Hi,

I'm looking at buying a 12" laptop -- but I've had no experience with macs
before so am looking for some help / suggestion.

Could someone help me qualitatively compare two apple laptops :
-- the iBook ( 800Mhz, 128+512M RAM, airport )
-- and the Powerbook ( 1Ghz, 512M RAM, airport etc)

The applications I'm planning to run will be fairly compute intensive eg:
GCC for compiling OS Kernels etc. How much of a difference does the processor
make ?? The Powerbook, seems more powerful and expandable but is about $400 more.
Is the investment worth it considering I'm a poor grad student :-)

Any help/suggestions will be greatly appreaciated.

Thanks
-mr

In article <b1314877.0312041746.652bdc22@posting.google.com >,
mohan@cs.arizona.edu (Mohan Rajagopalan) wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking at buying a 12" laptop -- but I've had no experience with macs
> before so am looking for some help / suggestion.
>
> Could someone help me qualitatively compare two apple laptops :
> -- the iBook ( 800Mhz, 128+512M RAM, airport )
> -- and the Powerbook ( 1Ghz, 512M RAM, airport etc)
>
> The applications I'm planning to run will be fairly compute intensive eg:
> GCC for compiling OS Kernels etc. How much of a difference does the processor
> make ?? The Powerbook, seems more powerful and expandable but is about $400
> more.
> Is the investment worth it considering I'm a poor grad student :-)
>
> Any help/suggestions will be greatly appreaciated.
>
> Thanks
> -mr


Check out MacSpeedZone
http://www.macspeedzone.com/html/rev...1ghz-pwbk-vs-1
ghz-ibook.shtml

In article <b1314877.0312041746.652bdc22@posting.google.com >,
mohan@cs.arizona.edu (Mohan Rajagopalan) wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking at buying a 12" laptop -- but I've had no experience with macs
> before so am looking for some help / suggestion.
>
> Could someone help me qualitatively compare two apple laptops :
> -- the iBook ( 800Mhz, 128+512M RAM, airport )
> -- and the Powerbook ( 1Ghz, 512M RAM, airport etc)
>
> The applications I'm planning to run will be fairly compute intensive eg:
> GCC for compiling OS Kernels etc. How much of a difference does the processor
> make ?? The Powerbook, seems more powerful and expandable but is about $400
> more.
> Is the investment worth it considering I'm a poor grad student :-)
>

Among the differences (besides the relatively modest processor speed
difference):

-- the Powerbook has a DVD burner
-- the Powerbook has a somewhat nicer keyboard
-- the Powerbook video out can be used for multiple-video display, while
the iBook video out only mirrors what's on the main display
-- the Powerbook has an audio-in jack; if you need to record audio on
the iBook, you'll need to use a USB audio device such as Griffin
Technology's iMic.
-- the Powerbook has Bluetooth built-in (I think)-- with the iBook, it's
an option.

Otherwise, they're pretty equally expandable. Neither has PCMCIA card
slots, for example; neither has Firewire-800. Both have USB 2.0 ports.

While I do some audio-recording, I already have an iMic... and the other
differences seemed less important to me. I got the iBook, and so far,
I've been really happy with it. It's possible that a year or so down the
road, I'll really regret not getting something with a DVD burner, but so
far, so good.

-- AZ

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003 6:46:10 -0800, Alan Zisman wrote
(in message <alan-ADAA34.06461605122003@news.vf.shawcable.net>):

