Any Mac-folk out there? iBook advice?

zurich

Kendoka
Veteran
I've been a staunch PC user since god knows when, but have recently come to appreciate OS X, Mac design, etc. I'm looking to pick up a 12 inch iBook, mainly for web browsing, e-mail, MP3s, occasional video playback, and general portability.

Here are some questions for you all.

1) How friendly is OS X with Windows XP these days? I have a slick HTPC system setup with Windows XP connected to an 802.11g router (the built-in 802.11g of the iBook is attractive here..). I'd like to have have shared network drives for convenient access to MP3s, etc.

2) Just how powerful, relatively, is the 1.25ghz G4 in the iBook? Like I said, this will pretty much be strictly web browsing, e-mail, IM, MP3s, some video playback. I've heard that OS X can be a big of a hog when it comes to system resources, and a 1.25ghz G4 and 512 megs of RAM comes off as slightly anemic..

3) Does MSN exist on OS X? How about XviD/DivX? Bit torrent?

4) When is the next iBook revision due out? In a perfect world I'd love a 12 or 13inch widescreen iBook, and if I buy a 4:3 now only to have a 16:10 come out a few months down the road... !

5) I know the iBooks ship with ATI graphics, but how flexible are they compared to their PC counterparts? Does the iBook support S-Video out, mirror/cloning, etc?

Any help greatly appreciated! I'm getting a little bored of the PC world, and OS X looks to be a fairly exciting change.
 
Well, I'm no usual Mac user, but yesterday went to fix an Adsl router connected to an Airport for a friend, who's bought a brand new iBook G4 1.5GHz with 1Gb Ram: I went through the router setup (via http) with that iBook. Well, at times I had to wait longer than I would have ever expected before Safari started up (and btw, with Safari I couldn't set up the router correctly since it didn't save some changes I made, would you believe? Eventually I used IExplorer for Mac, and it worked out just fine...), and PDFs too, so, from my recent experience I'd say yes, that's a power hog...
Some BitTorrent clients are Java-based, so that should work.
For all of your other questions, I didn't have the chance to try enough to tell you...
 
I recently bought an iBook to replace my windows based laptop, so I'll try to answer you questions...

1) mac<->windows connectivity is really easy. You can connect to any windows share from within the finder, like you would under windows using the explorer. You can share your mac drive to a windows pc, too, os x uses samba for that.

2) My iBook uses a 1.2 GHz G4 (older 14" model). Combined with 512 mb RAM that system is more responive than my second pc using an athlon xp 2000+ and 512 mb ram with windows xp. Though working on ressource intensive stuff (ressource intensive operations in photoshop, compiling big projects in eclipse, encoding...) the iBook is definately slower than my previous Pentium-M 1.8 GHz. But multitasking during working on these tasks, the system still feels more responsive than my old laptop did.
Doing the stuff you plan to do, you shouldn't notice any performance bottle necks. I'm using firefox for browsing, MS Entourage for mail, Adium for IMs (multi protocol messenger, no MSN though) itunes for mp3s and different video players and all of them work perfectly and with no noticable difference in performance to my desktop system (aside from load times due to the slower hd). MS Office even looks nicer and seems to run better on my iBook than on my PCs.

3) So far, I had no problem to play back any kind of media file, be it Divx/Xvid or WMV... had to install Windows Media Player for OS X for some wmv's though, but it's free at MS home page, just like the windows version. Same goes for MSN, microsoft has the msn messenger for download at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=msnmessenger

4) No idea, but hasn't the new generation pre-equipped with airport express just been released a month or so ago? That would mean it'd take some months before another generation would be released...

5) Sorry, didn't test multimonitor yet

All in all, I can say that I've been absolutely amazed by my 3 months Apple experience... Lots of small things in OS X that greatly help improve your workflow, like the exposé feature that sounds like a nice gimmick on paper, but in reality makes working with multiple documents/application on a single screen 1000 times easier. Working with OS X you'll notice why many modern applications use interfaces similar to adobe's or macromedia's products, the multi-palette window interfaces start making sense when combined with the central menu bar. Bah, i'm rambling, the thing is, when you just take a short look at OS X, you'll see that it looks shiny and polished and has lots of gimmicky effects, but when you start working with it, you'll notice that it's not gimmicky effects, but that it really is really user friendly and improving your workflow.

Two more things:

if you are into Unix/Linux, the easy accessability of OS X BSD base is a really nice perk. You'll find any functionality found in a typical unix system, for the important stuff there's always a nice frontend, but you can do everything in the shell, too. There's different projects for porting the Linux software base to OS X, too, and os x comes with a X11 server so you can run ports without a native GUI.

the smaller battery of the 12" iBook results in about 30-45 minutes less battery life per charge than the 14" model. At least those are the results I and a friend of mine are getting with our otherwise identical iBooks. On the other hand, my 14" will work for well over 4 hours (depending on what i do with it, but not measured while idling around) and his 12" will still work for 3-4h, and that's pretty good for a 1000 € notebook (769$ ;) )
Official battery life is 6h, but my pentium-m had an official battery life of 6.5h and did last 3h doing the same stuff i do now on the iBook.

