Apple's tiniest notebook is a little heavy and a little light on features, but it's so pretty and small.
The littlest Apple notebook packs an appealing punch. At 2.08kg, the company's new, 12-inch G4 PowerBook is smaller, lighter, and faster than the 12.1-inch iBook. Instead of the iBook's G3 processor, you'll get an 867MHz G4 and faster Nvidia GeForce4 420 graphics hardware. The 12-inch PowerBook is cheaper than its larger PowerBook counterparts, too, but lacks a few of our favourite PowerBook features--namely, an L3 cache, a PC Card slot, and included Wi-Fi. However, it trounces older Titanium models with a delightfully firm, large, new keyboard; built-in Bluetooth; and a slot for the 802.11g-draft-compliant AirPort Extreme card, and it stacks up well against PC notebooks--even in terms of price. Get the AirPort card and toss in the optional DVD-burning SuperDrive, and you have a thin-and-light notebook that should please anyone on any platform.
The 12-inch PowerBook, at 3 x 27.7 x 21.9 cm, is actually a tad smaller than the 12-inch iBook, and it's the lightest of the Mac bunch at 2.08kg (plus 0.23kg for the power adapter) with the battery and the optical drive installed. However, it's still noticeably heavier than the lightest 12-inch notebooks on the PC side; the similarly proportioned Sharp PC-UM10, for example, weighs just 1.7kg, while a fully loaded Toshiba Portege 4010 weighs 1.9kg.
The PowerBook's new design is similar to that of the 15-inch PowerBook: attractive, sleek,
and metallic but with an anodized-aluminium case instead of titanium. The 12.1-inch display supports 1,024x768 resolution and looks crisp and bright; you can even adjust the brightness from the keyboard--a nice touch. The lid's hinge is wider than the iBook's, providing more support to the thinner screen.
The most pleasantly surprising new design feature is the keyboard, which is superior to that of the earlier PowerBooks, iBooks, and possibly even Apple's desktops. A good touch-typist can really fly on this brushed-metal-looking keyboard, which offers good response, has comfortably shaped keys, and does not flex at all. Despite the 10.9-inch width of the PowerBook, the keyboard is full sized in both the distance between the centre of the keys and in the travel (the up and down motion). All keys are logically placed, as well. The only thing this PowerBook lacks is the drool-worthy keyboard backlighting of the new 17-inch model. The PowerBook's trackpad is large and responsive, although its size places it awkwardly far away from the keypad. We also wish Apple would throw in a right-click button since the Mac OS has long supported contextual menus.
Apple had to make some small sacrifices for the snazzy keyboard. The reason this keyboard doesn't flex is that it no longer pops out for internal access, as in previous notebooks. To add more RAM, you now need a screwdriver to open the PowerBook's bottom panel--a small price to pay, we think. To access the AirPort card slot, simply remove the battery.
The 12-inch PowerBook delivers far more bang for the buck than the high-end iBook, while cutting a few of the features of the high-end PowerBook. Like the iBook, this notebook doesn't include a performance-enhancing L3 cache, but the PowerBook compensates with its 867MHz G4 processor and faster graphics via an Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go with 32MB of DDR SDRAM. Unfortunately, the PowerBook, which comes standard with 256MB of DDR RAM, maxes out at 640MB (the same as the iBook), creating a possible bottleneck if you run several RAM-hungry apps such as Photoshop, iDVD, and Virtual PC simultaneously.
As for expansion and connectivity, the 12-inch PowerBook lacks a PC Card slot, but a full slate of ports runs along the left side, including FireWire, 100-megabit Ethernet, video-out, sound-in and-out, a modem, and two USB ports. (In contrast, the 17-inch model boasts both a PC Card slot and the faster FireWire 800 standard.) The video-out features are designed for travellers connecting to TVs and projectors, not desktop users; you'll find no DVI or AGP to connect an extra monitor or an Apple flat-panel display--a bummer, since a smaller notebook means a smaller screen.
The 12-inch PowerBook also offers some excellent features that previous models lack, including a slot for a AU$199 AirPort Extreme card, which provides 54Mbps, 802.11g-draft-compliant wireless networking that's compatible with the 11Mbps AirPort. We'd gotten used to built-in Wi-Fi in the PowerBook line, but most comparable thin-and-light notebooks, such as the Toshiba Portégé 4010 series, don't include it either. A DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive comes standard, but you can tack on a slot-loading CD-RW/DVD-R SuperDrive for another AU$429 (these features and upgrade choices are common in PC notebooks, as well).
Built-in Bluetooth for accessing Palm devices or the Internet also comes standard, and the 12-inch PowerBook now has a pair of stereo speakers and an enhanced midrange third speaker that provide audio clear enough to hear dialogue in movies. Finally, a 40GB hard drive offers plenty of room for a decent-sized iTunes music library and is a reasonable capacity for such a small notebook.
The hard disk comes loaded with an ample collection of software, most notably QuickBooks 5.0 from Intuit; Apple's iSync and iLife; FAXstf; and OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle (an elegant charting app) from the Omni Group. Also convenient is Microsoft Office X Test Drive, which lets you use Office free for 30 days before you buy licenses.
The 12-inch PowerBook, with its more powerful G4 processor, handily outpaced a G3 iBook in our tests, but its small amount of RAM limited its performance. ZDNet Labs used three different applications (Photoshop 7.0, iMovie 2.0, and iTunes) to test Apple's notebook performance. We performed a number of common, processor-intensive tasks in Photoshop; in iMovie, we converted a large movie file into QuickTime; and in iTunes, we converted a music file into MP3, timing each procedure.
The 12-inch PowerBook put its G4 867MHz processor to good use in our intensive Photoshop 7.0 tests, easily outperforming the budget G3-800MHz iBook. But its meager 256MB of RAM placed it far behind the Titanium G4 1GHz PowerBook, with its more generous 512MB of RAM.
In our iMovie and iTunes tests, the 12-inch PowerBook scored closer to the G4-1GHz Titanium than to the G3 800MHz iBook. In iMovie, the 12-inch PowerBook was approximately 20 percent slower than the G4 1GHz, while the iBook was about 40 percent slower, due to its less powerful G3 processor. The 12-inch PowerBook took only 10 seconds longer than the G4-1GHz to encode our test audio file in iTunes.
Although the 12-inch PowerBook's small display (it's actually 12.1 inches) consumes less power than the larger PowerBook configurations, this notebook also sports a relatively small, 47-watt-hour battery. This combination of specs kept the 12-inch PowerBook alive for a relatively short 2.6 hours in our intensive battery test. The 1GHz PowerBook, with a 15.2-inch display and 61-watt-hour battery, lasted 2.5 hours. The iBook's combination of a small display (12.1 inches) and a large battery (55 watt-hours) offered the best performance, lasting for 3.2 hours of nonstop DVD viewing.
In order to drain the battery of an Apple notebook, ZDNet Labs plays a DVD movie in full-screen mode with the sound on.
Apple offers a somewhat stingy, one-year warranty on the 12-inch PowerBook's parts and labour--an increasingly common standard on both sides of the platform fence. Thankfully, you can extend the warranty to three years for AU$499; this plan is worthwhile if you tote your PowerBook around often, which is likely with this model. You also get three months of free (and toll-free) technical support calls.
The 104-page, illustrated paper manual in the box is clear and informative, providing instructions on setup, use, changing the battery, and simple troubleshooting, as well as installing additional memory and an AirPort Extreme card. You'll also find a rich source of help information, software updates, and discussion forums at Apple's Web site, although you must register to use the help pages
Apple PowerBook G4
Company: Apple Australia
Price: AU$3,995
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 133 622
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