Apple’s PowerBook G4

Apple surely deserves laurels for giving computers a completely new look. First it was the iMac, then the iBook, and then the G4 Cube. Their latest offering–the PowerBook Titanium G4–is another feather in their cap. It’s an ultra-thin and lightweight notebook made of pure titanium, which gives it a lot of punch.

The unit that we reviewed has a 400 MHz PowerPC G4 processor with 1 MB L2 cache running at 200 MHz. The processor is supported by 128 MB RAM (upgradeable to 1 GB) and an ATI Rage Mobility 128 graphics subsystem with 8 MB VRAM. It has a 10 GB HDD (30 GB optional). 

The PowerBook is a mere 1” thick and weighs 5.3 pounds. It is in part made of

titanium, apparently for reasons of weight and strength. Despite being so thin and lightweight, it has a screen size that would put many notebooks to shame. At 15.2” with a wide-format screen, it has a lot of room on its GUI desktop. The screen gives you a maximum resolution of 1152x768. The wide screen allows you to open multiple application windows simultaneously, giving designers plenty of space for laying-out their work. Another significant feature is its large palm-rest space. This amounts to lesser strain on the wrists. 

The PowerBook G4 comes with a slot-loading DVD drive on the front and all the ports you will ever need at the back. It has an in-built 56 K modem and a 10/100 LAN interface. Also included are a FireWire and 2 USB ports, one S-video and a VGA output for display, and an IR port. It also has a standard PC card slot. You can also opt for an Airport card. The microphone and stereo speakers are built-in with a conveniently located headphone socket, too. 

The PowerBook comes with an Apple Hardware Test CD and a CD with the iMovie software for moviemakers. It also comes with a software install CD that installs OS 9.1 and some other software like Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.05, ATM 4.6, Palm Desktop software and a fax utility.

To get an idea of its performance, we ran MacBench 5.0 processor tests on it. The tests gave us a score of 1259 units for the CPU test as against a score of 1000 for a G3 300 machine. For the floating-point test, the score was 1509 (again, as against a score of 1000 for a G3 300 processor). The higher scores, of course, indicate better performance. To really understand what these numbers mean, we did some real-life tests. For this, we installed a fresh copy of Mac OS X, so that stray applications wouldn’t affect our results. Then we tried opening multiple applications. We started playing an MP3 file using QuickTime, and immediately opened up TextEdit, a terminal, and a video. The music continued to play smoothly without any breaks. 

The PowerBook’s batteries have a rated backup time of 5 hours. The notebook tends to get a little hot on the underside after continuous usage, perhaps due to the crunching power of the G4.

It is priced at Rs 1,82,610, which is justified considering the performance and features on offer. The PowerBook 500 version (with a G4 500 MHz processor) is also available at Rs 2,48,800. 

Ashish Sharma at PCQ Labs