> In article <b1314877.0312041746.652bdc22@posting.google.com >,
> mohan@cs.arizona.edu (Mohan Rajagopalan) wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm looking at buying a 12" laptop -- but I've had no experience with macs
>> before so am looking for some help / suggestion.
>>
>> Could someone help me qualitatively compare two apple laptops :
>> -- the iBook ( 800Mhz, 128+512M RAM, airport )
>> -- and the Powerbook ( 1Ghz, 512M RAM, airport etc)
>>
>> The applications I'm planning to run will be fairly compute intensive eg:
>> GCC for compiling OS Kernels etc. How much of a difference does the
>> processor
>> make ?? The Powerbook, seems more powerful and expandable but is about
>> $400
>> more.
>> Is the investment worth it considering I'm a poor grad student :-)
>>
>
> Among the differences (besides the relatively modest processor speed
> difference):
>
> -- the Powerbook has a DVD burner
> -- the Powerbook has a somewhat nicer keyboard
> -- the Powerbook video out can be used for multiple-video display, while
> the iBook video out only mirrors what's on the main display
> -- the Powerbook has an audio-in jack; if you need to record audio on
> the iBook, you'll need to use a USB audio device such as Griffin
> Technology's iMic.
> -- the Powerbook has Bluetooth built-in (I think)-- with the iBook, it's
> an option.
>
> Otherwise, they're pretty equally expandable. Neither has PCMCIA card
> slots, for example; neither has Firewire-800. Both have USB 2.0 ports.
>
> While I do some audio-recording, I already have an iMic... and the other
> differences seemed less important to me. I got the iBook, and so far,
> I've been really happy with it. It's possible that a year or so down the
> road, I'll really regret not getting something with a DVD burner, but so
> far, so good.

The big differences seem to be the price, the L2 cache is twice as big on
the powerbook but battery life is shorter.

[[ This message was both posted and mailed: see
the "To," "Cc," and "Newsgroups" headers for details. ]]

In article <alan-ADAA34.06461605122003@news.vf.shawcable.net>, Alan
Zisman <alan@nospam.zisman.ca> wrote:

>
> Among the differences (besides the relatively modest processor speed
> difference):
>
> -- the Powerbook has a DVD burner
> -- the Powerbook has a somewhat nicer keyboard
> -- the Powerbook video out can be used for multiple-video display, while
> the iBook video out only mirrors what's on the main display
> -- the Powerbook has an audio-in jack; if you need to record audio on
> the iBook, you'll need to use a USB audio device such as Griffin
> Technology's iMic.
> -- the Powerbook has Bluetooth built-in (I think)-- with the iBook, it's
> an option.
>
> Otherwise, they're pretty equally expandable. Neither has PCMCIA card
> slots, for example; neither has Firewire-800. Both have USB 2.0 ports.
>
> While I do some audio-recording, I already have an iMic... and the other
> differences seemed less important to me. I got the iBook, and so far,
> I've been really happy with it. It's possible that a year or so down the
> road, I'll really regret not getting something with a DVD burner, but so
> far, so good.

Similarly to Alan (Hi Alan!) I opted for the iBook G4, and am very
happy with it, with more than enough speed for me. I would suggest you
max out the RAM to 640 MB if you go with the iBook as that can have an
effect on the effective performance.

Cheers,

Darrell

p.s., tried to find an online URL for the item below, couldn't, so here
it is cut and pasted.

"Understanding MemoryStick

Mac OS X uses RAM very intensively, and the amount of stress placed on
your RAM can make a huge difference in performance. Yet Mac OS X
provides no equivalent to the "About This Mac" display of RAM usage
that was present in earlier systems. Thus, you can't even tell whether
you've got enough RAM for your daily tasks. The purpose of MemoryStick
is to make up for this by providing a graphical display of RAM usage.

A Mercifully Brief and Wildly Over-Simplified Lecture on How Mac OS X
Uses Memory

The first thing you'll notice when you start up MemoryStick is that
there are no applications listed. This is because in Mac OS X there are
not distinct application heaps as in previous systems. Instead, every
application is given the illusion that it has huge quantities of RAM
available to it (much more than you probably have). Mac OS X maintains
this illusion by means of its memory management system.

Under this system, Mac OS X loads into RAM the resources (bits of code,
data, and so forth) that are actually needed. An application's actual
RAM usage is thus dynamic. If an application loads all the data from a
small document, it uses a small amount of RAM; if it loads all the data
from a large document, it uses a large amount of RAM. If an
applications quits, some of these resources are no longer needed, and
RAM usage goes down (but, as MemoryStick reveals, not as much as one
might expect).

