Powerbook Vs. Thinkpad

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Orbitz · #31 Post by **Orbitz** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:02 pm

Actually, I prefer the Superdrive from the description..but I can see where it may be harder to keep it clean etc.

In my case, I am still sold on the X4x series but am thinking about grabbing a Powerbook also...my wife will inherit one

Email for me is all handled thru an Exchange account...I back up my .ost regularily but Exchange is the main bin everything is stored in so as long as the Mac will sync with Exchange it seems like it will be as easy to keep the Mac sync'd as an XP box. I am only really interested in footprint with a lappy (so long as it stays at 5lbs and under) so the extra pound wouldn't bother me at all. I am definately a die hard XP guy...I have 4 machines in my home alone...but I have always wanted to try the Mac os and Tiger seems really slick...actually similar in some respects to Longhorn (which I have running on one machine...and which has been basically a royal pain since I got it due to lack of early driver support...otherwise Longhorn is a fantastic improvement ).

A friend of mine who has switched to Mac after 20 years with Windows made a great point...the time spent keeping a Mac functional in an XP enviornment would likely not be much more then the constant attention XP requires to keep updated and virus free etc. Not sure if he is right yet, but he does seem to have a point as I spend a good deal of time between my XP boxes + XP laptop keeping everything running smoothly and up to date. He has had his latest Mac for over a year and hasn't reformatted / reloaded yet...I have never gone much beyond 6 or 8 months on any of my XP boxes before a rebuild.

I would also add...I happen to love the look of the TP...in fact when I got my T41p what sold me was the cosmetics of the dam thing...I don't much care for lappy's that look like high tech toys or gaming boxes...once in a while I wince when I see an associate wip out an Alienware Sentia...he just looks like a goof pulling that thing out in a boardroom

Having not seen a Powerbook up close (always pass em right by in CompUSA I don't have much opinion on them looks wise...but the reviews sure make them sound like works of art. I still love my TP rubber case tho.

Batuta · #32 Post by **Batuta** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:07 pm

Orbitz · #33 Post by **Orbitz** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:12 pm

By the way...just out of curiosity...is it the proc on a Mac that keeps one from loading up XP..or is it a lot of components in general? Running a box with dual boot Tiger and XP would be the ultimate fun

Batuta · #34 Post by **Batuta** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:19 pm

asiafish · #35 Post by **asiafish** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:20 pm

I installed Panther on the family desktop when I first bought it 15-months-ago, and I installed Tiger last week. The Panther installation is still totally stable, with the machine actually only rebooting when a system update required it. So far, Tiger appears to be more of the same.

emorphien · #36 Post by **emorphien** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:22 pm

Orbitz wrote:but the reviews sure make them sound like works of art.

It's a simple, yet elegant design. Although it isn't the most functional in some ways. The thinkpad is all about functionality, and in a way that makes me appreciate its appearance more than just a sexy looking laptop (like Apple or Sony even).

One company that seems to blend both in some notebooks is Panasonic, but their prices are outrageous and the specs are low.

asiafish · #37 Post by **asiafish** » Mon May 09, 2005 10:29 pm

IBM definitely put more emphasis on function, as evidenced by removeable comparing the weight of the 14" T with the 12" PB. Apple is still way ahead of Sony and the like though, and some of their useability features are OS related, and thus not comparable. PowerBooks waks from sleep in about 2 seconds, and they wake each and every time without fail. Windows suspend to RAM is really a bad joke, with the longer it sleeps directly related to its diminishing chance of waking up, and forcing most Windows users to hibernate (suspend to disk), which while as almost as reliable as MAC OSX sleep (still can fail to resume on occasion), is a whole lot slower.

So which is more useful really depends on what matters to you. I give my ThinkPad the edge from a hardware perspective (love the 9 hours battery life with 9-cell and Ultrabay Slim batts), but the PowerBook the edge in software.

Batuta · #38 Post by **Batuta** » Tue May 10, 2005 8:50 am

emorphien · #39 Post by **emorphien** » Tue May 10, 2005 3:02 pm

I'm not too picky about looks either, although I do like how the IBMs look. The Panasonics happen to also just have a general sexyness to them and they're quite tough. If the specs were a bit better I'd consider it, although as it is the W2 intrigues me. Small design, built in optical, etc.

