IBM T42 (2373-3UU) vs Apple Powebook G4

[mrflynn]

Hi everybody,

this is my first post here. I have to buy a new laptop as my graduation present. So I need you help to decide which notebook to buy.
The choose is between the Apple Powerbook 15,2" new G4 1,33 vs IBM T42 (2373-3UU).
If someone of you has both, or worked with powerbook too, and could answer to my questions, deciding will be easier for me.

My main concern are about:

1) fan noises: I hate fan noise!! Someone told me that powerbook are totally silent, while IBM T40/T41 had some noise problem. had been these problem fixed????

2) size and weight: I think here T42 wins

3) LCD quality

4) battery duration

Consider also the prices.
I will pay the apple powerbook g4 1,33 15,2 combo dvd, 60 gb hd, 256 mb pc2700 ram at $1829
while IBM t42 2373-3UU al $2200 according to one of the post I read here

what do you suggest me????

thanks in advance
Tony

[ian]

Have to say I like your style, but have serious doubts as to whether you'll actually get a *realistic* evaluation on what is, by virtue of it's name, a slightly (ever so slightly) biased forum...

That said, Ive learned something today - it seems Apple make laptops now - wonders will never cease

[Chun-Yu]

1) I've never seen a T42, but I can tell you that the PowerBook is far from silent.

2) T42 definitely wins, even the 15" ones

3) Don't know about now, but early Aluminum PowerBooks had that fun white spot issue

4) T42 definitely wins, and is more expandable too. Pop in a 9-cell or UltraBay Slim battery for even more PowerBook killing action

Also, contrary to what Apple would like you to believe, the G4 is *seriously* slow compared to a Pentium M. For example, running CineBench (google for it or something), a 1.6 GHz Pentium M is twice as fast as a 1.25 GHz G4. On a variety of other things we also tried (including my friend's C program for an Algorithms class), the Pentium M blew the G4 away.

I also happen to dislike the unibutton and lack of dedicated home/del/etc. keys the PowerBooks have (and don't have), but that's just me (I can't even stand a 2-button notebook like a Dell anymore - I need that middle mouse button for Mozilla and cut/paste in linux).

[taphil]

1) I've heard they can be noisy.

2) Specs easy to look up.

3) Their LCDs are widescreen which may be nice, but the resolution is so low compared to SXGA+ or UXGA.

4) I don't think the PBs last what Apple says they do.

I friend (girl) of mine has been researching a PB and decided against it. Spending $2500-3000 was fine for her, but what wasn't acceptable was that she judged it was more of a risk than she was comfortable with. There were and still are problems with the backlight in one half of the screen going dead, white spots appearing on the LCD after time, and other problems.

Other things I'd consider are speed. May not be that important at first, but it doesn't sound smart to me to invest in a machine that has the same core hardware it did a couple years ago. A PM can easily outperform the G4. Also, that hard drive might be only 4200rpm which makes it slow, although I remember they do offer the 5400rpm drives for some. The PB runs hot, while the T40-42 warm.

[cynic]

Very, very hot. No one I know can keep a Powerbook on their lap for an hour because they heat up so much and the keyboard actually vents heat upwards too (so your hands start to sweat)

I can confirm pretty much everything Chun Yu said and we have 10 Powerbooks at work and only my ThinkPad (but that's slowly changing...) The screen resolution on a SXGA+ T4x series is almost the same as the 17"PB, but the thinkpad is just fractionally heavier than the 12"PB. The 15" is also thicker than the thinkpad. The battery life if lucky on a 15"PB is about 2.5 to 3 hrs. The 5 hrs quoted on the Apple website is for the 12"PB (there's a note saying as much on the webpage) but even on a 12"PB the most I've seen it go is 3.5hrs. Meanwhile, on the 6 cell battery, you can get a true 5hours on the T4x.

Plus, you're not considering AppleCare which will run about $350 to get a sub-standard version of IBM's included 3 year warranty that is 24/7 (verses Apple's only business days and between business hours support) You can also swap hard drives on a ThinkPad which will void your warranty on a Powerbook.

...and finally a 1.3 Pentium M beat the 1.25 17" Powerbook by a substanial margin (this was done by a Mac site) That was the lowest Pentium M (non- ULV) available at the time verses the highest Powerbook model. You look at how the processors have scaled and the gap in performance just keeps growing.

edited for resolution name typo

[Chun-Yu]

Ah, yes... the Apple warranty. If I remember correctly, 1 year standard, but only with 90 days of free telephone support. The low resolution of the 17" is also still lower than that of an SXGA+ (or UXGA, obviously) T series.

