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Portables (Apple) Businesses Apple Hardware

Apple Updates iBook 80

Posted by pudge from the now-with-optional-superdrive-ha-ha-just-kidding dept.
micq writes "After the PowerBook was updated with a faster processor at the end of April, the iBook was sure to follow. Apple announced today that the popular iBook line has been updated, upping it to a 700MHz G3. It's good to see they're still keeping the 12.1" models, which are of the few remaining small screen, ultra-portables..." They've also improved the video card to an ATI Mobility Radeon. Prices range from $1500 to $1800 for the 700MHz model (12" and 14"), and there's a 12"/600MHz model for $1200.
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Apple Updates iBook More

Apple Updates iBook

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  • This upgrade makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @09:11AM (#3550234) Homepage Journal
    The G3 is a nice, lower-power chip at a decent speed. It's probably a better choice for an ultraportable than the G4 would be. And with the upgrade to a Radeon, it's now capable of taking advantage of Quartz Extreme (though not optimized, it now meets the spec). 700 MHz is a respectable speedbump - which we all knew would come soon after the PBG4 was bumped to 800 MHz. Personally, the only thing I'd like to see is the ability to support a little higher res (maybe 1152x870 or something like it) on the 14" model, but it's a nice upgrade anyways.

    A lot of folks squawk about the iBook's lacking a Cardbus slot, but I don't see it as a problem. The most common additions you'll see via Cardbus are Ethernet, modems, and wireless cards - these already have 'em, plus a Firewire port as well.

    This makes a heck of a nice little reasonably-priced Unix box, really. I've owned both the old toilet seat model and the newer iceBook model, and they're darn near bulletproof.
    • I've owned both the old toilet seat model and the newer iceBook model, and they're darn near bulletproof.

      Macworld Mag had a pretty funny 'realworld test' article about the iClam model, called "dieBook"--which included testing the toughness with things like a blowtorch. http://www.macworld.com/2001/05/buzz/diebook.html [macworld.com]

      I think MacAddict did something like this too...

      I remember lots of stories of 2-story drops and cars backing up over 1xx PowerBooks that still booted. Bragging about your trashed 'Book: a weird kind of macho?

      Power Page has some of these stories archived.

    • The 14" was made for schoolteachers who had problems seeing the small pixels in the 12". So, I doubt a resolution bump there :-(

  • More L2 Cache (Score:4, Informative)

    by rgraham ( 199829 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @09:22AM (#3550295) Homepage
    Something that should help the revised iBook's speed beyond the 100MHz speed boost is the doubling of it's L2 cache to 512K from it's previous 256K.

  • Debian with IBook? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rutherford ( 522065 )
    I really like these devices and want to try them. But I need Debian Woody on it. So had anybody already tried one of the new IBooks with Woody? Are there any special components (like soundcard) or ports (like usb) which don't work at the moment?

    • Re:Debian with IBook? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/03/29/i book_linux.html

    • Re:Debian with IBook? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Yarn ( 75 )
      For the old iBook: http://people.debian.org/~branden/ibook.html [debian.org]

      The TiBook setup is reportedly similar, I suspect that the new iBook will also be.
    • I can't claim to be any kind of a Linux guru, but I've got Sid running on my iBook 600 and everything is working marginally well (save the internal modem, which is still a work in progress as I understand it...damn Apple decided to put a softmodem in here with this revision for some reason). If you run the BenH kernel, you should find yourself in decent shape, hardware support-wise. Sound works, USB works (as far as I can tell; all I've got plugged in is a mouse). The nice thing about putting Linux on this beastie is that you can steal other people's XF86Config-4 and kernel .config files, since they're all the same machine :)

  • New graphics card supported by Quartz Extreme (Score:3, Informative)

    by peen ( 161966 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @10:19AM (#3550803)
    yey, the ATI Mobility Radeon graphics card that Apple have upgraded in these new iBooks is supported by Quartz Extreme which will be available in the next version [apple.com] of Mac OS X (see the bottom of page for which graphics cards are supported)

    If only I had the money for one of these I would probably buy the lowest spec or perhaps a new iMac? :D~

  • I can't find any information about the processor. Is this the PowerPC 750FX ("Sahara")? The specs page [apple.com] doesn't provide more detailed informations :/

  • Jaguar Video Req's (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Anonymous Coward

    OK, you assholes, one last time-- try to get this one simple fact through your thick Steve-washed braincases:

    MAC OS 10.2 DOES not REQUIRE 32 MEGS OF VIDEO MEMORY TO USE QUARTZ EXTREME.

    Every time there's new Apple hardware released, or some new rumor or tidbit regarding Mac OS 10.2, AKA Jaguar, there always seems to be at least one idiot who posts something uninformed yet totally rude and arrogant like "ah, [new hardware], outdated before it's even released." This makes my blood boil.

    So what is it that you people think exactly? That upon installing Mac OS 10.2 on, say, a Power Mac G3/450 it'll reboot into VGA text mode with a blinking text message "PLEASE UPGRADE VIDEO HARDWARE: INSUFFICIENT RAM TO DISPLAY MAC OS X?" Come on people, please. We know Apple's playing the "planned obsolescence" game now but that's a bit fucking ridiculous.

