You've almost convinced me about the importance of the 12" iBook, but...
It must be predicated on the machine being cheap (prepare pricing dance for future deployment). They could stick with a 12" bottom end, but to really drive the price down, it's going to have to stick with proportionally slower CPUs, smaller HDDs and weaker video. 1099 is a good entry, but the pressure is on. There aren't a lot of portable options that cost less that are actually worth buying, but there are a few and by next year there will be plenty. 799-899 is a mark worth striving for, even if the machine is proportionally slower.
Basically, the arguments you make amount to a niche -- the budget conscious mac road warrior. Niches are nice, but they can be the undoing of a company like Apple. Apple needs to attack the major markets, in laptops that means BIG SCREEN CONSUMER MACHINES. It makes sense.
This kind of buyer will not accessorize the machine with an external desktop set-up. They want one machine to do everything! And they want a big screen that they can view comfortably as their main desktop and mobile display, without a Dual Display setup. The iBook 12" excels as a secondary mac, and is a good primary machine in a pinch, though the lack of spanning hurts it. I don't trust the hack. Apple, however, should not make the assinine manouver of crippling machines to upsell buyers. The high end should sell itself on its own merits -- the PB's will move ahead significantly within the next 12 months and this problem will go away, Apple should just enable the spanning by then, or at the very least, provide a docked (closed lid) mode that lets you drive a higher res external display. But I digest...
It's as simple as matching the competition and competing on features. The people on these boards are atypical buyers, they have their own rationale that doesn't really match the behavior of the average consumer. Apple has read the trends and taken appropriate action.
The 14 is definitely the best consumer laptop option. The 12 is a great budget, budget-traveler option, but it doesn't make the same argument for itslef as an "primary machine" that the 14 does. So, yeah, it should continue, but they need to drive the price of it down, since it will always be a better secondary computer than a primary machine for the majority of consumers/students.
I'd still look for a widescreen replacement to oust both these models once the PB's move on to their G5 future (at least a year)
Ideally, Apple could build the mobo/case combination around a degree of modularity and just offer the same spec in your choice of either 12 or 14" model. If the 14" models are not artificially overpriced, they will outsell the 12" models even in such a scenario. But because Apple has inventory control issues to manage, we may not see such a scenario, they will instead opt for the model with the most potential, and that is the larger screen affordable machine. Most consumers will be happy.
Apple is not "crippling" the low end models, they are differentiating the product line. Each consumer is prepared to spend a different amount of money in order to satisfy their needs.
For example, McDonalds is not deliberately crippling their hamburgers and cheesburgers. They are merely swapping components in order to create a lower cost menu item compared to a Big Mac, McChicken, etc.
Apple is not "crippling" the low end models, they are differentiating the product line.
There's a difference betwen differentiating and crippling. Crippling is when you disable a feature that is already present to make the more expensive model seem like it's worth the money. Like video spanning on the iBooks. It's there. It works. But Apple put software in the firmware to disable it. It would've actually cost less to leave it enabled than go through the trouble of disabling it. I'm not complaining (much), because it helps sell the more profitable Powerbooks, and few iBook users realy miss it. But it's defnitely crippling.
The iBook RAM situation, OTOH, I would call differentiation, since it would be more expensive to have a second empty slot or to place more RAM in the soldered slot.
Apple is not "crippling" the low end models, they are differentiating the product line. Each consumer is prepared to spend a different amount of money in order to satisfy their needs.
For example, McDonalds is not deliberately crippling their hamburgers and cheesburgers. They are merely swapping components in order to create a lower cost menu item compared to a Big Mac, McChicken, etc.
There's quite a bit of difference between iBooks and hamburgers. McDonalds pays for everything in a hamburger, whereas Apple could have the iBooks doing video spanning, from the factory, with no additional cost whatsoever. I think there's plenty of reason to use the word "cripple".
