Could it be any bigger?

Author's Rating:

Pros: elegant design. Its an Apple! Everything!

Cons: DIfficulty setting up the airport extreme with current wireless network. Cost of windows comparable software

The Bottom Line: 
If you dont own an apple, this would be great to have as your first. But be ready for some getting used to, especially cost of windows comparable software.

Author's Review
So I finally received my Apple powerbook. ALthough the waiting was difficult, it was well worth it. THe 17" screen is so beautiful and bright! I have never seen a screen as great.

Now lets see, this being my first apple it took a bit of getting used to with the menus and what not. I do have a windows xp laptop as well that I just upgraded. And honestly, the whole myth about pentiums being twice as fast as the apple machines is definitely just that. A myth.

My windows laptop is a P4 2.5 ghz with 512MB RAM and it was still slower than the powerbook, although it was only minute, but still it was slower. Plus my windows laptop is almost twice as thick!

Anyhow, back to the powerbook. I really like the widescreen aspect of the laptop. I played a dvd and it was pretty great to be able to watch the movie without having the black bar across the top and bottom of the movie. One moot point about watching the dvd was that the speakers didnt do it justice. I guess me thinking it was Apple, they would put in great speakers into thelaptop, but it was comparable to my windows. Putting in ear buds is a definite.

Now about the power of this laptop. It is definitely a work horse. I mean 60GB of storage with a super drive. Its endless. I couldnt beleive it came with bluetooth and airport extreme built in. Although it took some time to set up the airport extreme with my current wireless network, once I got it up and running, it was a blast. Along with the whole ILife suite and the safari browser, I can't beleive I didnt go Apple earlier, but then again, they didnt have this bad boy out yet.

I know I am going round-a-bout with the whole review, but I am writing on it right now and its so incredible.

OSX does seem to be more stable, but I havent put it through all of its paces. The dock bar takes some getting used to if you are unfamiliar with the Apple OS.

The new firewire 800 is definitely fast. I have a 80 GB western digital external harddrive and it would take me 10-20 minutes to transfer my usual set of movies, but it now only takes a bit more than half the time. i was hoping for less than half, but it all depends on the speed of the harddrive.

Cool keyboard! I dont know about you guys, but i like working in the dark, and when I do, there are times when I have to tilt my screen towards the keys to see where I am typing, but now, I dont have to. the keys glow this great blue hue. its very mesmerizing, when i first tried it out, i just kept dimming my lights to watch it work. the blue is very soothing as well, another sign that Apple takes aesthetics seriously.

Another cool feature is the slim design. that in itself should make it worth buying. But a problem is that it does heat up awfully quickly. Perhaps in their next generation powerbooks they will use the water cooled pipes that I read about at www.wired.com. But thats years out. And going by Apples standards, my computer should still be pretty new even after a year, unlike Windows machines.

So the heat does pose a problem if you are truly a laptop user, but I found that because of the screen size, you can lay it on the desk, grab your wireless optical mouse (not included) and go nuts.

All in all, this laptop was worth the wait, granted I was very peeved that it took almost a month and half to get it, although i am told the wait is longer is some areas, it was worth it.

From their Ipod to this. I am definitely going Apple from here on out.

Now I just have to figure out how to get the money to convert everything to Apple.