Apple 12-inch PowerBook G4 Review

Dave_B writes "Tony Smith of El Reg gives his verdict after a month with Apple's 12-inch Powerbook." His overall impression was good, but there are some words of caution in here regarding battery life and heat, so read before buying one ;)

Re:more interestingly - software criticisms

[tbmaddux]

The battery conditioning issue; Apple doesn't really provide users with any clear and obvious documentation on it.

Finally; CDRWs needs the Disk Utility app.

A little clarification: you need either Disk Utility or Disk Copy to erase a CD-RW. Using Disk Copy is more convenient because at least it doesn't prompt you to authenticate with an admin password just to erase a CD-RW. But you're right, doing all this in the Finder would be much better.

I haven't noticed any need for battery conditioning in the PowerBooks and iBooks I use. I suspect the reviewer is getting under 5 hours of life not because of the battery "condition" but because he doesn't have Energy Saver configured for maximum battery life (backlight/brightness turned way down, sleep in under 5 minutes, turn off monitor in less time than that, spin down the disk), and is probably leaving Airport turned on as well. Apple is careful (like anyone making advertising claims) to state that their battery life is up to X hours on all their portables. That's a maximum, not an average or a typical value.

Re:Buying one..

[Alan Partridge]

that post makes no sense whatsoever. The G4 can't use the full bandwidth of the DDR RAM, but the other components that access the RAM can MORE FULLY saturate the RAMs bandwidth thanks to the new "controller chip". Either way, the G4 only has 256KB of L3 cache where the iBook's G3 has 512KB - and that's the main reason why the iBook is faster.