Apr 19
New iBooks and PowerBooks
5 comments 2004 at 07.52 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Ok, still no PowerBook G5, so personally I will not buy one of these but this was a much needed update to the portable line. The rumors for these machines already started way-back in 2003. First let's take a look at the new iBooks.
- 12-inch iBook
- 1GHZ G4
- iLife '04
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM
- Up to 1.25 GB RAM
- Starting at $1099
- 14-inch iBook
- Up to 1.2GHZ
- iLlife '04
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM
- Optional 4X SuperDrive
- Starting at $1299
The pro-line also got an update. Here are the specs:
- 12.1-inch PowerBook/15.2-inch
- NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
- 1.33GHz G4
- 256MB DDR333 SDRAM
- 15.2-inch PowerBook/17-inch
- 1.5GHz G4
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
- 512MB DDR333 SDRAM
All in all not bad, certainly those top machines. But still let's hope that the next round of updates to the portable line will bring the G5. Fingers crossed that it will be this year. Maybe by then all the G5 production trouble will be resolved. This is affecting everyone because our new Xserve is still not arrived. We've been down this road with Motorola and everybody was hoping that all that was resolved with IBM.
However steering remains a bit difficult. Hold on… switch to fantasy mode with me ... Imagine you are driving with your car and the traditional bicycle lanes now have these weird looking bumps. For safety it wouldn’t be that bad because cars won’t cross it without noticing it. 