And yes, this "crippling" is done to serve the purpose of differentation aka versioning. It just happens to be a very visible and irritating case of versioning since video spanning is a standard feature in the laptop computer industry, and everybody knows the functionality is in fact built in the product but hidden. It would be much easier to accept this versioning if the physical part costs to build a non-spanning laptop were, say, $5 more.
I'm happy that you found someone or (thing) to share your life with Don't get me wrong I know the iBook is intended as a low line machine and it is outfitted as such. However I'm the kind of guy who buys B&O stereos not because their the best but they look great. After seeing the shape of an iBook after just one month of NORMAL use it looks like a person took a Brilo pad to it . It's just annoyingly frustrating to spend that kind of money for scratches and not to mention the endless hardware problems we've experienced with them. If your happy with yours then great, I just couldn't recommend one to any of my friends.
I think they're all great machines, but lets set some of the iBook/PBook stuff straight.
The original PB867 wiped the floor with the iBook 800 in real world tests. Macworld used a suite of TIMED tests of REAL APPLICATIONS, including iMovie/iPhoto/iTunes, Photoshop, Office, and Adobe. The PB was 2-3X faster than the iBook across all of these. Even with 900Mhz G3's, that's still not a deficit that that G3 iBook could overcome and the 867 PB still wipes the floor with all of those when it comes to doing real work.
Undoubtedly the move to an 800Mhz G4 for the 12" iBook is still a substantial improvement over the 900Mhz G3 and the only thing that the 900Mhz G3 model would beat it at are some obscure memory test or I/O subsystem test that has more to do with MoBo than the CPU itself. Even if IBM had ever produced 1.1+ Ghz G3's, the 800Mhz G4 now in use would still be faster when it counts, a lot faster.
This is a great upgrade to the iBook line, there's no other way to look at it.
The only thing about the iBook that pisses me off (it has to do with Apple not the iBook) pricing is that when you go to the special education apple store for the US you can get an iBook for over a hundred dollars cheaper Canadian than you can get at the apple educational store for Canada! What a shame! I would have loved to get an iBook for 1548 rather than 1648, especially since I am a university student who like almost all of us, doesn't have hundreds stashed somewhere waiting to be used for the sole purpose of not allowing dust to form on the bills...
With that money it would almost cover an Airport Extreme card which is $137 Canadian discounted (which is still very expensive)!!! Not to mention the 288 dollars for AppleCare! Oh I hope that summer job comes through with the cash.... Anyways, the point is, that it sucks that Apple upped the price over a hundred dollars just for it being Canada to the NORTH!
P.S
I will now proceed to bang my head against my igloo and hope my forehead doesn't stick to the ice........
I think they're all great machines, but lets set some of the iBook/PBook stuff straight.
The original PB867 wiped the floor with the iBook 800 in real world tests. Macworld used a suite of TIMED tests of REAL APPLICATIONS, including iMovie/iPhoto/iTunes, Photoshop, Office, and Adobe. The PB was 2-3X faster than the iBook across all of these. Even with 900Mhz G3's, that's still not a deficit that that G3 iBook could overcome and the 867 PB still wipes the floor with all of those when it comes to doing real work.
You got a link to any of that? I remember seeing a certain http://barefeats.com/emac.html barefeats benchmark that shows the G3 winning a few benchmarks on non"altivec" code. The cache seems to help it here...then again, this is sort of an anomoly as Bryce will no longer be made for Mac and Cinema 4D is supposed to get a huge update to make it G5 optimized.
What I'm really wondering is if the G4 iBooks can keep up with the G3 iBooks when it comes to battery life. That's an important consideration...
Here's the review of the Rev. A 12" Powerbook by Macworld; scroll down halfway to see the benchmarks. (It beats the iBook by more than 200% in most tests.)
I wonder what the comparison would be between the original PB12 and the new iBook 12 in a graphics comparison, since for all intents and purposes, that is really the only difference between them.
Here's the review of the Rev. A 12" Powerbook by Macworld; scroll down halfway to see the benchmarks. (It beats the iBook by more than 200% in most tests.)
