Hands on the New iBook, Pt. 2

It's been just over a week since I brought my new iBook home. Simply put, it's fantastic. You may remember in my last column that I noted several advantages that I see it holding out over the Pismo G3: diminutive size, sharpness of the screen, durability, etc. Once I managed to finally purchase one, it immediately replaced my Pismo in my daily routine and this week I'd like to add a few more positive notes to my list.

1. OS X. My first task upon arriving home from picking up the iBook was to pull the 128 meg ram stick from my Pismo (which was waiting to be sold), plunk it in the iBook, and drop OS X on the hard drive. Installation was flawless. OS X runs smoothly and snapilly on the 500 mhz processor. As I noted in the last column, the sharpness of the screen makes the whole Aqua experience a much nicer one: the horizontal lines running though the title bars are crisply visible. As a side note, when I sold the Pismo I also sold the memory stick and haven't had the time to replace it. As a result, I have been running OS X for the last several days with 64 megs of ram. While classic is unusable, if I confine myself to OS X native applications (Appleworks, IE etc.) things are plenty snappy. This is, I take it, testament to the ability of this machine to handle OS X with flying colors.

2. Durability. I remarked extensively about how durable the iBook appeared on first glance, but just today a coworker knocked my bookbag containing my ibook off an average-height desk onto a linoleum floor. The computer was fine (I'm writing on it now). Once again, I believe Steve's claim that this thing is twice as durable as the previous one.

3. Quality. There are several things about the new iBook which mark it as something of "high quality." The sound is superior to that of any other laptop I've used--it's almost useful for listening to music. Overall, the machine is very quiet, contrary to early reports I've heard. It is nearly impossible to tell if the hard drive is spinning, even in a quiet room, and I've yet to hear it's fan come on. Under OS X the CD eject button (which is also the f12 key) ejects the CD almost instantly (unlike the couple of seconds it takes in OS 9). That's right: no more hunting around for the CD icon on the desktop. The trackpad/button and latch are both borrowed from the Titanium and share its polish.

This computer should do Apple some serious good, if my experience is any indication--and I think it is. The iBook is truly a hit.