Sunday, March 13, 2005
The 12 inch PowerBook: it doesn't suck but I'm not buying it
My mere mention of the fact that some folks were writing trying to convince me to take a look at the 12 inch PowerBook instead of the 12 inch iBook, naturally caused a flood of emails from both sides of the issue. While a lot of those emails were simply a matter of a user of one machine or the other explaining why their choice was the right one for them, some folks went to far to as to try to make a case that one machine or the other was the better choice for all users.
And you don't see that every day. Not on both sides of the issue, anyway.
The case that some folks made for the iBook being the "correct" 12 inch Apple laptop for all users generally read like this: the 12 inch PowerBook is about fifty percent more expensive and yet doesn't come anywhere near delivering fifty percent more specs. It has 20 percent more Megahertz, but it's still the same processor family, meaning that the two machines are going to feel roughly the same speed throughout their relevant lives, and they're both going to become obsolete at about the same time. While the PowerBook comes with twice the RAM, it does so simply by dropping an extra 256 MB RAM chip in the only empty RAM slot, meaning that if you plan on upgrading past 512 MB, that extra 256 chip it came with is going to be useless to you. The PowerBook has a better video card, but are you a hard-core video gamer? It comes with Bluetooth built-in, but are you going to use it? You can do monitor spanning, but will you ever actually buy a second monitor and use that feature? The PowerBook weighs a few ounces less but has a shorter battery life, which is a lousy trade-off. The only spec with an appreciable difference is that the PowerBook's hard drive has twice the capacity. You can get a SuperDrive, but you have to pay an additional $200 on top of the extra $500 you're already paying. The 12 inch PowerBook just doesn't have $500 worth of extra value built into it.
For what it's worth, I more or less agree with just about everything in the above paragraph, which is why I was leaning toward the 12 inch iBook in the first place.
In most cases, the case that was made of the PowerBook being the "only 12 inch Apple laptop worth buying" read something like this: the iBook is cheap and flimsy, the iBook has a crappy keyboard, I don't like the iBook's aesthetics, I don't like the iBook's white color.
Notice a pattern there? As in, no actual reasons to buy a 12 inch PowerBook, just a lot of badmouthing of the option they didn't choose?
The more I looked at the specs and the more I thought about it, the 12 inch PowerBook looked more and more like the "sucker model" of the group. Sort of like those "value packs" you see some retailers throw together that cost more than what the individual components would cost if you bought them on your own. I've used an iBook enough to know that it does not have a crappy keyboard, it's not flimsy in comparison to the PowerBook, and considering the color of the infinitely popular iPod, attacking the iBook for being "too white" is just weird.
And then of course there's the fringe crowd, insisting that I seriously consider "upgrading" to a G3 Pismo PowerBook, which effectively runs MacOS X at about one-fifth the speed of the machine I'm currently using. I guess I'll just leave that one alone, lest the fanatical Pismo devotees descend their wrath on me.
But back to the reality-based options, I kept kicking around the notion of why someone would actually pay $1500 for a 12 inch PowerBook, when for another $500 you could get yourself a "real" 15 inch PowerBook. And then I figured out the 12 inch PowerBook's intended target market: those folks who want the features that only the PowerBook offers, but for portability reasons, they need those features smashed down into the smallest form factor possible. If that means paying $500 more than an iBook then so be it, because these folks weren't looking at an iBook anyway. They were looking at a 15 inch PowerBook and saying "perfect...but too large."
Of course, I doubt Apple minds much when someone manages to upsell themselves from an iBook to a 12 inch PowerBook for no other reason than the ability to do the math, but that's not Apple's problem. As for me, I actually want the larger screen size and don't mind the larger form factor, so if I were to buy a new PowerBook right now, it would be the 15 inch model, not the 12. But, as I said earlier, the entire PowerBook line is overpriced right now, by virtue of the fact that they sport a G4 processor. Whatever I buy now, I'll be ditching the day the G5 PowerBook appears on the market, and I would never, ever, ever get a decent return by trying to sell a recent G4 PowerBook after the G5's have appeared.
So with all of that decided, why don't I just go and buy something already? Well, not yet. No matter what I do lately, I can't quite manage to nudge "new laptop" to the top of the financial priority list, which is fine because I expect Tiger to appear within the next six weeks at the most, and with the iBook line being about six months old, new revisions may be just around the corner as well. I can wait another two months and in the mean time I'll just keep chugging away on my current rig, as long as it continues to hold up (knock on Titanium).
