May 31, 2005
by Joe Kallo
Columnist

Amazingly close to exactly four years ago, I wrote a couple of columns here covering the then spankin' new dual USB iBook. I was so enamoured with the promise of the machine during the Stevenote, that I promptly ran out and sold my relatively new Pismo in anticipation of getting my hands on Apple's new laptop. Four years have past, and in that time I've gone through three portable Macs, numerous Apple Messagepads, and a couple of desktop Macs. I've also managed to find a really great job as a technology coordinator in a higher- education department which is very mac-centric. Amazingly, I've actually managed to keep and often use that iBook through these 4 years for a whole number of amazing things. This week, I'd like to revisit my original thoughts recorded a week or so after I brought the iBook home. My goal? Hopefully something useful can be said here about the nature of our first impressions and the way in which a Macintosh can weather a few years in my backpack.

OS X

One of my first tasks on getting the iBook home was to install OSX on it. I managed to get one of the very first ones to hit the store that were actually sold without X I was very much excited about the future of OSX, and I'd been using it from the time of the first Public Beta (and actually a for some time before as well). It ran well then and I'd argue that it has only gotten better since. I actually began regularly using the iBook again a few weeks ago after the release of Tiger. I did a clean install, and even with the iBooks paltry 320MB of RAM, I wound up with a very responsive system. Not having to resort to classic much these days, I found Tiger was a great compliment to most of the applications I normally run. Granted, Dashboard was not nearly as snappy as it is on my faster desktop system, but it was all defiantly usable. Four years later and a consumer-level laptop is still running the most current release of the manufacturer's OS. For comparison, I'd guess that would be somewhat like running Windows XP on a 400mhz Pentium box--the machine that I was obliged to use at work around the same time I got the iBook. Not exactly what I'd call fun.

Durability

Here's something that is very difficult to overstate about these iBooks. There are incredibly durable. Mine has spent four years ratteling around in book bags, briefcases, the floorboards of cars-you name it. It has survived many drops with various scratches and indentations. Despite all of this it just continues to work without a hitch. I have a very big place in my heart for the Powerbook Wallstreet-its easily one of my two favorite portable computers of all time. One of the most extrodinary features of the Wallstreet is its incredible durability. From what I've seen with my iBook, and the ones I administer in our labs, the iBook at least matches this durability. I have, for instance, seen more than one of these machines fall from a four foot tall laptop cart onto a concrete floor with no ill consequences. They are tough as nails.

Style

In matters of style, the iBook turned out to be the vanguard of Apple's esthetic concerns for the following few years. The cean, straight lines and stark white cues can still be easily seen in the iPod and Mini. In fact, the most recent generation of iPods are more iBook like than the originals- the sharp edge which doesn't appear on the iBook has vanished from the iPod as well. While we wasted lots of key strokes writing about how quickly the original iBook glossy finish seemed to pick up scratches and scuffs, its odd how after they got a certain level of patina, they actually achieved a kind of esthetic stability. I remember thinking that the finish looked like crap after a few months, but now it doesn't seem so bad. I have to admit never being very enamoured with the original TiBook (unlike the AlBook which I like quite a bit) and I think most would agree that their design hasn't survived nearly as well as has the iBooks.

So what does this all amount to, this sort of 4 year later review? Well I can say that the iBook has been, and really continues to be, a fantastic product. In my original review I skipped some of its warts. As a writer, I really value "keyboard- feel" and the easiest way of describing the iBook's keyboard is "crappy." Despite Apple's refusal to acknowledge it, I've seen the original batteries in the iBooks fail in such droves that there must have been some sort of design or manufacturing flaw. Even so, the original dualUsb iBooks represent a very solid basic computing platform even now. Ha! This is especially the case given how inexpensively they can be had these days: they routinely go for $250 on ebay and can be found for only slightly more at various Mac resellers around the web. With a 512 meg stick of ram yielding the maximum of 640 megs, it makes sense to just max the computer out as part of the purchase budget--especially if you're planning on running Tiger. How time flies! I just saw mention of the dualUsb iBook as an excellent “vintage” machine recently on the net. So is the iBook good enough to be a primary portable computer? That question only you can answer, of course, but for my needs its actually more than enough (and somewhat less with the keyboard!). I've been getting by for some time quite well using a somewhat hotrodded Powerbook 1400 and have been having a good time doing it. Starting next week, I'll be posting my experiences using somewhat (!) outdated Apple hardware to do my day-to-day portable computer tasks. Stay tuned!