[CantStopNow]

Coming from someone who has had an iBook for the last couple of years, if you choose to get the Powerbook, you must get Applecare. I've found the Apple laptops to not be very robust. My wife is on her 3rd or 4th logic board on her laptop, and a friend of mine has had some issues with his Powerbook as well.

But as long as you're covered by Applecare, OS X is really, really nice - especially on a Powerbook. I'm going with a Thinkpad because my school requires the use of a Windows laptop, and I'd really rather not get a Dell...

[K. Eng]

I'd go with a ThinkPad. The 15" PowerBook is nice, but its footprint is a bit too big for me and yes, it does get hot.

[Lmax]

Tony, several things...

I know many of my friends own Apple notebooks. Apple makes a fine product. The only Apple product I have ever owned is an iPod, and I love it. As for their laptops I can speak from my sister and friends' experiences. Most of them own iBooks and love them, only one has a three year old PowerBook. That said most of them are people who use their computer to do word processing, spreadsheeting, and financial management applications like Quicken, and of course surfing the web. Beyond that they don't use them for much else. I have used my sister's iBook extenisively and will speak based on that experience and the experience given to me by my friends. If you are a writer or a person who likes to use Photoshop or Premiere Pro, then perhaps the Powerbook is for you. I am not going to give you a biased opinion here if I can help it.

I have always used IBM based PCs because I grew up on them and I am a computer engineering major which is all done on PCs. However, I can see why many would choose the Apple product. I think the above posts may be a little subject to publication bias because we all love ThinkPads.

The Apple computers give an austere look that is beautiful and functional. However, in its true since the keyboard on the Apple simply sucks. No good function keys, no dedicated edit keys, makes it difficult to do intracate touch typing. You find yourself moving to that low down touchpad all too often. Also the key travel is somewhat shorter than the ThinkPad's so you find yourself tapping keys that don't travel fully thus misspelling a word.

The Apple touchpad is fine and works better than most touhpads offered by other companies including IBM. However, that is making the assumption that you LIKE using a touchpad. The single mouse button is fine in OS X as it was designed around that, even though I like the ability to right click in Windows and Linux.

OS X is a beautiful operatings system, but I am not sure it is as functional as it is beautiful. Too much eye candy gives way to annoyances that get in the way of getting work done, IMO. But if you work in Photoshop the added simplicity of the OS X interface may be a welcomed change. Also if you do a lot of audio editing and audio work the Apple may be for you as it handles these operations better than PCs for the most part.

Apple laptop hardware is not as easy to work on as ThinkPads but it is easier than most other PC laptops, and there is much documentation and pictures online to help you disect a Powerbook. However, don't go to far because replacing many things in a Powerbook will most likely void your warranty.

The iBooks I have used are loud but not much louder than my T41p. However, they are awefully slow even the newest PBs are smoked over and over by my T41p. The battery life on the Apples really does stink, for the first bit the batt may last 3 hours, but after about 3 months it starts to drop till eventually you got about 30 minutes of actual usage time before you need to plug up. My T41p with the 9 cell gets around 5-6 hours easily.

Also I don't like Apple's built in wireless options as they are inferior to IBM's options. Of the iBooks and Powerbooks I have seen the display is fuzzy and unevenly lit. Powerbook displays are better than iBooks but they are still a bit annoying. But once again if you work with video or photos a lot then the Apple displays reproduce colors more accurately and are generally more defined in the color relm.

But the Apple is a nice product and I am not saying that it isn't a good option if that is whay you really want or need for what you do. Personally, I went with and IBM out of instinct and because I need a PC based laptop. IBM simply makes the best all around laptops you can buy. Apple makes a great alternative to the PC world.

But remember, most of all, Apple notebooks DON'T have trackpoints!!!

Regards,
Lmax

[Leeper]

You have to look at this a bit differently than you would if your were comparing two different Intel platforms. And don't try to compare an iBook to a true Powerbook they are different animals targeted to different needs.

I carry both a T41p and a 15" 1.25 PB and use them both for different reasons. They both are very well built machines and are at the top of their class as far as price/performance.

The IBM I use probably 75% of my time because of the tools that are installed on it and their need for the Windows OS (Office 2k3, AD admin tools, network diag stuff). The rest of the time is spent on my Apple because the tools I use (most of the iLife set and the Adobe design suite)need the Mac OS to run.

Both machines perform their duties very well and I would not give up either of them. If I had to choose only one it would depend on what tools I wanted to primarily run on it. There is always a way to work cross platform but you have to give up some of the feature when you do.

