Insanely Great Mac - The iBook 466 v. Pismo 400 Conundrum

Gay Paree or Pismo Beach?
The iBook 466 v. Pismo 400 Conundrum
by Remy Davison

With the release of the new iBooks in Paris, there's been an awful lot of discussion on the 'net about whether Apple has overdone the speed bump. Everybody on the Mac web has been saying how the iBook 466 blows the Pismo 400 into the weeds. And why buy the 400 for more moola when all that dough gets you is a bigger screen? And how does it compare with the PC laptop? If only it were that simple. Of course, I don't need to revisit Wintel Portable Land in this column. Been there, jeered at that. Actually, I've just been down at the local computer megamart to sneer at the latest models this week. Like, who hit the Vaio over the head with the Ugly Stick (and you know what Sony can do with its Memory Stick, don't you?). So here I am sniffing disconcertingly in an annoyingly-superior fashion when someone even looks like road-testing a PC laptop. 'I think we can do a bit better than that, sir/ma'am'. No, I don't work in a store. I just kill time in them crashing Windows 98/ME/2000 machines. Doesn't take a great deal of effort, I must admit. On an average day, I can lock up about 42 PC notebooks in around 5 minutes now I've had a little practice, which more than the number of states Al Gore's going to win. Gore's not a Mac user anymore anyway, so vote for Nader's policy of recycling those Lisas locked up in landfill somewhere, along with any 'wicked-fast' PowerBook 5300 CPUs that're lying around. Okay, okay. So it's no biggie blue-screening wintels. I'd crash more, but of course, by now, the overly-protective, over-large and megapodded (look it up) Store Manager has asked me to vacate the premises and I'm in no mood to argue (he being much bigger than me in all areas but one. Brain, in case you were wondering). So I hop in my car, head down the street and pop into my local AppleCentre to gaze fondly upon the Pismo and the newly-resprayed iBooks. Mood Indigo. Granite Graphite. Cool Key Lime. Ahh. Nirvana (the state of mind, stupid, not that band Kurt whateverhisnamewas used to front).

But I digress.

Pismo v. iBook: Fact v. Fiction

Fact: The iBook SE/466 is not faster than the Pismo 400.
Fact: Neither is the iBook 366. Do the math.
Fact: 256K of on-chip cache cannot hold as many frequently-called instructions as 1MB can.
Fact: Pismo's system bus runs at 100MHz; the iBook's at 66MHz.
Fact: Pismo's memory bus runs at 100MHz and not the iBook's 66MHz.
Fact: You'll need a FireWire hub of some kind if you want to attach more than one FireWire device.
Fact: You'll need a USB hub for more than one USB peripheral.
Fact: The iBook only does composite video out. No Studio Displays need apply.
Fact: There's still no PC card slot on the iBook.
Fact: There's still no standard sound-in port; only a USB solution will work on the iBook.
Fact: You can't IrDA to your printer or mobile phone with the iBook.
Fact: 800x600 resolution means your screen real estate becomes very restricted very quickly.
Fact: Tried stuffing an extra hard drive into an iBook?
Fact: Tried unstuffing that Zip drive you stuffed into the iBook's...er...that is an expansion bay, isn't it? Oh. Oh. Oh well.
Fact: There were 12 apostles, not 10.
Fact: The PowerBook comes in any color you like, so long as it's black.
Fact: The Paris iBooks are trememdous value for money. Period.

The Portable Computing Paradigm

What's interesting about the iBook is that it's brought so many people out of the closet who were never going to buy a PowerBook. Extend the features. Lower the price. And what've you got? People who're suddenly very interested in the iBook. Consumers asking, 'What do I need a desktop for anyway? Why should I buy an iMac and stay cooped up in the same room?' Let's face it: Airport's not very signifcant if you're surfing wirelessly five feet from your Airport Base Station. The Paris iBooks are effectively creating a new market among people who might never have considered anything other than a desktop Mac before. Now that's significant: it means we're finally moving beyond the desktop paradigm to truly portable and wireless computing (and the G4 Cube's smaller-than-a-Mac-Classic form factor attests to this as well). And Apple fired the first shot by bringing its Airport solution to the mass market first.