Yeah, NOFEER, you're taking the replies out of order. Gizzmonic suggested that the G3 iBook was actually better at many non-Altivec enhanced tasks than the G4 PowerBook, so Placebo provided a link showing that the G4 PowerBook wiped the floor with the G3 iBook.
I think the G4 iBook is a bit too new to have any comprehensive benchmark testing done on it - there are two XBench results posted to the XBench website however. They're two different trials of the same iBook, an 800 MHz G4. The scores were 68 and 76, under Panther, but XBench is funky under Panther and it somehow always gets huge numbers for memory allocation (in the hundreds, this iBook got over 300 one time and over 500 another time!). So I would only compare to other systems running Panther.
From looking at the few XBench results from comptuers running Panther, it looks like the 12" 867 MHz PowerBooks are getting 80-85, and the 12" 1 GHz PowerBooks are getting 85-90. So they should be a bit faster than the G4/800 iBook - which is expected since they both have higher clock speeds.
The result shown on xlr8yrmac shows a fair bit more promise, be nice to see a sample of 10 or so machines to get a feel, the 800 looks like it is doing ok by the newer numbers.. spanks my poor little dvse500 an 933 would be even mucho betterer
which is best "value" ibook, most bang for the buck considering all with AE,BT
does it make sense to get the largest HD possible? Since all come standard with combo drive, is 1gz in real world better than 933 or 800? unless size is the question, is 933 that much slower than 1gz? If you need a 12 then there is little to add to this, but as far as "value" what makes the most sense.
which is best "value" ibook, most bang for the buck If you need a 12 then there is little to add to this, but as far as "value" what makes the most sense.
I think 933 and 800 are both good value, but I dont really understand that 1GHz version.
does it make sense to get the largest HD possible?
I would definitely suggest doing a BTO 60 GB hard drive for anyone considering an iBook G4. You can't replace the hard drive without voiding the warranty, so if you go to the max now, it'll last you much longer.
I think the 800 and 933 represent equally good values. The 1 GHz makes little sense. It's a $150 boost in price for just 67 MHz more, a 7% speed boost for 12% more money. The other $50 goes into bumping the hard drive from 40 GB to 60 GB. I think if I were considering the 1 GHz iBook, I'd just get the 12" PowerBook instead and get all the nice features it has to offer - more cache, more compact, more RAM on the motherboard, spanning works by default, closed-lid operation, etc.
I guess 1 GHz is a psychological barrier and so they'll charge you a premium to get the top of the line model. It will also depreciate the fastest - I'd like to see how selling prices of 933 MHz and 1 GHz iBooks compare in a year or two.
Comments
Originally posted by Matsu
You've almost convinced me about the importance of the 12" iBook, but...
It must be predicated on the machine being cheap (prepare pricing dance
Basically, the arguments you make amount to a niche -- the budget conscious mac road warrior. Niches are nice, but they can be the undoing of a company like Apple. Apple needs to attack the major markets, in laptops that means BIG SCREEN CONSUMER MACHINES. It makes sense.
This kind of buyer will not accessorize the machine with an external desktop set-up. They want one machine to do everything! And they want a big screen that they can view comfortably as their main desktop and mobile display, without a Dual Display setup. The iBook 12" excels as a secondary mac, and is a good primary machine in a pinch, though the lack of spanning hurts it. I don't trust the hack. Apple, however, should not make the assinine manouver of crippling machines to upsell buyers. The high end should sell itself on its own merits -- the PB's will move ahead significantly within the next 12 months and this problem will go away, Apple should just enable the spanning by then, or at the very least, provide a docked (closed lid) mode that lets you drive a higher res external display. But I digest...
It's as simple as matching the competition and competing on features. The people on these boards are atypical buyers, they have their own rationale that doesn't really match the behavior of the average consumer. Apple has read the trends and taken appropriate action.
