K, I admit it. I was beguiled by the blueberry and taken over by the tangerine. When Apple started bombarding billboards with color photos of its new iBook laptop computer, I wanted one. It didn't matter that I had given up on Macintosh more than two years ago. The iBook looked cool.
The iBook is a masterpiece of industrial design and engineering. Built primarily for students, the iBook is sure to be popular among the affluent high school and college set. But it's important to realize the iBook also is hobbled by Apple's MacOS operating system. Although Apple has made great strides in bringing the Mac back from the abyss, Macintosh users are still second-class citizens in many corners of the Internet.
The iBook felt different the moment I took it out of its carton. Easy to hold, its case is covered mostly with a thick, rubberized shell. Apple claims this shell, four times thicker than the plastic of most laptops, makes the iBook easier to hold and reduces the damage that a sudden impact might cause.
The iBook is the first laptop designed with a backpack in mind. Sharp edges have been rounded. Missing are buttons, sliders, little doors or plug-in devices that can break off or get lost easily. Also missing is a latch for the lid, which could get jammed in a crowded backpack. The iBook also comes with a compact charger that includes a spindle for winding up the fragile power cord.
The basic iBook costs $1,599 and comes with 32 megabytes of RAM, a 3.2 gigabyte hard disk, a 300 Mhz PowerPC G3 processor, and a 800 x 600 TFT display. It has a built-in CD-ROM drive, one speaker, a stereo headphone jack, a universal serial bus interface, a 56K modem, and a 10/100 Ethernet port. There is a single SO-DIMM slot for expanding memory (up to 128MB can be added) and an internal slot for Apple's AirPort wireless networking card (an AirPort antenna is already built into the computer's case). As with the desktop-size iMac, there is no floppy disk drive, although you can buy an external floppy and connect it using the USB interface.
The iBook has lots of nice little touches. When you plug in the battery charger, the charging plug glows yellow-green, to show you have a solid connection. Another LED on the computer pulsates when the iBook is in ''sleep'' mode, to let you know your battery is being drained. And speaking of sleeping, Apple's implementation of ''sleeping'' and ''suspend/resume'' is flawless. That's a welcome change from many Windows-based PCs, which occasionally crash instead of waking up. The iBook also has an improved touch-pad.
Where the iBook falls down are its size, weight, battery life, and operating system. It is 13.5 inches long, 11.6 inches wide, and nearly 2 inches high, and weighs 6.6 pounds - larger and heavier than any textbook I carried as a student. This size lets Apple equip the iBook with a full-size keyboard, but the weight increases the chance it will be slammed around when a heavy backpack is dropped on the kitchen floor at the end of the day.
Battery life is another subject of contention. Apple says the iBook's lithium ion battery has enough juice for 6 hours of operation. But when you turn it on, the built-in battery gauge reports just three hours and 30 minutes of power is available. In my testing, the battery delivered between three and four hours of life with typical use. Replacing the battery is hard, too, and charging takes two hours when the computer is off - and four hours when the system is running. Fortunately, many universities have begun installing outlets in their classrooms.
Sadly, the iBook's biggest liability is Apple's Macintosh operating system. To be fair, MacOS 8.6 is much more reliable than previous incarnations; not once did the iBook crash while I was using it. This computer also goes to great pains to be Internet-ready.
But once I got out on the Internet, I ran into problems. Some Web sites looked bad, and others wouldn't work at all, because their designers had not tested them with Macs. Apple doesn't equip MacOS with a Telnet or FTP client, making it difficult to use some services. I also ran across many applications, screen savers, and demo programs that were designed for Windows and wouldn't work on the iBook. Using the iBook reminded me what it's like to be a computational minority.
I also was disappointed with the iBook's Web browsing speed. Despite its fast processor, neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer ran as quickly on the iBook over my cable modem as the Web browser on my Pentium III desktop computer.
My last quibble is the iBook's price. A friend asked if he should buy an iBook for his 13-year-old daughter. While it's a great piece of equipment, I have doubts about giving a child that age anything that costs $1,500, then watching it being thrown into a backpack and taken to school. A better direction, I think, was Apple's now-abandoned eMate computer. It could run eight hours on a battery charge, had a nearly indestructible case, and cost less than $600. I wish Apple was building lightweight, long-running, and low-cost computers for the educational market, rather than high-priced designer laptops.
Technology columnist Simson Garfinkel can be reached at http://chat.simson.net/
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