When would be a good time to purchase an iBook?
Howdy everyone, I'm new here, I just discovered this forum a few days ago. I'm interested in purchasing a new iBook. I'm not in a situation where I 'must' do it now. I currently have a 500 MHz G3 based iMac and I am quite happy with it. I am a full-time student and I am majoring in Information Systems, I have one more semester after the current one and I will be finished with school, at least for now :-). I have a PC laptop that I bought for school and when I am finished with school I plan to sell it. With all the buzz about big changes at Apple and a new line of processors, I'm wondering if I should get one of the current iBooks when the new models come out or if I should wait to get one of the redesigned ones. Do you guys think that the newer ones will still be able to run OS 9? I use both OS 9.1 and 10.2.6 on my iMac. Has anyone heard or have any ideas what, if any, changes are coming for the iBooks? I'm hoping that the newer ones will be able to hold/use more that 640 KB of RAM and that they will finally have USB 2.0. A faster FSB wouldn't hurt either. Thanks for your input and suggestions.
Comments
Apple's already dropped the price on the 12" PB, perhaps in anticipation of upgunning the 15" and 17" lines to the PPC970, but they notably didn't drop prices on the iBooks. Reports from IBM suggest that Apple might be planning to keep a G3 in the iBooks for a while yet. In any event, I'd be shocked if Apple didn't wait a least a year after introducing 970 PB's to debut a 970 iBook (or PB-lite, like the 12"). As for OS9, I'm pretty certain that none of the current iBooks can boot into OS9, and it's a lock that no future ones will either.
Larry
iBook tech specs here
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Originally posted by thegelding
the current iBooks can boot 9 or X...
I stand corrected. I thought they disabled OS9 booting on all the lines in January (save the one old PM configuration), but it looks like the iBooks and the low-end eMacs still can.
I agree that being able to put 1GB of RAM into an iBook would be sweet. It seems a little silly that even the 12" PB has the same limitation. If performance is a major consideration for you, you might want to wait and see what the new 15" PB's look like. If you really need 1GB RAM, you'll likely prefer a faster CPU, bus, GPU, etc. too. But if you're just thinking of the future, 640MB should do fine for the (IMO) three-year life expectancy of a laptop. I'm on a tight budget so I've only filled my iBook-600 out with 384MB, and though I ride it pretty hard it does just fine.
I'll also slide this thread over to General Discussion, the forum for purchasing advice such as this.
LarryC