Uh, have you actually TRIED the computer you plan to buy? They are quite slow. The G3 isn't competitive NOW, let alone "in a couple years".

Tired of languages that are focused on the machine rather than the human? >> Squeak Smalltalk

Command-Tab to switch apps, Command-` to swicth windows.

Application development and deployment on Open Source Technologies, Feratech.

1. Is it rugged? To me, the iBook seems to hold up well to abuse. I carry mine around daily in a backpack with other books and sharp pointy things and the iBook hasn't been harmed at all. It's bound to happen one day, but it's been 1+ years now and it's still looking nice and shiny, just like when I bought it. My friend's PowerBook had its case bent above the DVD-ROM drive. The drive still works, but it makes a terrible buzzing sound when a disc is in it.

2. Port access. I've noticed on some older model PowerBooks, the ports have a little door that flips down before you can access them. And, if you plug in an Ethernet cable, it's really damned hard to press in the tab to pull it out because it snaps in under the door hinge. On the iBook, the ports are all on the side, ready to use.

3. The screen. A bigger screen is always more desirable, but I've looked at both the 14" iBooks and the PowerBooks and noticed that when you close the laptop, the screen sags due to lack of support and scraps against the keyboard. This does not happen on my 12" iBook because the keyboard extends out far enough that it rests on the screen border (since the screen is countersunk a little, it prevents it from scraping against the keyboard). Just something else to think about.

4. Moving parts. The less moving parts, the better. On the PowerBook (last I checked), the CD/DVD drive is slot loading. On my iBook, it's a tray that's held in place by a lock. When you eject, it unlocks it. You have to pull it out and then push it back in to lock it, but my drive works perfectly. I've seen the slot loading motors fail after excessive use.

-- David L. Cantrell Jr. david@burdell.org

And I would have to say that I like the TiBook more for its screen. I picked up a 14" iBook (for my fiance) in January and the TiBook (for myself) in June. I use the TiBook for daily work, and my fiance uses the iBook for checking email and surfing the web at home. Both are very usable, but, if you plan to use the system a lot, then you'll want the better screen.

Is it worth the price difference, though? Difficult to say. Also, be sure to check out the 12" iBook, you may find its smaller size appealing.

The way I code is designed to maximize my cross-platform capability. I'm the lead developer on most of the projects I work on, so I have the luxury of defining the structure of the project. I try to follow a pretty strict MVC model, separating the user interface code from the model and control modules. We always try to structure and write our code so that it's easy to port from one platform to another.

Unless we're talking about a Java project or a CLI application, the View module is created on the target platform (i.e. for a Windows target, the GUI is developed using Windows). However, the model and control modules are designed with Standard C++ code interfaces, and we implement them with Standard C++ and/or ANSI C as much as possible.

By using cross-platform code in the model and control modules, I'm able to develop and do initial testing for those modules on the platform of my choice (i.e. Mac OS X).

Right now, when we build for the target platform, we're compiling on the target (i.e. for a Windows app, the final build is done on Windows). However, I want to find the time to play around with gcc on the Mac and see if I can get it set up as a cross-compiler. Then I could compile on the Mac for Linux or Windows targets (I had gcc configured this way on my last Linux box). I haven't gotten around to it, though, since it's really easy to ssh to a different box and run a make.

It probably helps that many of the projects I work on have minimal GUIs. I do a lot of server-side stuff.

I have a love/hate relationship with my powerbook. Besides the pathetic airport reception, I have had to have my LCD replaced TWICE due to the hinges cracking (a known flaw...check the support forums), and I'm on my FOURTH motherboard...one was replaced after damaged during the LCD repair, one was replaced when the firewire port fried...and that replacement board was defective so they had to install another one! My poor tibook has cost Apple a lot of money in hardware support during it's one year lifespan. And I'm good to it...I keep it in a padded sleeve inside a padded/hard shell inside a laptop backpack, and I'm as gentle as possible with it. But it does get a lot of use.

My tibook is extremely delicate. But it's wonderful. It's gorgeous, it's fairly fast (although the 550 needs more L3 cache), and I love using it. I just wish I could have the durability/airport range of an iBook. If you do decide to get one, do not hesitate to get AppleCare.

G3 is not a good option for purchase at this time. The processor is really quite lack luster and doesn't give a great bang for the buck. I on the other hand feel that a PowerBook is a bad option. After coming in contact with about 10 individual units, I must admit that every single one of them has had a major hardware problem within the first 4 months of ownership. Either the DVD drive will only spin correctly for 10 minutes or less (making it useless for DVD's) or the keyboard will flake out, etc... For the sizable investment which is required to become a PowerBook owner, it's not worth the cash.

My solution is, just wait. If you have a notebook which works well for the moment and your only reasoning for an upgrade is cash to burn, wait to have something worth burning it on. An iBook with G4 will have to be released eventually, after all, Apple can only lower the price on iBook so many times before they have to sell something new. The G3 iBook is old technology and with nothing more than a G4 CPU upgrade would be a great deal.

