Apple Sets Colorful Trend With Design of Portable, Peppy iBook
A new notebook PC arrived on a hot Silicon Valley afternoon, so I stuffed it into my backpack and bicycled over to the air-conditioned Palo Alto Cafe to start working on the review. I often use a notebook PC from cafes, but instead of a boring-looking black or gray model, this one was blue and silver and instead of an “Intel Inside” sticker, it had an Apple logo on the lid.
Functionally, the $1,599 Apple iBook is pretty much what you’d expect from a portable Mac, but what makes it unique is its design. Instead of being rectangular, it’s rounded; instead of a latch, the lid is spring-loaded; instead of plastic all around, there is rubber molding for added protection against shock; and instead of having to carry it in your hands or in a briefcase, it has a foldaway carrying handle. The most striking difference, however, is its color. Mine is blueberry, but it also comes in tangerine.
Apple, once again, is a trendsetter. IBM this week will unveil a series of ThinkPad laptops that will offer $30 snap-on covers in seven colors, and Dell recently announced two new Inspiron notebook PCs in Tahoe blue and storm gray.
Whether or not you like the iBook design is strictly a matter of taste. I put it next to a black G3 Macintosh PowerBook on a table at the cafe and almost everyone over 30 preferred the more corporate-looking PowerBook. Most of the younger people preferred the iBook.
Several said they’d go for whatever machine is lighter, cheaper and faster regardless of what it looks like. Although more expensive, Apple PowerBook G3 is lighter (5.9 pounds) and comes with a faster processor, more disk storage and twice the memory.
The iBook weighs 6.6 pounds and comes with 32 megabytes of memory (expandable to 160mb) and a paltry 3.2-gigabyte hard drive. It’s about 2 inches thick, 13 1/2 inches wide and 11.6 inches deep, which is bigger than the PowerBook and most Windows notebook PCs.
To be fair, the extra size and weight help make the machine a bit more rugged, which isn’t a bad idea considering that Apple hopes that they will be popular with students.
There will be no complaints about the machine’s peppy 300-MHz PowerPC G3 processor or its six-hour battery life, which, unlike many manufacturers’ battery life claims, is actually true.
The iBook keyboard also has an unconventional look with its white, translucent key tops. But the oddity ends there. The keys are spaced just as they are on a desktop machine and the keyboard is recessed four inches from the edge, giving you plenty of room to rest your palms.
Like previous Apple portables, you move the mouse cursor via an electronic touch pad. Personally, I’m not a fan of touch pads, but this one seems to be more responsive and less erratic than most. Of course, even the touch pad is a bit “different.” Instead of being white or black, as is typically the case, it’s a dull silver color. Not content with the typical black-”brick” power supply, Apple made it round with a recessed groove so you can wrap the cord around it.
I love the 12.1-inch active matrix screen. It’s bright and easy to view from almost any angle.
Like all new Macs and almost all current-model PCs, the iBook comes with a USB port that you can use for all sorts of peripherals including scanners, digital cameras, printers, mice, keyboards and backup systems. But unlike most notebook PCs, it doesn’t come with a PC card slot.
Apple argues, correctly, that the PC card slot is mostly used for a modem or ethernet card, which are standard issue on the iBook. Yet, there are other uses for the slot, such as memory cards from digital cameras, wireless modems and global positioning systems.
And, like its cousin the iMac, the iBook doesn’t come with a floppy disk drive. Apple doesn’t even offer one as an option, though other companies do. Apple recommends that you transfer files between an iBook and another computer via the Internet, over a local area network or by using “an external USB mass storage device, such as a (100mb) Iomega Zip drive.
I needed to transfer files from the iBook to a Compaq PC, so I unplugged the 120mb Imation SuperDisk drive from the universal serial bus port of the Compaq and plugged it into the Mac’s USB port. Not only did it let me transfer files via a SuperDisk, but it also supports standard Mac and PC floppy disks.
Although it’s not standard issue, an iBook can be equipped with Apple’s $99 “AirPort” wireless local area network card. Mine didn’t come with one, but Apple says that it can be used to transfer data between iBooks or provide Internet service within a classroom or home without having to string wires. Don’t confuse the AirPort with a wireless modem that works anywhere. It’s limited to a radius of about 150 feet. The AirPort requires you to connect a $299 base station to your network.
Despite a few flaws and omissions and a design that appeals to some and turns others off, the iBook is nonetheless an excellent machine that, I suspect, will be popular among students and some mobile professionals who are turned on by its offbeat looks.
It certainly gets attention. Even my technologically jaded fellow patrons at the Palo Alto Cafe couldn’t help but comment when they saw me plop the iBook on the table. The two predominant adjectives were “cute” and “kewl.” Roughly translated, that’s a vote of confidence for a company whose idea of thinking different involves building machines that also look different.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”
