Hmm... well, this is a lovely little laptop, but there are certainly a few points which I dislike and they are beyond the "get used to it" or "deal with it" realm.
Number 1 issue is heat. The thing burns. After 2-3 hours of continuing usage, the laptop just burns like a hot cake on the lower left side. As other reviewers have already said and people on the forums, the Powerbook 12" just gets too hot. It is cool to be fanless, but if I had to choose between fan noise and my lap or my hands becoming roasted, I prefer the fan noise. Yes, other laptops also get hot, but this laptop is among the hottest around. This issue should be resolved in newer models, or I don't see me buying a new Apple laptop in a few years from now.
Number 2 issue is the quality of the LCD screen. With great sadness I will have to say that the LCD screen used in *this* Powerbook model, is crap. I know that the older models and the current 15" Powerbook's LCD model has _great_ quality, same as the LCDs found on the Sharp/Sony/IBM laptops, but the one used for this Powerbook is the same as the one found on the 15" iMac and the iBooks. I tried adjusting gamma and color, to no avail. After 1-2 hours using this machine, my eyes hurt, the horizontal lines of the Aqua windows are way too visible, fonts look worse and more blurry as they do on most Linuxes *because* of this LCD and the lack of Clear Type, LCD is not viewable from up or down but only when you are directly looking at it in perfect line, and worst of all, when scrolling on a web page that has many colors and the LCD has to adjust quickly from black to white colorspaces, the LCD is just "slow". Motion blur in all its glory.
For those who didn't know, Apple is using two different models on their LCD products, one great quality (older powerbooks, Cinema Displays) and one crappy/cheap one (imac, ibooks, 12" powerbook and the new 20" Cinema Display (that's why it is so cheap and it even competes price-wise with the PC LCD monitors in the range)). The new 12" Powerbook comes with the cheap one. However, I can live with it I guess, as I find the heat issue even more annoying than the LCD quality. However, I did mention my old AMD K6 laptop in the beginning of the article, and the irony is that this 1998 laptop has a fantastic 13.3" LCD screen (also at the same resolution), and it's waaay better quality-wise from the Powerbooks' in year 2003. I guess, they don't make LCDs as they used to (yes, that was sarcasm).
Many will be unhappy with the fact that the resolution is at 1024x768, but for a truly mobile solution, that resolution is acceptable. There is some space around the LCD, so they could use something like 12.8" and use 1152x864 resolution, without making the Powerbook bigger. Good quality LCDs used on today's SONY or Sharp or Fujitsu PC laptops are able to do 1280x768 at 10.4", so having 1152x864 on the 12.1" or 12.8" screen would be a no-issue. But instead of asking for more resolution, I would first ask for a better quality screen, as I explained above.
The hard drive the 12" laptop uses is not among the ones someone would consider fast hard disk for laptops. Depending on your luck, you will end up with either a Fujitsu or a Toshiba 4200 RPM drive (Apple uses both). Mine is a Fujitsu one, but other than the slow RPM and seek time, it works well. However, I find the booting of the OS on the Powerbook to be a bit slow. My Cube has a slower hard drive overall (but faster seek) and slower CPU, but it comes up faster than the Powerbook.
There is no DVI port, nor PCMCIA or PC card/bus port on the Powerbook, and in order to install the new Airport Extreme card, you will need to remove the battery and make a "real" hardware installation. The memory placeholder is more reachable and easier to deal with. However, in order to open the placeholder to put the ram in it, it requires a Philips 00 screwdriver, instead of the "clip-in" thingie you usually find on PC laptops.
Another thing I find quite annoying is the the touch pad. It is not fast enough. I have the acceleration to maximum and still, in order to go from 0,768 to the 1024,0 screen co-ordinates, by using normal speed on my finger, it requires two "trips". If I do the trip fast with my finger, it can go to these co-ordinates in one trip, but in that case it is quite useless, because you lose in precision. Mind you, this is not a hardware problem, it is more of a mouse driver problem on OSX, but the fact that the problem exists, it makes it a laptop issue too. I find the mouse speed on my Cube slow as well.
The other day I was boasting in the forums that I have never crashed OSX on my Cube (I had crashed it because of hardware issue, but never because OSX has failed). Well, in two days since I got the Powerbook via FedEx, I managed to crash the powerbook, twice. Here is how:
The first time you turn on your Powerbook, you are asked to input information about yourself, register the machine, put in the IP addresses and send the info over at Apple.com. I did so, the machine connected to their servers, did the registration fine, and then when it was saying "Disconnecting..." the machine just wouldn't respond. I left it there for a while, but it wouldn't come out of that screen. Please note that this screen comes up _before_ Finder and the OSX desktop has loaded. So, no matter what you try to kill the crashed app, it wouldn't work. OSX was not responding so I had to hard reset it.
The second time was on Saturday night. A few friends were over here for dinner (and a lot of you 'know' them, but I won't tell who they are ;-) and we wanted to do an FTP transfer from my Cube, to the Powerbook. We FTP'ed in successfully, we copied over files that were in the realm of 200 MB each, and then we started chatting between us. The FTP was still going on, and after a few minutes, suddenly the machine gone to sleep (I use the default time settings for power energy). When we tried to bring the machine up, it wouldn't come up. Black screen, and nothing else. The caps lock was still working, so the machine was not completely crashed, but it wouldn't awake no matter what. So, we had to hard reset it again and then we got over the painful fsck time to clean up the filesystem (no, don't ask me to put the journaling on, it is still experiemental).
- "Intro, The Good"
- "The Bad"
- "The Bad II, Conclusion"