[EDIT]
read the answer above me:
don't ever, for the love of god, ever use MS IE for mac os x. It's by far the slowest piece of crap of a browser available for os x. The only thing going for it is that it interprets some CSS better than IE for windows, but aside from that, it's truly horrible under os x. Use firefox/camino instead (or safari, but it really doesn't work with some pages)
Hehe, second edit:
Forgot about bittorrent: I use Azureus on my home pc, it's java based, so it should work on os x. The jre is slower under os x than it is under windows, though.
Oh, and Preview coming with Panther is the worlds fastest pdf reader. For big documents it's faster than my 3400+ using Acrobat Reader at home ;)
 
For what you said you should be doing, you'll be absolutely fine. Remember not to care about maintenence/adware when you use it, though.
 
Dreamin'

what kinda laptop was your old one?
Even the newest 1.5GHz PB G4 is waaay slower than a P-M 1.8GHz.
 
With the speed comparison, I have an 1.7Ghz Pentium-M and a 1.2Ghz G4 (iBook). I am well aware that the Pentium-M will win any sort of number-crunching benchmark, but subjectively none is faster than the other.
It probably depends what applications you use.
 
I purchased a 12 inch PowerBook around April of this year.

I have found it VERY EASY to move files between my PC and my Mac. Networking (Wirelss) is also a lot easier on the Mac. I can say this because wireless on my fiances laptop is piss poor.

I'll have to agree with dreamin that IE on the Mac is the worst browser ever. I use a combo of Safari and Firefox. 90% Safari though.

Speedwise, you'll be definately ok for what you are doing. I would upgrading the RAM though. I am running 768 MB and the Mac OS takes advantage of the upgraded RAM even if you do not necessarily need it. I was also impressed with the FX5200 it came with. I was expecting it would be horrible, but it actually ran WOW and UT2004 decently. While it is definately NOT a gaming computer, it isn't horrible. The computer takes awful long to boot up though, so I just close the lid and let it sleep when I'm not using it.

The things I like best about the Mac is it comes pre-loaded with a lot of software, I like the feel of OS X better than XP, wireless networking is more stable, and multitasking is a lot easier. For example, my laptop has a 12 inch screen and I can multitask as easily as on my PC that has a 19 inch screen. F9, F10, and F11 will become your best friends.
 
Hi ,
it seems I am little late to party but here goes ;)

I switched to Mac OSX a little over a year for now and I have a Powerbook 15", which I use for my personal stuff email/documents/music/media and some personal development. As you know developer tools come along with OS X.

There are some questions which were not answered or will add to answer previously given by others.

MSN : I suppose you mean MSN messenger , yes its there and not as advanced as XP side but one feature it has which makes it even better it can let you log in in invisible mode like yahoo messenger.

Next iteration of ibook : keep a watch on macrumors.com ;)

Multimonitor : It works beautifully just plug your second monitor and voila. I have used multimonitor on Xp but its nowhere as plug-n-play as on OS X. My experience is based on powerbook and not ibook though. S-video , I think its available on most laptop of Apple but there might be slight deviation in specs which you can check at Apple's site.

Webbrowsing : I use safari and mozilla .

few points to note :
iBook does not have any pcmcia slot that means no addons, Powerbook comes with pcmcia slot. iBook is not an ideal machine for gaming its not just the hardware but games on Mac are few and slow to appear.
Ease of use is still ahead of XP although not light years ahead.
Its much secure than XP but you already know that I suppose. Some settings are not available in GUI ( some very core settings ) but as its based on FreeBSD I can always go to shell and tweak away...

if you have anymore question just ask.

edit: it seems multimonitor is not available on iBook but there might be a hck for it.
 
T2k said:
Dreamin'

what kinda laptop was your old one?
Even the newest 1.5GHz PB G4 is waaay slower than a P-M 1.8GHz.

That's why I wrote that the iBook is definately slower at things like encoding/compiling... But on the other hand the system still feels just as responsive while performing these tasks. If i put enough load on my PC, it will still perform the tasks faster than the iBook, but the system will have a slow response time and generally feel jerky during performing them. My iBook may take longer to finish (and considerably so, 1.2 GHz G4 <-> 3400+ Athlon), but OS X will allow me to multitask just fine. With my old Pentium-M Notebook (1.5GHz) this was especially appearant when the system started to swap heavily when doing last minute edits in photoshop/freehand/indesign...
 
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