12" Ibook Questions

I'm definitely gonna get myself one of these 12" things, which run OSX. in January

Some questions I have:

1. 12" inch iBook comes with 800MHz G4, exactly how slow is that compared to the 1GHz PBook ( consider CPU and RAM specs only ).

2. Apple allows the option to get a 60GB internal HD. Any good name brand vendors sell power efficient, iBook compatible HD that are 80GB or above?

3. Is 256MB of RAM enough? If not, how is it upgraded? Do i have to chuck out the original if I decided to upgrade after I got the iBook already or does it have a free slot so I can just slap in another 384 to get the maximum 640MB?

Is it just any notebook spec SDRAM or something special( weirdly applized )

4. I will be using this thing mainly for wireless browsing on campus, music, anime and movies, plus the occasional photoshopping and flash related things. How fast is this 800MHz iBook compared to say a Pentium 4 on a laptop or Centrino? ( realistic equivilant performance ) ( maybe say, G4 800MHz = P4 1000MHz )????

FINALLY GETTING THIS BABY, DAMN

#87989

I don't know much about the CPU differences, but I know Apple has 80 gig HDs on the 17" powerbooks, so they're probably available at macwarehouse, or macmall, macconnection etc. As far as the ram goes, get 512 mb YOU WILL NEED IT. I don't think the 12" powerbooks have DDR memory, so its plain old SDRam which is really cheap, (128mb for like $20 USD). The wireless options come in handy all the time, and get yourself a bluetooth adapter as welll to connect to all the new cell phones, you can browse the internet using the phone as a modem, transfer pics, download games on to your phone, and much more. Finally it is not possible to compare unrelated CPUs, but I would say the 12" powerbook performs as well as a mid-high end PC laptop. Plus the superdrive is the ultimate coolest (in my opinion) feature of the laptop, be sure to get one. (Phew I hope that helped)

#88018

Well CPU performance is not exactly unrelated, say performing the same filter in photoshop to the same picture, what CPU would be approximately the same on the x86?

I'm more thinking of the 12" iBook because the price difference there can get me the 40GB iPod as well,

iBook + 40GB Ipod > PBook in my opinion

#88081

I got the 30 gig iPod, and 12" iBook, but i have all my music stored on the beast pc, if your gonna get a iBook, make sure you upgrade everything, 256 is not enough, get 512 and it should be fine but dont expect it to play games well at all, i cant even run tonyhawks 4 well, all jittery.

What will you be using your ibook for?

I only use mine for recording music.

If your going to be using it for different things, get a power book or iMac

#88180

I have a G3 800 with 384M Ram and it's way faster than I expected it to be. After installing Panther, the performance shot way up and is now on par, if not better than my AthlonXP 1800 running WinXP. I'd say a G4 800 should be ample power. One note though...the G3 is a bit stagnant when attempting to do video editing, so depending on what you're using it for, you might want to test one in a store first, but I'm sure it will be more than OK.

#88184

Aiming for web browsing, i have a massive chinese pop collection 15GB and growing.

Other than that, play DVD's and DIVX's. Coding/compiling stuff in C++ and such. Do a little photoshopping and that's about it.

Yeah im definitely getting Airport Extreme, i take "Airport Extreme enabled" means you gotta buy one yourself, lol.

I have my PC for games and mass storage (3 7200rpm with 8MB caches ;-) ).

Darn it looks like I definitely need to bump up the RAM.

But the ATI 9200 isn't too shabby for cheap gaming on the PC... dont know what what apple's mobility version is like.

#88199

I have a G3 12" iBook and it came with almost no RAM (128 MB).

It's maxed out now at 576 MB and it rocks.

As for your HD question, you cannot upgrade the HD in any iBook.

Well, you can, but you will void the warranty.

Mine is already out of warranty, so I have upgraded mine from the stock 10GB to a Toshiba 60GB drive.

A big pain in the rear to do, but worth it.

I really wouldn't worry about disk size though, while mine was under warranty, I used, and still have, a Lacie firewire 80GB drive.

You can always go external.

#88248