This architecture has two chief advantages over earlier Mac systems.
First, you can run lots of applications without necessarily using all
that much RAM, because an application is not compelled to ask in
advance for a big block of RAM that it might not need all of. Second,
an application basically never runs out of memory, because there isn't
some fixed block of memory beyond which it can never go. So you'll
never see one of those messages saying that an application is running
out of memory and can't open this document, complete this operation, or
whatever. This, in fact, is probably one of the main reasons you're
using Mac OS X as opposed to an earlier system.

Nevertheless, the fact is that your RAM is finite, so Mac OS X must do
something if RAM gets tight (which could happen because there are a lot
of windows open or a lot of applications running or whatever). What it
does is to spool some less used resources off to the hard disk (into
/var/vm, if you must know). This is called a "pageout". The idea is
that in this way Mac OS X can use all the actual RAM available to it,
and then if a resource is needed that was paged out to the hard disk,
it can be read from the hard disk, exchanging it for some other less
used resource. This is superficially similar to the earlier notion of
"virtual memory". For example, if you're running AppA in the background
and you open AppB which needs a lot of actual RAM, some of AppA's
resources might get paged out; then if you switch back to AppA and do
something that needs those resources, they are read back in, in
exchange for some of AppB's resources.

The problem is that this process of pageout-and-swap is slow. For this
reason, more RAM is better. So, you can run Mac OS X with just 128MB of
RAM, but after a while you might start to see a lot of delays, with the
dreaded "spinning cursor" showing up often. That's because Mac OS X is
having to pageout and swap a lot of material in order to keep open all
the applications you're using. On the other hand you might do the same
work with 256MB of RAM and never see any delays at all.

For more information about Mac OS X memory management, please see John
Siracusa's article in Ars Technica.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q4/...sx-10.1-6.html
It was reading this that inspired me to write MemoryStick, so that I'd
have a tool to visualize my machine's RAM usage. There is also a superb
but somewhat technical article at Apple's site.

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/mattneub/downloads/MemoryStick1.3.dmg.gz"

--
To reply, substitute .net for .invalid in address, i.e., darrell.usenet2 (at)
telus.net

In article <0001HW.BBF5ED1C00037DFDF02845B0@news.west.cox.net >, John Biltz <biltzjohn@cox.net> writes:
>On Fri, 5 Dec 2003 6:46:10 -0800, Alan Zisman wrote
>(in message <alan-ADAA34.06461605122003@news.vf.shawcable.net>):
>
>> In article <b1314877.0312041746.652bdc22@posting.google.com >,
>> mohan@cs.arizona.edu (Mohan Rajagopalan) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm looking at buying a 12" laptop -- but I've had no experience with macs
>>> before so am looking for some help / suggestion.
>>>
>>> Could someone help me qualitatively compare two apple laptops :
>>> -- the iBook ( 800Mhz, 128+512M RAM, airport )
>>> -- and the Powerbook ( 1Ghz, 512M RAM, airport etc)
>>>
>>> The applications I'm planning to run will be fairly compute intensive eg:
>>> GCC for compiling OS Kernels etc. How much of a difference does the
>>> processor
>>> make ?? The Powerbook, seems more powerful and expandable but is about
>>> $400
>>> more.
>>> Is the investment worth it considering I'm a poor grad student :-)
>>>
>>
>> Among the differences (besides the relatively modest processor speed
>> difference):
>>
>> -- the Powerbook has a DVD burner
>> -- the Powerbook has a somewhat nicer keyboard
>> -- the Powerbook video out can be used for multiple-video display, while
>> the iBook video out only mirrors what's on the main display
>> -- the Powerbook has an audio-in jack; if you need to record audio on
>> the iBook, you'll need to use a USB audio device such as Griffin
>> Technology's iMic.
>> -- the Powerbook has Bluetooth built-in (I think)-- with the iBook, it's
>> an option.
>>
>> Otherwise, they're pretty equally expandable. Neither has PCMCIA card
>> slots, for example; neither has Firewire-800. Both have USB 2.0 ports.
>>
>> While I do some audio-recording, I already have an iMic... and the other
>> differences seemed less important to me. I got the iBook, and so far,
>> I've been really happy with it. It's possible that a year or so down the
>> road, I'll really regret not getting something with a DVD burner, but so
>> far, so good.
>
>The big differences seem to be the price, the L2 cache is twice as big on
>the powerbook but battery life is shorter.

