Howdydoody to you, precious reader, who made the bold decision to
read another chapter of this increasingly irreverent little niche of
online literature (only in the sense that it's made of letters and
words: I don't proclaim this to be art or anything snotty like
that).
All weekend I lived through an experience me and my poor partner
(she really is to be commended for being such a hardy soul) never
made before: We were desperately trying to spend 1,300 pounds on a
computer (or to be correct: the incredibly sexy
DVD iBook).
As I work in a rather remote part of Scotland where Apple
retailers are rather scarce (one in 4,000 square miles), I used a
little business trip to London on the weekend to get me that piece of
equipment I longed for for over three months. To my astonishment,
every retailer I went to was very eager to sell my the CombiDrive or
CD-ROM iBook, but every request for the DVD-ROM issue was either
greeted with hollow laughter, a certain unbelieving facial expression
or just plain tears. Apparently there is no DVD iBook in the whole of
London, and nobody knew when there were any more coming in.
One bloke was trying to flog off one of his ex-demo models that
had been standing for weeks in the shop window, but he was not ready
to either go down with the price or throw something in with the
machine. No way, Jose.
After more than 24 hours of unsuccessful walking around the
streets of London during the worst heat wave for a decade, something
snapped in me: I had to have a bloody iBook for my flight back to
Scotland, and by golly, I was going to get one - so I bought the
CD-ROM Version. DVD movies are overrated anyway, and I saved a couple
of hundred quid, even though I whacked a cool 128 MB extra in it.
So this is what it's like: I am sitting here on my flight from
London to Scotland with my new gorgeous iBook strategically placed on
my lap. Very much to the envy of my co-passengers (har, har) I am
able to type away happily to bring you my first impression of this
thinking man's ultimate gadget. The first couple of minutes have
certainly been very enjoyable: After installing Mac OS 9.1 and
OS X 10.0.3, I still had enough battery life for another 90
minutes (thanks for preloading the battery, guys). The display proved
to be beautifully crisp and well designed, and the keyboard has a
good feel to it.
Using 9.1, the desktop looked familiar, with the software bundle
pretty exhaustive. I always wanted to get my hands on AppleWorks 6,
and I can vouchsafe for its good design and great handling. The mouse
pad (or whatever it's called) is pretty difficult to use if you're a
hard-core mouse user like me, but I'm sure I'll get there. Don't know
how it will work for my Total Annihilation addiction, though.
As soon's as I'm home, I'll copy my graphic and Web design
applications onto it and see how this baby breezes through my
Photoshop jobs. Now that I am an ecstatic person with the plane about
to descend onto the west coast of Scotland, the only thing that is
left for me to do is a) remind you again of the biggest hacker
convention in Europe , HAL2001, where I'll be hosting a session on
Health and the Net and b) ask you kindly to email me your experiences
in trying to get hold of an iBook.
Wouldn't life be great with an iSlate?, John Hatchett, Recycled Computing, 07.04.
PDAs and smartphones are too small for some tasks, full-fledged Tablet PCs are overkill, and ebook readers are too limited. Apple has the tech to own this niche.
Mac of the Day: 'WallStreet' PowerBook G3, May 1998 - WallStreet offered 3 screen sizes and CPU speeds from 233 to 292 MHz.
List of the Day: System 6 is the email list for those who choose System 6.
The Macintosh Portable started a notebook revolution, Carl Nygren, Classic Macs in the Intel Age, 07.03.
Before Apple introduced the Mac Portable, notebook computers were text-based and ran MS-DOS. Ever since, graphical interfaces have been the norm for laptops.
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