What the new iBook also does is truly bring desktop video to the consumer portable. Previously, if you wanted to plug your DV camera into a Mac, it had to be a FireWire iMac at least. Now the iBook is much closer to the iMac's feature set, although it still lacks VGA out. That 256K on-chip cache's a problem too: try running VirtualPC or SoftWindows on it and you'll find it markedly slower than the Pismo 400.

Apple's margins on the iBook are also likely to be much higher than on the iMac. I doubt whether there's much more than $US100 on the lower-end iMacs. Essentially, a lot of the current iBook's design and tooling bills have been paid for by the original iBook. Now Apple can lower the price on the entry-level iBook 366 and pick up an awful lot of cream on the SE. What's more, the SE will get consumers into the AppleStore where they might buy something else. Yes, it's a Dell strategy, but who can blame them? Unlike Dell at least, Apple doesn't short-change you on features by leaving 10/100 ethernet and a decent screen somewhere in the back shed as 'optional extras'.

Despite the iBook's 16-bit audio, it still has that lousy mixed-stereo speaker. However, one area where Apple really has it over the PC competition is that ATI RAGE 128 video card: 8MB of VRAM is still a comparative rarity in the PC world; you need to buy a high-end (Pismo competitor) notebook to get 8MB on board - and it probably won't be a RAGE 128 either. With every iBook, it's standard.

Megahertz or Megabucks?

So. What do you get with a Pismo 400 for your extra $500 or so? A bigger, better screen; a faster 'Book; an extra FireWire port so you can run both your FireWire DV camera and hard drive simultaneously; a hard drive that takes 10 minutes instead of three hours to replace; much greater RAM capacity (up to 1GB!); two hot-swappable expansion bays, permitting up to 10-hour battery life, the addition of additional storage devices. What else? Access to CardBus video-capture cards like the Capsure for instance. Or CardBus cards like Adaptec's to accommodate fast, wide SCSI devices.

However, access to fast (expensive) SCSI devices is becoming less mandatory these days. The new iBooks up the ante to a 10GB hard drive - matched by the revised PowerBook 400 - which is an enormous amount of space, unless you're editing digital video. I suspect that few iBook owners will fill that hard drive space. Which is just as well, as the iBook's hard drive is a pig to take out. On the other hand, Pismo's drive is designed for easy replacement, and can be done in about seven minutes by any reasonably PowerBook-savvy Mac user. Wtih the iBook, however, you stand a very good chance of stuffing it up.

What else you get on a Pismo 400? Dual monitor support, that's what, and it's not lousy iMac-style mirroring, which's all the iBook's AV port gives you; it's bona fide virtual desktopping. USB and FireWire ports are also independent of one another, so you run less risk of overloading an individual port. And let's not forget the iBook has no writable, removable storage. None. Unless you back up or upload everything to the 'net, you're going to have to invest in some external USB device. Now, in fairness, Pismo has no removable storage solution either. But at least you can buy an internal one. Zip 100, 250, CDRW, SuperDisk, floppy, hard drive, magneto-optical (mainly in Japan). You name it, it's available for the PowerBook.

With the iBook, I'm betting you're going to be lugging around one of those miserable little USB devices, aren't you? Working on something critical? (term assignment, maybe?). Forget your USB cable? Crash. Burn. You're in trouble. With a Pismo, just save a backup to that internal Zip drive or whatever. All I can say is be thankful Apple put FireWire on the mobo of the new iBook. Those USB CDRWs are seriously nasty. They're even nastier than IDE ones. Before I get Insanely-Great Mac's servers flooded with outraged responses, take a walk down the street to Usenet's comp.sys.mac.hardware.storage. You see more complaints about USB burners and their lousy throughput than anything else. Then there were some (name brand models we won't mention here because they'll sue me) models which didn't support Disc at Once and so on. The new iBooks at least give you access to the vastly superior FireWire burners which at least match, if not exceed, the standards of SCSI burners.

