Apple PowerBook G4 15.2 in. (M9422LLABUNDLE) Mac Notebook

My trusty old IBM Thinkpad finally bit the dust and I was in the market for another notebook. I researched different brands and models, and do admit Apple have probably one of the slickest ad campaigns around. Touting the performance and interoperability of the new OS-X to the pc platform; the 'real' comparison of hardware performance, i finally went ahead and bought one from Apple directly.

The spec of the unit is as follows: G4/1.5 with 128mb vram, 2 gb Ram, 80gb 5400 rpm hdd, super drive, and apple care. With OS 10.4 Tiger, Office 2004 Pro, and Filemaker Pro 7, I feel sufficiently armed to tackle my 'switch' to the apple religion at the cost of over $5k. I figured that i will use it for 3 years, so it costs me a bit more than 1500 a year, and for something so well designed i will enjoy it immensely.

Apple delivered as promised as far as the ease of use portion of interface. However, the casing does not hold up well at all, it is immediately scratched and the aluminum finish is getty tatty quickly. The keyboard pitch is fine, but overall it does not have a solid feel after a month of use. The superdrive now makes noises that i am just not very confident about. But, the screen is brilliant, color is fantanstic, and it is a very slick unit indeed.

The switch over part however is a case of over-promise/under-deliver on Apple's part though. My network administrator has no problem using the NFS setup for files on the network for me to access, the wireless works well, but the email program used in the Mac version of office is not a straight port from the PC based outlook. Infact, they need to have the network use IMAP services instead of the more common POP3 services for me to port over my emails. Good thing I run the company and have the latitude to tell my administrator to incur additional storage expense on the mail server to fulfil my very personal needs; but i doubt a larger organization would be so accomodating.

Only other gripe on the software side is that MS Access does not natively port over to Mac Office, as there is no solution provided in the Mac side, to enable it, it requires a 2 way port through Filemaker, now, the good intentions of the Apple guy at the Apple store is well appreciated, but the reality is that the process is cumbersome and ineffective. Now, most business offices now rely heavily on MS applications, all of it. I am not a "creative professional' so i can not comment on the artistic accomodations that the Mac provides, but the claims of the switch over ease is really false advertising. I spent over 5 grand, i want to use it, I wont buy it just to surf the web and check my email.

My personal comparison of the hardware components is very simple. I work with spreadsheets all day long, big ones, the ones that is over 50 megs per file, that taxes the ram, the hdd, and video as everytime the workbook recalculates, everything start to whirr away to appease to my numeric needs. In this respect the mac is definitely a lot worse than the other computer i use, a lowly p-4/2.0 with only 512 mg of ram and 64 meg vram. So, the claim of 'super-computing' throughput for me did not really work out in Apples favor at all.

Also, it gets really really HOT! not in a good way. It also crashed a lot, especially when i am remounting the NFS folders.

I now have another thinkpad on order, I will keep this mac in the office to look pretty, to surf the web, to view movies, and when i file my quarterly taxes in march, i will write it off and give it to my wife, who told me: 'why dont you look at an apple.'