So you plug it in via its wall wart whenever possible.

Recently, I took my 17" PowerBook to a training event. I was able to get
through the day (9am to 5pm) by keeping the screen backlight low and put-
ting it to sleep whenever there was a break or lunch. Most of the intel
based laptop toting attendees remarked that they were happy if they got 2
hours on their battery.
--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)COM

"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"

In article <alan-ADAA34.06461605122003@news.vf.shawcable.net>,
Alan Zisman <alan@nospam.zisman.ca> wrote:

> In article <b1314877.0312041746.652bdc22@posting.google.com >,
> mohan@cs.arizona.edu (Mohan Rajagopalan) wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm looking at buying a 12" laptop -- but I've had no experience with macs
> > before so am looking for some help / suggestion.
> >
> > Could someone help me qualitatively compare two apple laptops :
> > -- the iBook ( 800Mhz, 128+512M RAM, airport )
> > -- and the Powerbook ( 1Ghz, 512M RAM, airport etc)
> >
> > The applications I'm planning to run will be fairly compute intensive eg:
> > GCC for compiling OS Kernels etc. How much of a difference does the
> > processor
> > make ?? The Powerbook, seems more powerful and expandable but is about $400
> > more.
> > Is the investment worth it considering I'm a poor grad student :-)
> >
>
> Among the differences (besides the relatively modest processor speed
> difference):
>
> -- the Powerbook has a DVD burner
> -- the Powerbook has a somewhat nicer keyboard
> -- the Powerbook video out can be used for multiple-video display, while
> the iBook video out only mirrors what's on the main display
> -- the Powerbook has an audio-in jack; if you need to record audio on
> the iBook, you'll need to use a USB audio device such as Griffin
> Technology's iMic.
> -- the Powerbook has Bluetooth built-in (I think)-- with the iBook, it's
> an option.
>
> Otherwise, they're pretty equally expandable. Neither has PCMCIA card
> slots, for example; neither has Firewire-800. Both have USB 2.0 ports.
>
> While I do some audio-recording, I already have an iMic... and the other
> differences seemed less important to me. I got the iBook, and so far,
> I've been really happy with it. It's possible that a year or so down the
> road, I'll really regret not getting something with a DVD burner, but so
> far, so good.
>
> -- AZ

One thing I neglected to mention... whether you get an iBook or
PowerBook-- boost the base RAM. Both models ship with 256 MB, which is
adequate (the G3 iBooks were shipping with sub-par 128 MB) but not
great... I'm quite happy with my iBook's performance with 640 MB.

In article <00A29EB7.871CC1FF@SendSpamHere.ORG>,
VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:

>
> So you plug it in via its wall wart whenever possible.
>
> Recently, I took my 17" PowerBook to a training event. I was able to get
> through the day (9am to 5pm) by keeping the screen backlight low and put-
> ting it to sleep whenever there was a break or lunch. Most of the intel
> based laptop toting attendees remarked that they were happy if they got 2
> hours on their battery.

Another thing nice thing about the PB is a little internal backup
battery that lets you swap batteries without shutting down. (Or does the
G4 iBook do this now?) I wish my iBook had that, though I don't really
need it often.

Chip

--
(note: email address munged -- there are no punctuation marks in the
part preceding the "at" symbol)