Apple iBook G4 user reviews (14-inch)

4.5 stars

"Review from someone who actually owns one." on August 1, 2005 by flclkris

Pros: Great display, light, long battery life, great price, very fast, decent 3D/2D graphics (good enough for visualizations in Itunes or NES/PS emulators), the OS is great, superdrive, keyboard, mouse

Cons: Gets warm though not uncomfertably so, mac OS obviously lacks games, not as popular as windows so there's not as much variety in the general public's 3rd party support, 60GB maybe not enough

Summary: I've used laptops before but this is the first one I've bought and owned myself. For a little background, I'm an 18 year old about to go into college at University of Oregon and I plan on studying Journalism. I'm an avid gamer and longtime PC user, so I was apprehensive about this purchase. I must say, I'm glad I did though. I know a lot of these comments and reviews can seem fishy on CNET, so I don't expect you to buy everything I say here. Nonetheless I implore you to buy this machine. It's a great deal especially if you're a student because you get a decent discount. I'm not sure how much room I have here so I'll just try to hit all the bases quickly. By the way, I do have the newest iBook that just came out july 06, the one mentioned here not an older one.

Mac OS X: This was my biggest fear in switching to a mac. My fears have been alleviated though after good use. All the windows files work fine on here just like they say. I've even gotten my iTunes collection over here (though it required some trickery because they don't like you copying your xml file so it was hard to keep my ratings and such). I've also even gotten my videos I downloaded. I have lots of anime that I download in OGM format, and I got VLC player on here now...basically if you're a poweruser and you like pirating stuff you're gonna be ok. You can still burn DVD's too and even the most obscure media formats will work on here. Also, your word and picture files will work, everything works basically. =) Oh yes, and you can network with your windows computer and take files, wirelessly or not. That's how I got all my stuff. This was actually the most complicated thing to figure out, though it was problems on Windows that made this difficult, not the mac. Finally, the OS in general is really cool with lots of little flairs and great organizational tools. My number one greatest praise of this OS though, is the quickness. I know even on my PC I built which is pretty fast that if I'm doing a bunch of things and I open Firefox or whatever, it can bog it down a little. Well, today I was encoding a DVD rip and talking on AIM, and using iTunes and it still opened Firefox super quick. It's like this machine is god, I swear.

Screen/video: You're not gonna do much in terms of games on here, cause the video card isn't the hottest thing to hit the street, and everyone knows PC has all the games; noone's kidding themselves there. That doesn't bother me though; I just want to be able to rip DVD's and encode them, and also manage my photos from my digi camera. It does all this well. Oh yes, and I wanted the visualizer to work well in iTunes. It's not silky smooth or anything like a nice vaio or my old home built PC, but it's decent. The screen is really blowing me away though. It's not the shiny kind but it's still bright. And the colors don't invert no matter how far you view the angle from. It's such a nice screen. Seriously, I wasn't even expecting this much. I have some really high resolution digi pics I got off my 6 megapixel camera (well, not mine but the family's), and this screen makes them look amazing. It's like a magnifying glass or something, it's so sharp. The only thing I don't like is it doesn't let you bend the screen to being flat so if you accidentally put too much pressure or something, you'd probably snap something. Though, this is a stupid complaint cause every computer is fragile in some way.

Design: Man this thing is cool. The whole case is all smooth and I guess it's made out of bullet proof glass material. It feels like it too, though it does smudge a little. The apple logo lights up too which is nifty. The whole thing is sealed up real nice and it feels really solid. I feel like I could throw this thing at the wall and it'd survive. It's like a brick, not to say it's heavy though. In fact, it's so light it's amazing. I can carry it around under my arm and forget I'm carrying it. It's lighter than your average high school text book. You could easily pick it up with one hand and wave it around.

Keyboard/ergonomics: The mouse trackpad is cool. It makes scrolling a lot quicker without a mouse, though, nothing's going to replace a true mouse in quickness. To be honest, not having a right clicker is annoying. Don't let anyone tell you different, it's not pissing me off or anything, but the one button deal is old, get with the times you know? The keyboard's got plenty of room too. It's nice and big, full sized and comfertable. One wierd deal though is it's got fn,ctrl,alt AND the little Apple button. So you've got like 4 secondary function buttons which is a little over the top. It can be confusing sometimes, I'm like, do I press control and click? or fn and click? I'd say only having one mouse button and the secondary function keys are probably the biggest annoyance so far though I've still gotten used to them.

Sound: It's ok. There's seriously no bass. I honestly think it's ok for movies though. Movies are mostly speech so I noticed that I hated listening to my MP3s through it but I didn't mind watching movies with the speakers. I plan on using my old PC speakers in college and also headphones, so it doesn't matter to me. I don't think any laptop this small will have steller sound anyway. For what it is, it's fine.

Superdrive: This thing's awesome. It's really fast for ripping stuff, and writing it's really quick too. When I copied off a CD earlier it was doing a few megabytes a second which seemed fast to me. I didn't mind waiting for the whole CD to finish copying which means it couldn't have been more than a minute or two. When I was looking around for a laptop the DVD drive was a big thing, and I'm happy with this one.

Others: The hard drive is a little small, especially for all the videos I have. I have lots of anime and movies I wish I could fit on here. I'm probably gonna get an external drive from fry's or best buy or something. That's another tick against the system, though i'm at the very high end of people who use the most hard drive space; normal people probably won't have a problem. Hmm...what else. Oh yes, the wireless card is amazing. I was in my friend's flat which is a concrete building and her dell can't pick up crap besides her wireless router, and I was picking up the neighbor's signals through 6 inch concrete! Not to mention it's got this little network folder that has windows shared files automatically appear. It's amazingly simple. It doesn't take much energy though either. I'd say, if you're using AIM and taking notes in class and you got your wireless going, you're gonna get a good 3, maybe 4 hours out of the thing. It's got this cool battery management thing too incase you wanna eak out more battery life. I'm sure wherever you go though, there's gonna be an outlet somewhere if you're using a wireless network. I'm pretty sure I'll just be able to plug in somewhere during class and juice up. Another cool deal is even while I'm using it, it only takes like 2 hours to charge back up. And if it's sleeping or off it's even faster, about and hour or less.

So, final points. Get a mac? Yes, I'd recommend it, unless you want to play games. Anything else, get one. This particualar laptop is a great deal, I'm really happy with it. It's super fast and does heavy tasks well. I looked at everything from Alienware, to Acer, to dell, and I settled on this because I went over to the Apple store and just realized how stable and reliable these things are, not to mention how fast. Don't doubt these things, I used to be a person who always said macs sucked but now I'm converted. Though, I still have a soft spot for Windows and PC. It's just fun building a computer and I know Windows really well, so I never have problems or viruses cause I know how to get past them. If you're wondering, I did buy this myself, I've been working all summer saving up. Seeing as I just spent all my money and how happpy I am with the purchase, I think that says something about this computer. I'd really recommend it if you're thinking about it. Good luck!