[wplug] Seeking advice (possibly OT)

[joe at terrarum.net]

> Not to play the Tim Allen 'more power' card, cliched though it may be,
> but are ibooks respectable when it comes to performance?  I'm not saying
> I need a machine that can compile X in <3 minutes while serving as a
> portable render farm, but I'd like to have some sort of decent engine
> under the hood.  A sort of 'that thing got a hemi?', if you will.
>
> Is ibook upgradability/support good?

The only things you can really upgrade with iBooks are the ram and hard
drive (although replacing the harddrive is like a 30 step process to get
under the hood). Everything else is onboard. But thats the same with any
laptop, really.

As for performance, I would recommend maxing out the ram. I have a G3
900mhz with 640mb of ram. I've run OSX, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Debian with no
performance problems at all. The newer iBooks have the G4 processor now.
I've heard that iBook G4s have a "watered down" version of a real G4 chip
-- but I cant be certain on that.

If you run linux on an iBook, the one thing to worry about is heat issues.
On all Apple notebook products the hard drive is right under the left
palm, and if not cooled properly, makes for a very uncomfortable session.
This was the big decision maker between me choosing a 12" ibook or a 12"
powerbook -- you could actually feel the heat coming off the keyboard /
palm-area with the powerbook. Support for cooling fans in the laptops has
gotten a lot better on linux lately, but I still have to tweak it on my
iBook when I first install linux.

The pros for going with an apple laptop are things like hardware (usb2,
firewire, wireless, ethernet, modem, external video, great battery life)
and software (linux works fine, but I believe there is no airport extreme
support yet  :(  and OSX is a beautiful operating system).

And even if you decide to keep OSX on there, theres nothing like having
Microsoft Word next to a terminal window with vi running  :)

The cons would be that its not x86 hardware -- if you wanted windows on
there for some reason, just cant do it.

The thing I've told everyone who's thought about buying apple hardware is
to find someone who already owns something apple and play with it for a
day or so before making their decision.

/rant

-Joe