Then there's the microphone/line-level audio input issue. Yes, in the old days, no one ever used their PlainTalk mike on their LCII/Pergola 400. So Apple stopped bothering. But high-quality, digital audio is a much bigger ball game these days. The PowerBook makes it easy to input sound, right out of the box. Yes, there's a USB solution or two for the iBook, but one I tried wouldn't work with a hub, so you can wind up with a mike or line-level input hogging your USB port. Ah. How do you back up your audio then? Answer: you can't unless you unplug that USB input and plug your external storage device in there again.

Then there's the AV port. OK. It's a step in the right direction. But my main beef about the iBook is its refusal to output to an X/S/VGA monitor. All right. If you manage Macs in a college or K12 establishment, I can kind of accept that you don't need a room full of monitors as well, and that 12.1" of screen real estate with 800x600 resolution is more than sufficient. But it really does distinguish the PowerBook from the iBook. As an Apple Australia executive (they're the guys who recently nominated Apple as the best place to work in Oz. Reason? They don't actually do that much work) commented at the iBook's '99 launch, 'we don't sell many PowerBooks into schools.' They do now. iBooks, that is. Plus a lot of Airports. But for the consumer/small-business person who wants to work at a desk some or a lot of the time, the absence of VGA-out is a real downer. And it pushes them back in a desktop direction (read: iMac) for sure.

Hands On (hold on tight now...)

Fortunately for me (and you), my Apple dealer's an obliging chap. We have that Pismo 400 and iBook SE/466 sitting next to each other, remember? Now, since my last article was about Pro audio on the PowerBook, we decide loading a copy of Peak on both isn't a bad idea. Both 'Books have 128MB of RAM and OS 9.04. Standard complement of extensions. Peak's memory is adjusted to 34MB with VM off. We know that MacBench 5.0 doesn't work with the PPC 750cx CPU on the FireWire iBooks, so real-world applications are the only way to go.

Peak launches rapidly on both 'Books - around 2 seconds for each (to give you a basis for comparison, it launches in 3 seconds flat on the Wallstreet 300 and Lombard 333. Now for the torture test. Dump 10MB of raw MP3 audio via QuickTime into Peak. Using 'change pitch' and 'fine tune' (two CPU and disk-intensive tasks), guess who wins? No prizes: Pismo takes 1.24 minutes, versus the iBook's 1.47. We try the search-and-replace test on a 15,000 word document in Word 98, with 200 replacements, but that takes less than a second on a Wallstreet or Lombard, so it's a pointless test on these two superfast 'Books. Next, import a 92MB scanned colour file at 600dpi into Photoshop 5. No stopwatch this time (got bored, went outside to...er...do whatever it was George W. Bush used to do 25 years ago. Ask him.), but the Pismo finished about a minute or so ahead. OK. Not exactly rocket science. But eminently reproduceable conditions in your office, classroom or college dorm, right? On a subjective level, the hard drive accesses and graphics seem pretty much the same: not surprising, considering they're both running the same graphics chipset and Ultra ATA hard drives. Finder operations are fairly much on a par. What I do notice is that if I have, say, Photoshop, Peak and Word open at the same time (we're running low on RAM by this stage), the Pismo can resume operations in, say, Photoshop or Peak, faster than the iBook SE. When we're multitasking, the iBook can slow down to a crawl; the slowdown is noticeable on the Pismo as well, but it's not as extreme. Of course, this is a multitasking limitation of OS 9 as well; OS X will iron out a lot of these problems.

The conclusion? The Pismo's superior performance has to be put down to the 1MB cache and the 100MHz memory bus. Bear in mind too that the Pismo gets info to the ATI graphics card faster than the iBook can push it through. It might be nanoseconds, but it all adds up. So. As usual, your PC-toting friends were wrong. Megahertz does matter, yes. But not as much as a fast bus and a huge cache. Ever wondered by an intel Celery at whateverhertz is always slower than a PIII 100 or so MHz slower in clock speed? Explain it to them that way, and suddenly they begin to comprehend why they pay more for a PIII than some Celery. It's essentially the same equation in the Pismo:iBook face-off.

What price for a good 'Book?

