My Toshiba Satellite Pro, purchased in 1996, was a great, dependable computer that survived numerous drops that would have scrambled a lesser machine. But after six years, the venerable laptop-- with it's 100 Mhtz processor and 40 meg of ram -- was seriously dogging it.
I needed a new machine. Specifically, I needed one that was highly mobile, slim, and energy-efficient. I don't travel much, but when I do travel, my trips tend to be very, very long -- like my trip last year to Alaska (14 hours), or this June's to Wyoming (8 hours). It also had to be affordable, but nicely loaded -- an Ethernet connection and USB port (used to connect digital cameras, mice and such) were musts.
Enter the iBook.
The iBook is Apple's low-end laptop. The original -- inspired by the iMac -- was decent enough computer saddled by a tacky-looking colorful exterior that made the thing look like Barbie's purse. Some folks loved it, and it sold quite a few units, but it wasn't something that professionals could take into business meetings. Not if they wanted to be taken seriously.
That changed with the new iBook, which is far lighter and thinner than its predecessor. The new laptop is about the size of a paper notebook, and only slightly thicker than one. The garish color scheme of the original has been ditched in favor of a sleek all-white look that's wrapped in a translucent cover. On the technical side, it's powered by a 600 mhtz G3 processor, a beautiful active matrix 024-by-768 pixel resolution screen, two USB ports, and a 400Mbps Firewire port. Network connections are handled by an internal 56k modem and an Ethernet jack.
The baseline model comes with a barely-tolerable 128 meg of ram, a 15 gig hard drive and a CD-Drive, while the full-loaded model has 128 meg of ram, a 30 gig hard drive, and a duel DVD/Rewritable CD drive. The machine's upgradeable to 640 meg of ram. It has the Apple-standard single button track pad as a mouse.
It comes with both Mac OS 9 and the new Mac OS X operating system installed; by default it boots into the familiar OS 9.
The iBook that arrived on my door step in early August was a mid-range model with 128 meg of ram, a 20 gig hard drive drive and a DVD-ROM. It shipped before the speed bump with a 500 MHz processor. Knowing that I would be taking the computer on road-trips -- including lengthy flights to points far west of Pennsylvania I opted to buy a second battery. All told, the machine cost about $1800 (with about another $100 going to the tax man).
I had the machine booted and AppleWorks -- Apple's word processor / spreadsheet / database program -- running a minute after I took the machine out of its box. There was only one simple registration screen to deal with, and none of the