[cynic]

Lmax wrote
Also if you do a lot of audio editing and audio work the Apple may be for you as it handles these operations better than PCs for the most part.

I have to strongly disagree here. I work in a music studio and traditionally, Macs have been the computer of choice. They pretty much took over this market in the mid-90s when ProTools ran better on Macs.

Today, that is much different. ProTools runs much better on PCs today (in fact, a P-M 1.6 beat the Dual 2.0G5 in tests run by the ProTools user group for tracks, effects, and latency--much to the dismay of everyone in audio who bought a Dual 2.0 G5 for that work) It's a hot topic on the DUC forums (see the Digidesign website and look at the forums) Other than that, there are more VSTs on PCs, Steinberg products are better coded for PCs (stability, efficiency), more options for editors, the only professional CD mastering tools are PC only, the only professional DVD production tools are PC only (namely Scenarist from Sonic Foundry-- though I'm sure very few people outside of Hollywood use it as it runs into the 100K region so they are usually owned by studios)

THe only reason to get a Mac today for audio is if you run Logic (which Apple bought and then killed the PC branch so that it would force people to by Macs because they realized they were losing the market segment fast.) BTW, audio and DVD encoding are about 3 times faster on a PC because almost all codecs are optimized for SSE2 instruction sets whereas the SIMD on the PPC (Alti-Vec or the Velocity Engine depending on branding) doesn't have an instruction set to take advatage of for encoding. It's quite a difference... something that will take 15 minutes on one of our Dual G5s (4GB RAM) will take about 2 minutes on my laptop (P-M 1.6, 1GB RAM)

As for 3-D work, Macs maybe had a year of being even in contention for it. SGI's were the preferred machine and then everyone started porting to PCs. When SoftImage (which was owned by IBM--it's now owned by Avid) went PC only, that put a nail in the coffin. Alias (which was owned by SGI before being bought by AutoDesk) offers Mac and PC offerings, but all the highest features (like fur rendering additions) are PC only. Neither company intends to change on these positions. Even Pixar, majority share owned by Steve Jobs of Apple, just ported some of their tools to OS X-- however their render farm is still PCs with Linux and they still use Alias and Maya for modeling which both run better on PCs.

Speaking of AutoDesk, another one of their products and the leader in CAD, AutoCAD is PC only. AutoCAD finally released a viewer to see AutoCAD files on Macs, but that's all you can do. This is big for the design world because AutoCAD and AutoCAD's file types are considered the standard.

And finally there is Adobe... they have a love/hate relationship with Apple. Sometimes they claim they are faster on Apple, sometimes faster on PCs. However, it's prety clear with the exception of a few plugins, that in the desktop world, Adobe is faster on a PC (they just need to protect their ties to their user base on the Mac side.) On a laptop, there is no comparison between a G4 chip and a P-M chip in sheer horsepower so even if the plugin isn't optimized for the x86 platform, by horsepower alone it still is rendered faster than the G4 can.

There is a big myth that was more or less created by Apple in the 80s to secure the creative market and that was colour accuracy was better on a Mac (especially Panatone matching) That was true pre Windows 2000 or so and especially true for CRTs, but that has been false for a long time.

The only market that Macs still dominates easily is publishing. This may change in the next few years for three reasons... Quark was late to port Quark over to OS X so publishing houses started to look elsewhere, InDesign cropped up from Adobe and runs on both platforms and can read cross-platform files better than Quark could, Adobe killed FrameMaker for Macs (which is especially funny since Apple does all its internal long-form documents and manuals on FrameMaker) and suggested anyone still wishing to run it to use PCs. Quark also suggested at one point (I think about 5 years back) that everyone switch from Macs to PCs and they were going to kill of devlopment on Macs. There were a lot of concern that Quark would never be ported to OS X, but eventually Quark caved after they realized who their user base was/is.

All in all, the creative market being dominated by Apple is a myth today; it's just that myth has quite a strangle-hold on the general public and Apple reinforces the idea they are the "design and creative" company through their admittedly stylish products and Ad campaigns. It is just that sometimes you need a reality check of functionality over form which is where Apple looses out.

BTW, sorry for the long diatribe but I face kids coming out of sound/recording-engineering school that think Apples are a religion without examining what performs better. They just ride on the assumption that a Mac will work faster and is more stable and then they hit kernel panic after kernel panic, can't get drivers for the best audio hardware, and have to wait forever to get files opened and at no time do they look over to see what functions better and will get your work done. Luckily, the non-newbies who've been in the profession for a while are a little tired of Apple's behaviour in the pro-audio market and are willing to give other things a try-- almost always it proves to be a great eye-opener.

