15" G4 Powerbook, 1.67

[beachycove]

This one came to me as a parts machine, and at a price worth a small risk, but in fact the problem was a flaky power adapter. Booted right up from a good one.

It has 2GB RAM and is in superb shape for a laptop its age. It will go to a family member needing a portable machine for ordinary duties — once the new battery/ adapter arrive, the old ones being toast.

I am reminded on getting hold of it of the manifold reasons I bought a 12" G4 PowerBook (still used daily) instead of the 15" model back in early 2006 (refurbished from Apple online): Talk of a '15" portable' is oxymoronic; 'luggable' would be the better word. Like the 15" MacBook Pro, it's just too bloody big for me, and I am 6' tall and about 220lbs.

Does anyone actually like a laptop this size? It's a mystery to me why they sell.

 

[Gorgonops]

Like the 15" MacBook Pro, it's just too bloody big for me, and I am 6' tall and about 220lbs.

... and equipped with tiny little pipe-cleaner arms? ;^)

(I know, some folks once they've gone "tiny" are just never able to go back. But I'd say for most people the difference between lugging around a four pound something and a six pound something just isn't that huge a deal.)

Does anyone actually like a laptop this size? It's a mystery to me why they sell.

Two words: screen resolution. That's my excuse for preferring the 14-15" size, anyway. The 1024x768 of the 12" Powerbook is *so* year 2000. (And honestly, with the slow pixel bloat of modern GUIs the 1280x800-ish widescreen resolutions of five-year old 15" and current 13" or under machines still seems awfully tight when your work style involves having multiple terminal windows and a documentation reference visible simultaneously. One of my favorite screen size/resolution tradeoffs is the 14" 1400x1050 in a five-pound-ish laptop, which unfortunately is a combination that's going extinct in the name of widescreen everything.)

 

[coius]

I have a 17" MacBook Pro and I love it. As noted, screen resolution is a huge issue. Small screens even with higher resolutions make things hard to see, and too big of laptops (over 17") is too much to carry.

The bonus apple has is while they pack a lot of inches into the screen, it keeps it relatively light compared to most laptop manufacture that can't help packing in extra stuff to also make use of that space. Apple instead includes bigger batteries and uses the space they have wisely, not pack in features that reduce more battery time.

What I would like is a laptop no more powerful than a high-end netbook but have a 17" LCD and around slightly heavier than the air. It would make an awesome combo, but they seem to think in order to have a 17" LCD you have to throw a lot of horsepower under the hood. and the same is opposite, the smaller the screen, the harder it is to get pure power. No one wants people with small machines to have power, and no one wants a person with a big screen to have battery life.

 

[Concorde1993]

and no one wants a person with a big screen to have battery life.

Not necessarily true. I have a 15" MBP, and I get about 5 hours of battery life running various apps simultaneously. Not to mention that this battery has hit over 400 cycle counts, and still holds about 90% of its original charge.

Does anyone actually like a laptop this size?

Higher screen resolution, and the fact that the larger models tend to support faster processors.

'luggable' would be the better word

If you think a 15" PB is heavy, get an older Thinkpad, like a 600E, or an A21M. Although a real luggable would be a Mac Portable.

 

[beachycove]

I like them small but perfectly formed.

 

[Cory5412]

I tend to prefer 14-inch machines. My main laptop is a ThinkPad T400 -- it ends up weighing about the same as a 15-inch MacBook Pro, but has just an ever-so-slight advantage in the footprint department.

Older ThinkPads can get hefty, but they're well-built for their time. I've got a T30 that was manufactured in 2003 (Although its model was introduced in 2002) that actually meets 2005's high end PowerBook G4s in benchmarks. I have Windows NT 4 on it at the moment, but there's a good chance it'll receive Windows 7 or 8 if I ever bother to get a newer disk for it.

Regarding the computing power and display size divide: The ThinkPad X220 is a fairly powerful tiny computer, and there's talk about whether or not Apple's going to migrate all of its mobile products into air-like enclosures -- but it's definitely possible to get low end 14 and 15-inch notebooks. (Not quite atom, but why would you really want an atom in something so big anyway?)

 

[bigmessowires]

I like them small but perfectly formed.

Are we still talking about Powerbooks?

 

[beachycove]

Yes, of course — gotta love those little Apples.