Orbitz · #40 Post by **Orbitz** » Tue May 10, 2005 6:30 pm

Great article at Anandtech about this subject. This is the second part of the "experiment" which is focused on moving to a powerbook...the first part of the story was using desktop mac (the link for the first part is in the first paragrap of the link).

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2326

Bob Collins · #41 Post by **Bob Collins** » Tue May 10, 2005 7:18 pm

I am not 100% sure, but comparing the PPC to the X86 architectures really does not really make any sense. I think it is like comparing X86 to the SPARC processors. Very different and measures of speed based merely on MHz or GHZ is silly at best, especially from x86 to SPARC or PPC for that matter. I think the oranges-to-oranges comparo cannot be performed, as each handles things differently.

What EXACTLY would directly compare in TP to PB?

Again I posit; you get the proper tool for the job at hand! Try a side by side comparison of applications using the same data sets.

Batuta, I am sure, as you are, that Apple will prolly never deliver OS X to x86, but even if they did, I am not sure it would be able to run the apps you already have, sort of the "written for windows" thing. ;-( prolly still have to have an emulator.

Bob,
Happily using both a TP and a PB for which task requires which machine....

Orbitz · #42 Post by **Orbitz** » Tue May 10, 2005 7:30 pm

I don't disagree. I was more interested in the what difficulties the reviewer encountered in adding a Mac to the arsonal...performance is hard to quantify anyway in my view. There are many on these forums that find and X4x painfully slow for what they need to accomplish...others find it acceptable etc.

I am a frequent visitor at Anandtech and find their reviews to be pretty good overall...so I was happy to run across this one since I have been debating about whether to get a PB to play with along with a X series

asiafish · #43 Post by **asiafish** » Tue May 10, 2005 11:47 pm

MHz to MHz means absolutely nothing even when staying just in the X86 camp. Case in point, Pentium M and Pentium 4, a 2.0 GHz is most definitely faster than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4. Apple's G3, G4 and G5 are totally different systems, and again vary widely even compared to each other. In the old Mac OS9 a 400MHz G3 and a 400MHz G4 were about the same most of the time, with only a select few applications able to take advantage of the G4's altivec processor. On OS X, the G4 is much faster most of the time as most OS X applications and much of the OS X interface itself are optimized for the G4. I haven't played with a G5 yet, but I would imagine that Tiger and many of the newer high-end apps, as they are written for 64 bit processors like the G5, will be significantly faster than when run on a G4 of the same MHz.

Comparing PowerBooks to ThinkPads, it is far more difficult. My T42p (1.8GHz Pentium M with 1.5GB ram) is significantly faster than my 1.5GHz PoewrBook G4 with 768MB of ram when encoding video (Nero on the ThinkPad and OpenShiva on the PowerBook), but apply a filter in Photoshop and the two are about the same. Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are faster on the ThinkPad, but PowerPoint presentations open faster on the PowerBook. It all depends on what a given application is doing, how well it was optimized for the processor and operating system, and of course whether or not the person to your right is wearing plaid.

emorphien · #44 Post by **emorphien** » Wed May 11, 2005 1:07 am

Exactly, although I generally find that mhz for mhz the Pentium M outperforms the mobile G4s slightly, and since they're able to clock a good bit higher, there can be some good performance gains. But there are certainly some instances of optimizations where the G4 will do better.

GoEatFood · #45 Post by **GoEatFood** » Fri May 13, 2005 6:41 pm

anyone with a powerbook that has a superdrive...is it true they are very loud?? I'd hate to hear the little drive going back and forth or whatever...

asiafish · #46 Post by **asiafish** » Mon May 16, 2005 12:28 am

My PowerBook has the new 8X SuperDrive, and yes, it is a bit louder than the combo drive in my ThinkPad or the one in my last PowerBook.

Still, it isn't obnoxiously loud except when a disk is first inserted and mounted by the OS. The disk clunks when first inserted, then you hear friction sounds for a few seconds.

Once mounted, however, the drive is just as quiet as my ThinkPad's, which is to say I can't hear it when I'm watching a movie, but it does make a bit of friction noise when copying files or burning.

Powerbook Vs. Thinkpad

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