[Leeper]

I don't want to get into a religious debate on this thread but the Mac still has some major advantages while running the Adobe design suite vs. the PC versions of the app (Premier aside). There are still color functions that can only be done on the Apple version and font issues are still going to be a pain on the Windows side as MSFT does not have the same level of font support in 2k or XP that the Mac has under OS X.

On the video side it really depends on what tool you are familiar with or need. Final Cut Pro will handle just about everything Premier/Avid does for a lot less money.

Both of these points are probably mute for 80% of the population that would use either platform so my vote is still pick the platform that you feel most comfortable, just like you would your shoes.

[cynic]

There are still color functions that can only be done on the Apple version and font issues are still going to be a pain on the Windows side as MSFT does not have the same level of font support in 2k or XP that the Mac has under OS X.

I'm curious about what colour functions you are referring to? I understand that WinXP has a slightly poorer screen rendering engine for fonts than OS X (especially at sub-pixel anti-aliasing) but for fonts themselves, both systems support the same font packages: True Type, Open Font, Type 1, etc.

On the video side it really depends on what tool you are familiar with or need. Final Cut Pro will handle just about everything Premier/Avid does for a lot less money.

This is true. (though I would emphasize "just about everything" because there are things you can do with Avid hardware that still can't be measured up on FCP-- though you're talking seriously large budgets; also Avid runs on Macs, so it is cross platform)

...pick the platform that you feel most comfortable, just like you would your shoes.

Agreed because you end up using laptops all the time and you do have to feel comfortable. Like my shoes, I rarely allow anyone to use my laptop because it is a bit too "personal." I just think the decision should be based on do you like OS X or WinXP better and can you run all the applications you need on the platform you choose and not based on old marketing slogans or past traditions for market-segments.

[Lmax]

I have to strongly disagree here. I work in a music studio and traditionally, Macs have been the computer of choice. They pretty much took over this market in the mid-90s when ProTools ran better on Macs.

Cynic, this is my fault as I made a HUGE typo. I definately meant to say that PCs are better at audio work than Apples. I do alot of mastering on my Gateway desktop, and much of my work is done using ProTools and I would agree it runs MUCH better on PCs. The audio hardware options are also generally better on PCs, I have a special tube amp in my desktop.

Using a Mac for audio work was the better choice back in the 90s but I certainly agree that the PC beats the Mac in that regard today, I being the serious audiophile I am feel stupid for making the typo, sorry.

Max

[Chun-Yu]

I understand that WinXP has a slightly poorer screen rendering engine for fonts than OS X (especially at sub-pixel anti-aliasing) but for fonts themselves, both systems support the same font packages: True Type, Open Font, Type 1, etc.

I'm going to have to disagree here, as ClearType is clearly (hahaha) superior to OS X's "micro-pixel positioning" in my opinion. OS X may be able to accelerate it using the graphics card (not sure, but I bet Quartz/Quartz Extreme does), whereas XP uses software rendering, but when it comes to visual quality, XP wins hands down.

[cynic]

As much as I'm a proponent for Win XP on a thinkpad, I have to give the advantage to OS X for on screen rendering of fonts at sub-pixel antialiasing. It has barely anything to do with speed or clear type, just the actual screen renders are better on OS X.

However, none of this effects printing. Print quality is not dependent on screen rendering and both systems conform to standards that end up with same-quality printing.

[Chun-Yu]

I guess it really comes down to personal preference - I seriously can't stand OS X's sub-pixel anti-aliasing, although I know some people who like it. Either way, Linux's xft easily has the crappiest sub-pixel anti-aliasing - I think nearly everybody would prefer XP/OS X's to that.

[taphil]

I can't stand OSX's anti-aliasing either. It looks plain awful to me.

Cleartype looks good with any font size and with any screen resolution. On the Mac, 12pt font at maybe 75% zoom in Word looks like crap - the characters are uneven and way too thick. Perhaps that's why they run their screens at such low resolution? And to compensate for the poor anti-aliasing, OSX has the option/pref to turn it off for font sizes smaller than what you choose because it looks so bad and is unreadable when enabled with a font smaller than that.

[Lmax]

I'm going to have to disagree here, as ClearType is clearly (hahaha) superior to OS X's "micro-pixel positioning" in my opinion. OS X may be able to accelerate it using the graphics card (not sure, but I bet Quartz/Quartz Extreme does), whereas XP uses software rendering, but when it comes to visual quality, XP wins hands down.

I completely agree.

Max