The damn shame of this is that Apple is in a jam. They don't have a reliable source of CPU technology. Low heat, small die G4 chips usable in the iBook aren't likely to come along anytime soon. Besides, since the tiBook isn't really all the fast, even a low end G4 (by today's standards) in the iBook would make the tiBook redundant except for screen size and superdrive. Even when IBM start shipping the 970, it will be a while before they ramp up with a notebook/mobile part. So I don't see Apple having any ability to move forward on notebook technologies any time soon.

I would say that today is a really good day to pick to make a statement to Apple. Let them know that you're their most valued treasure, a paying customer. Let them know that you won't perform for them just because they're Apple and you have no alternative if you want to run a end user non-Windows OS. Let them know that you demand better treatment than you get in the PC world. They need to ship better technology and they need to make it cost the right price.

I am passionate about this since I'm typing this on a PC. It's a 1.7ghz P4 with a few bells and whistles. I've always bought the next to State of the art model every 3 months. I haven't been able to upgrade this machine because it's more than fast enough to develop multi-million line applications on. On the other hand, my dual processor 1Ghz G4 at the office is a dog for development. Codewarrior is just plain junk and Project Builder is still years off. The machine is just too damn slow and I'm not interested in paying Apple $5000 for a decked out XServe just to get a whimpy 10% increase in speed. I want dual Ghz and I want it now.

As for how I feel, I explained to my boss the other day, I want to move to another platform, the Mac is just too painful. I've developed on 15 different platforms (including all the majors) and Mac is simply the worst and I've been programming it for 2 years.

As for the "Shocking" statement, it's the fact that the average end user can't even figure out that an outdated G3 notebook isn't worth the effort anymore that makes it so they can still peddle this crap on us. There was a time where Apple had a worse than crap OS running on a hell of a machine. How did that reverse itself so quickly. They are fabulous engineers which can make hardware which from appearance alone can make old school Sun/NeXT freaks drool, but lately, I have to say, there's no excitement in the trash they're shipping.

In a way, before I move back to the Mac (which I hope to do someday), I want real hardware at no more than 50% over the equivilent Dell in price and I want a public apology to be issued to all the people who have been recently suckered into purchasing overpriced dated hardware sold at above-premium prices. Until that happens, I'll stick with my P4 1.7Ghz and with my Ultra 10

My wife uses her iBook for personal things like creating web pages, web surfing, email, etc. It is perfect. The battery life is long, the machine is small and durable, and the airport reception is great. I find her machine a little slow when I use it, but that is mostly a comparison. I don't think I would notice it if I used it daily.

I am an IT professional and I could not get by with the iBook for work (I could for home though). I often require dual monitors and high resolution to view large spreadsheets or UML diagrams. I also travel a lot and give presentations. The iBook only supports one video mode and lately I have been at two sites where the projector would only support 800X600. The TiBook is much better at multiple vide modes and I have also used the S-Video out to run flash demos on plasma screens. A real lifesaver when I forgot my VGA video adapter.

Both are great machines and both meet the needs we bought them for. If you buy the one that meets your needs, you can't go wrong.

Yeah... I'm going to have to sort of, disagree with you there...

The TiBook is VERY nice, but at a starting price of $2400 or so, it doesn't exactly meet my definition of "reasonably priced".

You also pointed out an exact issue which does justify many of my statements. We do have to compile the huge project quite often. This is because the code originates from Windows 3.1 (I wish I could elaborate, but we have agreements with Apple which require we don't publicly bash anything they do, so anonymous it is). During a corporate growth stage which used the "All developers report to the CEO" heirarchy, the code grew very rapidly and was ported to many platforms. We have been attempting to recover from this for approximately 2 years, but unfortunately, the old fashioned "If you want Visual C++ 1.5 to compile really quick, then make a single procompiled header which includes all the other headers." which made it nearly impossible to separate all the headers again, so any time you change a header file, it's recompile time. Our next big project at the company which is currently in the "Design stage" is a modularization project. It should correct much of this.

As I have said earlier, I can agree with most everything you said. I have to point out that I would love to work with Cocoa since the promise from management that I would eventually have the opportunity went bad. The fact is that we were a Carbon shop before I joined the Mac team. Used PowerPlant which may have been considered the best you can get for a while, but really it's as bad as Carbon itself. So now we have a product with PowerPlant on Carbon with a bastardized hack to support Carbon Events. Due to the "WAY TOO LONG" time it takes to initially port to this architecture, we have no choice but to stay with it and improve on it over time. At least for now. So when it comes to generating CFM binaries and debugging through CodeWarrior since Apple hasn't focussed much on a libc which works on CFM, the experience doesn't feel too good.

As for your remark about gcc, I agree, it's the system ld which kills me, getting it all to link is a pain in the butt. Also dlfcn is a huge part of my life and although the emulation layer often works, it doesn't work all that well yet. Apple should have taken charge of this.