The 14 is definitely the best consumer laptop option. The 12 is a great budget, budget-traveler option, but it doesn't make the same argument for itslef as an "primary machine" that the 14 does. So, yeah, it should continue, but they need to drive the price of it down, since it will always be a better secondary computer than a primary machine for the majority of consumers/students.
I'd still look for a widescreen replacement to oust both these models once the PB's move on to their G5 future (at least a year)
Ideally, Apple could build the mobo/case combination around a degree of modularity and just offer the same spec in your choice of either 12 or 14" model. If the 14" models are not artificially overpriced, they will outsell the 12" models even in such a scenario. But because Apple has inventory control issues to manage, we may not see such a scenario, they will instead opt for the model with the most potential, and that is the larger screen affordable machine. Most consumers will be happy.
Apple is not "crippling" the low end models, they are differentiating the product line. Each consumer is prepared to spend a different amount of money in order to satisfy their needs.
For example, McDonalds is not deliberately crippling their hamburgers and cheesburgers. They are merely swapping components in order to create a lower cost menu item compared to a Big Mac, McChicken, etc.
Originally posted by Chagi
Apple is not "crippling" the low end models, they are differentiating the product line.
There's a difference betwen differentiating and crippling. Crippling is when you disable a feature that is already present to make the more expensive model seem like it's worth the money. Like video spanning on the iBooks. It's there. It works. But Apple put software in the firmware to disable it. It would've actually cost less to leave it enabled than go through the trouble of disabling it. I'm not complaining (much), because it helps sell the more profitable Powerbooks, and few iBook users realy miss it. But it's defnitely crippling.
The iBook RAM situation, OTOH, I would call differentiation, since it would be more expensive to have a second empty slot or to place more RAM in the soldered slot.
Originally posted by Chagi
Apple is not "crippling" the low end models, they are differentiating the product line. Each consumer is prepared to spend a different amount of money in order to satisfy their needs.
For example, McDonalds is not deliberately crippling their hamburgers and cheesburgers. They are merely swapping components in order to create a lower cost menu item compared to a Big Mac, McChicken, etc.
There's quite a bit of difference between iBooks and hamburgers. McDonalds pays for everything in a hamburger, whereas Apple could have the iBooks doing video spanning, from the factory, with no additional cost whatsoever. I think there's plenty of reason to use the word "cripple".
And yes, this "crippling" is done to serve the purpose of differentation aka versioning. It just happens to be a very visible and irritating case of versioning since video spanning is a standard feature in the laptop computer industry, and everybody knows the functionality is in fact built in the product but hidden. It would be much easier to accept this versioning if the physical part costs to build a non-spanning laptop were, say, $5 more.
The original PB867 wiped the floor with the iBook 800 in real world tests. Macworld used a suite of TIMED tests of REAL APPLICATIONS, including iMovie/iPhoto/iTunes, Photoshop, Office, and Adobe. The PB was 2-3X faster than the iBook across all of these. Even with 900Mhz G3's, that's still not a deficit that that G3 iBook could overcome and the 867 PB still wipes the floor with all of those when it comes to doing real work.
Undoubtedly the move to an 800Mhz G4 for the 12" iBook is still a substantial improvement over the 900Mhz G3 and the only thing that the 900Mhz G3 model would beat it at are some obscure memory test or I/O subsystem test that has more to do with MoBo than the CPU itself. Even if IBM had ever produced 1.1+ Ghz G3's, the 800Mhz G4 now in use would still be faster when it counts, a lot faster.
This is a great upgrade to the iBook line, there's no other way to look at it.
With that money it would almost cover an Airport Extreme card which is $137 Canadian discounted (which is still very expensive)!!! Not to mention the 288 dollars for AppleCare! Oh I hope that summer job comes through with the cash.... Anyways, the point is, that it sucks that Apple upped the price over a hundred dollars just for it being Canada to the NORTH!
P.S
I will now proceed to bang my head against my igloo and hope my forehead doesn't stick to the ice........
EDIT: I found this so I quess it DOES work. What a great news!