    If there's not 16 megs of RAM, regular Quartz will run. If there's 16 megs of RAM, Quartz Extreme will run. And if there's more than 16 megs of RAM, it'll run really nice. GET THIS THROUGH YOUR FUCKING SKULLS . Mac OS 10.2 will run on any system that Mac OS 10.1 will run on. Jesus fucking Christ, I run 10.1 on my stock Power Mac 8600/300 with no video card!!! You people really need to wake up.

    To said idiots, morons, and imbeciles (which the Mac world seems full of nowadays, thanks to the Apple's fruit campaign bringing over loads of PC lusers), I'd like to shout a resounding FUCK YOU and link you to Apple's Mac OS 10.2 spec page so that, on the off chance that you can read, you'll see that Quartz Extreme doesn't require 32 megs of RAM, it just prefers it over 16 megs of RAM (which is the actual base requirement).

    I hope this little rant helped get the message across about Mac OS 10.2's actual graphics requirements. I need to go lay down before I have some sort of blowout. I can feel my heart pounding in my head at 180bpm.

    • Holy smokes calm down man. Why do you care what other people think ? If they think it will not run Quartz Extreme then let them think that. It's people like you that contribute to the growing number of heart attack deaths in our country.
    • actually, I think that Quartz Extreme will run perfect *optimal* with the 16MB in the new ibook. Because the the RAM is used for the 1024*768 lcd screen and eventually an external monitor at the same rez. It's not that there is an cinema display with a huge rez attached to the video out. So the Titanium would need 32MB, and voila, it has 32MB.
  • As a former user of this machine, let me tell you that this computer (even after the speed-bump) is woefully underpowered if you intend to run OS X.

    It's a shame, because it really is a nice piece of hardware - great battery life, compact size and lightweight. But it's SLOW. For OS X, you really need a fast (and apparently Altivec enhanced) CPU, and the iBook just isn't it.

    • Yeah, the iBook's are more for college students looking for word processing and solitaire than serious 'programmers' like ourselves. I do like the iBook though, but ill stick to pentiums for a while.

    • Re:underpowered (Score:3, Informative)

      by afantee ( 562443 )
      > As a former user of this machine, let me tell you that this computer (even after the speed-bump) is woefully underpowered if you intend to run OS X.

      Speed was an issue with my 500 MHz (66 MHz system bus) before OS X 10.1, but not any more.

      In fact, with OS X 10.1.4, the machine is fast for almost everything I do (surfing, programming, graphics, etc). IE is still slower on my iBook relative to an equivalent Wintel notebook, but I use OmniWeb most of the times.
      • Agreed - I have the 600Mhz 100MhzFSB model and in 10.1.4 it's perfectly usable - more so than my desktop (800Mhz Duron) which hasn't been powered up seriously for about 3 weeks now.
    • As a former user of this machine...
      Wow, the machine in question has just been made available for sale, and you're already a former user.

      Got any tips for the Belmont Stakes?

  • > Unfortunately, I have almost no hope. Apple has demonstrated for more than 10 years that they do not care about unix users, and they will not address their concerns [google.com]. I sincerely hope that they change their ways, and start to care. The fact that they now have a very-high quality unix OS gives me hope that they might start to care about unix users.

    Apple do care about Unix users. In fact, if you listen to Steve Jobs, Avi Tevanian, or Phil Shiller, you would know that they take great pride in the fact that OS X has already become the single largest Unix platform since its first release just over a year ago.

    According to Tim O'Reilly

    http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/19/invit e. html

    alpha geeks simply love Mac OS X because they get the best of both worlds without the hassle of dual-boot - a fully functional Unix system to hack around and an amazingly rich collection of applications for home and office. To further prove his point, O'Really stated

    "Almost all of the Perl 6 core team has switched to Mac OS X, as have many of the top Java and XML developers. Developers in new fields like bioinformatics and peer-to-peer networking are also climbing on board."

    and apparently, James Gosling (co-inventor of Java) from Sun uses OS X on a TiBook.

    The keyboard is might be valid point for you personally, but it doesn't seem to bother others. I myself is a Unix developer for many years, but never noticed any inconvenience with any Apple keyboard, and my PC keyboard is similar to the iBook's.

    My iBook is much slower than the latest with only a 500 MHz G3 and 66 MHz bus, but I love it and use it for almost everything I do, because it's light, beautiful, quiet, faster than my 600 MHz PC. Most importantly, it has never crashed since I got it nearly a year ago, and I normally leave all applications (a dozen or more) running in the background for weeks and never shut down the system unless necessary.

    In contrast, my 600 MHz PC running Win XP is only used to run IE and Outlook, and is hybernated or shut down daily because it's too noisy, but it typically crashes once every 2 days or so. The crash is the most destructive I have ever seen - it simply restarts with a black screen and disk checking followed by a half screenful of text messages that only Bill Gates cares to read - no warning - no time to save anything.

    So if the keyboard is the only issue for you, consider that as a blessing and go get yourself a iBook now and you will enjoy it.

    Is there anything perfect in this world?
  • Why didn't this make the frontpage? There are a lot of people buying iBooks to run various flavors of BSD, Linux, and obviously Mac OS X on that are coming from Slashdot's target audience. Any story related to the iBook should obviously hit the frontpage.
  • Granted, the CPU is a G3, but apple can do better than a 100 Mhz FSB.

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