Outside of the Mac's are slow for development, a good example would be what are they really slow at? Compressing video either through Quicktime or Premier is quite slow. Compressing MPEG-4 video through Quicktime (which you have to often reprocess to create MPEG-4 standard streams since QT doesn't) sucks. It's extremely slow, there's no usable progress meter and it more or less permanently locks up at least one CPU in the system which encoding. Compressing the exact same stream (of my little boy playing with the computer) takes less than 40% of the time on my P4 1.7ghz than it does on my Mac. Of course I don't use Quicktime on the PC, instead I compress the video using VirtualDub and DivX. The quality that I get is also about 3 times as good without enabling any of the pro features of DivX. Using MPEG4IP utilities, I can generate an MP4 file from the AVI which is standard enough to work on every MPEG-4 player I've found. So really the Mac isn't too good at video.

As for Adobe products. There is no avoiding the fact that they are definately more user friendly on the Mac platform than on Windows. They look gorgeous there, but they're terribly slow. The video subsystem on Windows which has been steadily developed and improved on for the past 15 years if just simply faster than the graphics architecture on Mac. The issue isn't in the performance of the drivers. We all know that nVidia uses the same code on every platform. The problem is with CoreGraphics. It's not terribly fast. If you want an example, just drag a window around on XP, on Linux and on Mac. The fact is that the Mac is painfully slow. Also, open IE or Mozilla on Windows, Mac and Linux (IE through crossover office). Now load a long page, even Slashdot will do. Scroll the window up and down and you'll see that the performance of the Mac is dead slow.

Now for usability. Withouth touching the mouse, start from a blank desktop and open X windows, write a small X app, switch between windows a few times. Now open 10 other applications, open 2 or more windows in each app which allows it. Tell me now that there is a consistant method of selecting which window should have focus without touching the mouse. The fact that I ever have to touch a mouse is more than enough reason to say that the Mac is slow. The fact is that if I had the coordination to use a mouse and keyboard quickly and in conjunction with each other, I'd have been an athlete instead of a nerd.

There are a few kinks with the Mac which need to be worked out. They aren't terribly bad, all of them should be resolved after the next $100+ minor revision of X. But really, the problem for me is the system is just too slow. Apple is stuck in a position where they can't easily correct this, they simply don't have the faster chips available. But this is something they should have seen coming ages ago and resolved much sooner. This is what angers me about it the most. I don't mind paying way too much for hardware, I really don't mind paying a lot for all the neat products which I had to relicense when I moved to Mac, but I do mind not having an upgrade path. G3 should have been off the road map back when the Cube was taken of the agenda. There is simply no good reason to ship the G3. And more to the point, there is no good reason to ship one so slow. The G3 does not perform all that well in comparison to the Pentium 3. Not like the G4 against the P4. So a 700mhz G3 on an operating system with a slow graphics system is just aweful. Also there is not a single reason why dated G4 machines should be so expensive. Apple should be shipping at least 1.8ghz right now if they want to charge what they do.

Well jsut my thoughts and I'll gonna take more videos of the kid right now.

The 12" iBook currently has a $10 instant discount. OOOoooo...

I think after Christmas, you'll see deeper discounts as Apple tries to clear stock in preperation for whatever is coming in Macworld near end of January.

Then again, if they do release G4 iBooks, it'll probably be several weeks before they are shipping.

Hence, that magic first week or two of January may be the best time to buy if a G3 doesn't scare you off, or if you can wait, chill and see what pops up at Macworld...

I never really gave laptops much thought, due to the expense and relatively tiny screens, until I was given a 100MHz Pentium laptop earlier this year. I installed Linux on it and selected a light window manager (fvwm2)... and I've been amazed at how even a clunker like that changes how you use a computer.

So now I'm considering getting rid of the desktop altogether & replacing it with a laptop. My primary question with iBook vs. TiBook is the screen size. OSX seems to like screen real estate almost as much as it likes RAM. Either one stuffed with RAM would be computationally fast enough for my needs. The old Pentium has an 800x600 screen, which is mostly adequate, but I'm mostly running xterms and the occasional Ace of Penguins card game.

Is anyone out there using their laptop as a primary system? Is the screen adequate?

-- Dirt Road
And wireless... drool...

I, too have found that my TiBook has slowly taken over all of my computing needs. At work it has X11, samba, etc. At home it's a great gaiming/multimedia box.

That being said, I rarely use it in "laptop" mode. At work and at home I have an external keyboard, mouse and nice monitor to hook it up to. It feels like a regular desktop machine, except that I can put it in my briefcase and take it home! The only time it really acts as a laptop is on the plane, or when I'm doing casual web browing from the couch. In either of these situations, the screen real estate is more than adequate. (And I have an older TiBook with the 1152x768 screen. The newer ones have more pixels.)

---veni vidi gdb---