ibook or powerbook? does it really matter?

[lancebug]

We are reorganizing here at my house and adding a new silicone baby. Must be a laptop and mac OSX platform. Seems like the price break between the 14" ibook and the 15" powerbook is pretty steep. Anybody have a good reason to make the $700 jump? Otherwise we'll probably go with the cheaper of the two. For what its worth we run a lot of Adobe stuff and I use PTLE and various softsynths and RTAS plugs. Appreciate any wisdom. -L-

[lancebug]

looking at the specs on the site it appears thew fastest internal drive on either model is 5600rpm and does the powerbook still have only 1 FW400 port? it appears the other one is FW800 which I dont know about being compatible with FW400 devices (read: basically all my drive and interface options).

[yardleyone]

the firewire 800 port is compatible with firewire 400.

[kcrusher]

You can always get a pcmcia/cardbus firewire card installed on the computer for more firewire ports.

The PB has a faster bus speed than the iBook, but all in all the iBooks are darned good for the money.

[seeabove]

No cardbus on the ibook, though.

I am having this exact same debate! I'm leaning towards the 1fw no pcmcia ibook... can't justify the extra 700 buckaroos right now. Course, I might just wait till oSX Tiger and G5 powerbooks come out and then pick up the g4 powerbook at the price break.

[high tek]

just a heads up but Apple is not planning on making a G5 labtop

are you sure?
read this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/14 ... erbook_g5/

[high tek]

also regarding the ibook vd powerbook thing,
i think the powerbook has a higher system bus.

maybe more cache on the processor (but im not sure about that)

[vatoben]

high tek is right. it's all about the system bus. i've used a few different i books and powerbooks and the bus speed made more of a difference than the processor speed when working with audio. i've always assumed that even if you have a 1.5 ghz processor you're doomed if your sys bus is under 133 mhz.

[lancebug]

Its starting to sound like the powerbook is just a little more appropriate in general for audio stuff without having to to do as many workarounds etc... Apple always pretends like they dont have anything coming down the pipe cause they dont want to jeoardize the sales of their current product. Its a sure bet there will be a G5 lap at some point but they did also lag a bit with the G4's so we'll see. I may think about waiting til spring if I thought there was a concrete chance of a new generation of laps/ a price drop on the current powerbooks.

[theistheman]

well...

A couple things that are better about Powerbook:

1. when you hook it up to an external monitor, you can have two separate displays, or you can use mirror mode. With the ibook, you can only use mirror mode. This sorta sucks if you're doing DAW stuff, because it's nice to have two displays. I've heard of people trying to hack this, but I don't know if it's possible.

2. the superdrive is awesome. It's pretty rad to have a built-in DVD burner, especially if you do a bunch of multimedia stuff. When I was looking into buying either a powerbook or an ibook, I found that upgrading the ibook to have sufficient RAM and a superdrive would make it cost more than the powerbook.

If you can live without these features, ibook's ok.

As for the powerbook G5 issue, I heard that they haven't figured out a way to make the G5 run cool enough to put in a powerbook. It would be rad to have a prototype G5 powerbook and watch it melt. I wish I could work for apple R&D.

[seeabove]

Well, according to this...
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=854
and this...
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0501briefly2.html
They are going to definetly do something to the powerbook. Unfortunately I'm the kind of guy who waits for the cheaper price break.

[marcthepirate]

If you can live without these features, ibook's ok.

Those are pretty topical differences, albeit annoying. In general though, there are quite a few ways that iBooks are fundamentally different from PowerBooks, usually not identifiable by non-geeks (i.e. not clock speed, memory, or hard drive space). As someone already mentioned, the system bus is faster, which isn't something that's easy to find, but it dictates how fast your computer can access its memory, which can be a crucial factor in audio recording/editing. It's definitely something to think about, if you have the extra $500 to spend on it.

[chikkenguy]

if you get an ibook, make sure to get applecare. me and other people i know have had what i would call a disproportionate amount of issues with ibooks.