Intel processor. Makes it somewhat faster than the G4 dual 1.25 GHz in my home office. It has 1 GB of RAM which I recommend as the bare minimum for any Intel-based Macs, the low-end models leverage their RAM for the video, anything less creates a miserable experience. It has an 80 GB hard drive, only my home server has an equivalent amount of storage. Best of all, it has a SuperDrive that also can burn dual-layer DVD-Rs (almost 9 GB per side). As you can see from the picture, it has a built-in iSight camera; good for making movies, videoconferences and taking adequate pictures. I’m still test driving the little remote. Obviously, I renamed it Bugs Bunny and will be “vandalizing” it soon with stickers, thus everyone will know it’s mine.
The iBook G3 has new home waiting for it. A security guard at work had a 100 bucks ready to go. Only a C note? I sold it “as is” because it’s over four years old, it had three repairs (it was part of a run with bad luck), the battery had over 400 cycles (Lithium Ion is only rated to perform in spec for 300), and it was a G3, which was state of the art during Clinton’s second term. It’ll work, it’ll be fine, if the new owner/user only uses it for e-mail, web browsing and writing papers. Anything really intense such as Photoshop or QuarkXpress will result in frustration. Most low-end portables are best treated as portable wallets, day planners and overgrown PDAs.
This is now my fifth personal Apple portable and I think this one will be the greatest since my PowerBook G3 FireWire (the last of the black G3 portables). That one was bulletproof and it ran like a champ! If my only complaint about it was it not fitting in the customized backpack Somara made for me, then it has become the standard to judge all others by. What about my others? They were good too, I only traded up because technology keeps improving and once you’ve owned a portable Mac, they’re pretty difficult to live without.
Next steps, getting newer, better versions of key software I depend on: Now Up2Date and TypeIt4Me mainly. Then a new kick-ass 24” iMac in 2008.