Mac Users - Advice needed.

[Rabasaurus]

Ill be purchasing a new mac soon, a portable. But Im a little unsure what too go for. Its either between...

12" ibook, 900mhz G3 with 640 ram for ?1,166.62 (not interested in the 14" version as it has the same screen resolution as the 12" so its a waste of money)

or

15" Powerbook, 867mhz G4 with 256 ram for ?1,468.75

Now I havent been using macs for a few years, my current employer favours PCs, but my new job will be working on Macs.

So which of the two would be better, or better value for money? Would there be a huge performance difference between the two? I would also be looking to get a 19" monitor as well, but couldnt if I got the G4 Powerbook.

So what would you recommend?

[eASY aDDICT]

Powerbooks all the way to be honest...

Ibook is like a Fisher Price laptop in comparison

[bowser123]

The ibook is nice but the one you have seen seems very pricy seeing as the G3 processor inside is quite old now. If you have the extra ?400 then definitely get the powerbook. It looks much better, is much faster (ignore the mhz speed, its very misleading on a mac) and almost certainly will have a better graphics card as standard. Most new games require a G4 for decent performance too.

Any reason why you are after a laptop in particular?
Take a look at the eMac or the sexy new iMac for equal performance at a much cheaper price.

One thing I would say is that when you get your new mac ensure you download the free safari web browser from apple. That and mozilla are by far the best browsers on the platform and once safari is finished (its still beta but very stable) then you will only ever need safari.

If you haven't used a mac for a while, wait till you see OSX.
Its lovely.

[Rabasaurus]

I wont be using the mac for games, its for work and will be for web and print work. I want a portable so I can bring work home and show client examples etc etc

[replicant]

pc forum. tbh.

gtf

[Rabasaurus]

pc forum. tbh.

gtf

Was originally posted in Q & A but was moved

[weresheep]

A couple of points (as a owner of a 12" 700MHz iBook).

The difference between the G3 and G4 processors only really show up in things like Photoshop, ripping CDs in iTunes etc. If you just want to browse the web, do email etc then you wont notice a difference between a G3 and a G4 CPU.

You mentioned getting a 19" monitor, are you aware that the iBook is only capable on display mirroring? That means that the display on the external monitor is a copy on the iBooks monitor. That also means that the 19" monitor would be stuck at 1024x768 (the iBooks resolution).

PowerBooks do not have this limitation. You can use the PowerBooks display and an external monitor separately (including changing the resolution).

You only mentioned the 12" iBook and the 15" PowerBook. However, I think that the 12" PowerBook is possibly the best "value for money" portable from Apple at the moment. Maybe you could consider that?

Hope this helps.

Oh, bowser123, OmniWeb > Safari

-weresheep

[Rabasaurus]

Only thing about 12" Powerbook is the 2-3 week build time

[bowser123]

The other thing you may need to consider is the amount of programmes that you will be using that are OS9 only. Most new macs like the G5 and iMac will only boot up in OSX so you have to run any OS9 stuff through the classic mode of OSX. While it is functional I have noticed a severe hit in speed whilst trying classic compared to just running it through OS9.

The iBook will almost certainly boot up with OS9 but I reckon the powerbook may be stuck in OSX. I don't know for certain but the time it was announced was around the time that apple announced that their computers would only boot in X. Other than that, as I'm sure you are aware, OSX needs tons of memory to perform well so depending on the amount of OS9 applications you will be using it may be wiser to get the slightly cheaper iBook and spend the remainder on memory.