My mere mention of the fact that some folks were writing trying to convince me to take a look at the 12 inch PowerBook instead of the 12 inch iBook, naturally caused a flood of emails from both sides of the issue. While a lot of those emails were simply a matter of a user of one machine or the other explaining why their choice was the right one for them, some folks went to far to as to try to make a case that one machine or the other was the better choice for all users.
And you don't see that every day. Not on both sides of the issue, anyway.
The case that some folks made for the iBook being the "correct" 12 inch Apple laptop for all users generally read like this: the 12 inch PowerBook is about fifty percent more expensive and yet doesn't come anywhere near delivering fifty percent more specs. It has 20 percent more Megahertz, but it's still the same processor family, meaning that the two machines are going to feel roughly the same speed throughout their relevant lives, and they're both going to become obsolete at about the same time. While the PowerBook comes with twice the RAM, it does so simply by dropping an extra 256 MB RAM chip in the only empty RAM slot, meaning that if you plan on upgrading past 512 MB, that extra 256 chip it came with is going to be useless to you. The PowerBook has a better video card, but are you a hard-core video gamer? It comes with Bluetooth built-in, but are you going to use it? You can do monitor spanning, but will you ever actually buy a second monitor and use that feature? The PowerBook weighs a few ounces less but has a shorter battery life, which is a lousy trade-off. The only spec with an appreciable difference is that the PowerBook's hard drive has twice the capacity. You can get a SuperDrive, but you have to pay an additional $200 on top of the extra $500 you're already paying. The 12 inch PowerBook just doesn't have $500 worth of extra value built into it.
For what it's worth, I more or less agree with just about everything in the above paragraph, which is why I was leaning toward the 12 inch iBook in the first place.
In most cases, the case that was made of the PowerBook being the "only 12 inch Apple laptop worth buying" read something like this: the iBook is cheap and flimsy, the iBook has a crappy keyboard, I don't like the iBook's aesthetics, I don't like the iBook's white color.
Notice a pattern there? As in, no actual reasons to buy a 12 inch PowerBook, just a lot of badmouthing of the option they didn't choose?
The more I looked at the specs and the more I thought about it, the 12 inch PowerBook looked more and more like the "sucker model" of the group. Sort of like those "value packs" you see some retailers throw together that cost more than what the individual components would cost if you bought them on your own. I've used an iBook enough to know that it does not have a crappy keyboard, it's not flimsy in comparison to the PowerBook, and considering the color of the infinitely popular iPod, attacking the iBook for being "too white" is just weird.
And then of course there's the fringe crowd, insisting that I seriously consider "upgrading" to a G3 Pismo PowerBook, which effectively runs MacOS X at about one-fifth the speed of the machine I'm currently using. I guess I'll just leave that one alone, lest the fanatical Pismo devotees descend their wrath on me.
But back to the reality-based options, I kept kicking around the notion of why someone would actually pay $1500 for a 12 inch PowerBook, when for another $500 you could get yourself a "real" 15 inch PowerBook. And then I figured out the 12 inch PowerBook's intended target market: those folks who want the features that only the PowerBook offers, but for portability reasons, they need those features smashed down into the smallest form factor possible. If that means paying $500 more than an iBook then so be it, because these folks weren't looking at an iBook anyway. They were looking at a 15 inch PowerBook and saying "perfect...but too large."
Of course, I doubt Apple minds much when someone manages to upsell themselves from an iBook to a 12 inch PowerBook for no other reason than the ability to do the math, but that's not Apple's problem. As for me, I actually want the larger screen size and don't mind the larger form factor, so if I were to buy a new PowerBook right now, it would be the 15 inch model, not the 12. But, as I said earlier, the entire PowerBook line is overpriced right now, by virtue of the fact that they sport a G4 processor. Whatever I buy now, I'll be ditching the day the G5 PowerBook appears on the market, and I would never, ever, ever get a decent return by trying to sell a recent G4 PowerBook after the G5's have appeared.
So with all of that decided, why don't I just go and buy something already? Well, not yet. No matter what I do lately, I can't quite manage to nudge "new laptop" to the top of the financial priority list, which is fine because I expect Tiger to appear within the next six weeks at the most, and with the iBook line being about six months old, new revisions may be just around the corner as well. I can wait another two months and in the mean time I'll just keep chugging away on my current rig, as long as it continues to hold up (knock on Titanium).
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