Originally posted by Matsu
I think they're all great machines, but lets set some of the iBook/PBook stuff straight.
The original PB867 wiped the floor with the iBook 800 in real world tests. Macworld used a suite of TIMED tests of REAL APPLICATIONS, including iMovie/iPhoto/iTunes, Photoshop, Office, and Adobe. The PB was 2-3X faster than the iBook across all of these. Even with 900Mhz G3's, that's still not a deficit that that G3 iBook could overcome and the 867 PB still wipes the floor with all of those when it comes to doing real work.
You got a link to any of that? I remember seeing a certain http://barefeats.com/emac.html barefeats benchmark that shows the G3 winning a few benchmarks on non"altivec" code. The cache seems to help it here...then again, this is sort of an anomoly as Bryce will no longer be made for Mac and Cinema 4D is supposed to get a huge update to make it G5 optimized.
What I'm really wondering is if the G4 iBooks can keep up with the G3 iBooks when it comes to battery life. That's an important consideration...
Link.
Originally posted by Placebo
Here's the review of the Rev. A 12" Powerbook by Macworld; scroll down halfway to see the benchmarks. (It beats the iBook by more than 200% in most tests.)
Link.
that was in april!
any new comparisons PB12 vs g4Ibook12 with similar amount of ram?
Originally posted by Matsu
The original PB867 wiped the floor with the iBook 800 in real world tests.
Originally posted by Gizzmonic
You got a link to any of that?
Originally posted by Placebo
Here's the review of the Rev. A 12" Powerbook by Macworld;
and then:
Originally posted by NOFEER
that was in april!
Um yeah, that was the whole idea.
I think the G4 iBook is a bit too new to have any comprehensive benchmark testing done on it - there are two XBench results posted to the XBench website however. They're two different trials of the same iBook, an 800 MHz G4. The scores were 68 and 76, under Panther, but XBench is funky under Panther and it somehow always gets huge numbers for memory allocation (in the hundreds, this iBook got over 300 one time and over 500 another time!). So I would only compare to other systems running Panther.
From looking at the few XBench results from comptuers running Panther, it looks like the 12" 867 MHz PowerBooks are getting 80-85, and the 12" 1 GHz PowerBooks are getting 85-90. So they should be a bit faster than the G4/800 iBook - which is expected since they both have higher clock speeds.
does it make sense to get the largest HD possible? Since all come standard with combo drive, is 1gz in real world better than 933 or 800? unless size is the question, is 933 that much slower than 1gz? If you need a 12 then there is little to add to this, but as far as "value" what makes the most sense.
Originally posted by NOFEER
which is best "value" ibook, most bang for the buck If you need a 12 then there is little to add to this, but as far as "value" what makes the most sense.
I think 933 and 800 are both good value, but I dont really understand that 1GHz version.
Originally posted by Rewes
I think 933 and 800 are both good value, but I dont really understand that 1GHz version.
I agree. It's a tough decision between the rock bottom 12" ibook vs. the mid-range 14" 933MHz model, but I wouldn't remotely consider the 1GHz model.
Originally posted by NOFEER
does it make sense to get the largest HD possible?
I would definitely suggest doing a BTO 60 GB hard drive for anyone considering an iBook G4. You can't replace the hard drive without voiding the warranty, so if you go to the max now, it'll last you much longer.
I think the 800 and 933 represent equally good values. The 1 GHz makes little sense. It's a $150 boost in price for just 67 MHz more, a 7% speed boost for 12% more money. The other $50 goes into bumping the hard drive from 40 GB to 60 GB. I think if I were considering the 1 GHz iBook, I'd just get the 12" PowerBook instead and get all the nice features it has to offer - more cache, more compact, more RAM on the motherboard, spanning works by default, closed-lid operation, etc.
I guess 1 GHz is a psychological barrier and so they'll charge you a premium to get the top of the line model. It will also depreciate the fastest - I'd like to see how selling prices of 933 MHz and 1 GHz iBooks compare in a year or two.