Now. Don't think I'm blowing off the iBook. I'm not. The SE in particular is the best-value consumer portable on the market today. No contest. No PC laptop offers its array of out-of-the-box features and plug-and-play dependability. Plus, the iMac's software suite is replicated with the iBook, which of course includes the outstanding iMovie 2.0. The old iBook was highly competitive; the new iBooks hit the ball out of the park. Apart from hard drive, processor and DVD, the 366MHz iBooks - especially with a price drop to $1,499 - lack nothing (much) and are unbelieveable value. Like the Pismo 400, the iBook 366 shares its faster sibling's expansive feature set (DVD-ROM aside). And, like the Pismo 400 again, it's very tempting to pronounce the iBook 366 the value leader which gives most bang for buck. On a $1,499 notebook, the level of standard complement of networking equipment, comprising Airport, FireWire, 100baseT ethernet and 56K modem, is just phenomenal. If you can find a PC notebook that offers those features at $1,499, let your MIS know - if they're interested in dealing in stolen goods, that is. Fact is, a PC notebook with this feature set just doesn't exist at that price. That's not even taking into account the 8MB of VRAM and the six-hour battery. With Office 2001 providing a temporary feature head start on the Windows Office version, that's even more reason for the new iBooks to kick some serious Wintel butt. If Wall Street (the NYSE, not the beloved PowerBook G3 of the same name) can't recognise that, they need a Pismo beach vacation themselves.

The point is, the 'i' in iBook stands for Me. Myself. I. A personal computer that's designed to fulfil a variety of common tasks (mail, net, word processing, database). On the other hand, the 'Power' in PowerBook suggests a replacement for a desktop Power Mac. But you've got a real portable computing conundrum these days. Assuming you've decided upon replacing - or at least supplementing - your desktop, you have at least three viable options: first, buy an iBook or SE for $1,499-$1,799. Second, you can have a discounted Pismo 400 for anywhere from $1,999 (education discount) to whatever you option in with it (say, $2,500). If you go for the old 6GB model (pre-September), you'll save a bit. Finally, PowerLogix have begun shipping their Wallstreet upgrades, so if you have any variant of the Wallstreet series, you can slot in a daughtercard with 1MB of L2 cache and a G3 processor of up to 500MHz. While I don't believe PowerLogix's published MacBench figures for one second, you still get 466 or 500MHz of G3 with 1MB of cache. For $599 or $699. So. For the price of a decent PB1400/166 or maybe a dog-eared 3400, you get a Pismo-powered 'Book. Not bad. Better than a new iBook? Probably. Less than half the price and you get to keep SCSI, serial and LocalTalk. And your RAM and any batteries or expansion bay devices. Better than a Pismo? Maybe. The low-end Wallstreets (233/12.1" ones for example) suffer in the graphics department, as opposed to the iBook and Pismo. The 13.3/14.1" models are better, but still less than optimum for really fast 2/3D acceleration. You still need to add FireWire, USB, 100bT and a more expensive Airport-type card to bring it up to Pismo spec though. Or even iBook spec. Not particularly cheap.

On the other hand, if you're a Wallstreet owner, as opposed to an Apple shareholder, you probably can't go past the PowerLogix upgrade. For around a third the price of an iBook SE, you get a much faster 'Book which will run OS X much more happily than the earlier G3s. Personally, I think this upgrade makes most sense for the Wallstreet 13.3/14.1" model owners: that screen is the main reason to stay with your Wallstreet (or Lombard, when the upgrades for that come). You can upgrade the iBook in all sorts of ways - RAM, hard drive, peripherals - but not the display. Non. Nein. Nyet. Never. However, you can now bridge to SCSI devices using a FireWire<->SCSI adapter, so to some extent that removes the advantage older PowerBooks had over the original iBook. Speaking of which, the original iBooks in my corner of the hemisphere are depreciating at an alarming rate (not quite iMac 233 levels, but still). I know all the math about portables depreciating at $50 per day or whatever it is, but you can't get people to bid more than the Australian equivalent of $US999 on ebay Oz for an original spec iBook (and auctions here are where people know what something's worth). Compare that with the $US1,250-$US1,700 Wallstreet 266/300s and Lombard 333s are still fetching (depending on spec), and you'll see my point. People want PowerBooks. It's seen as a 'serious' Pro portable, whereas the iBook is not. Bear that in mind when you trade in your iBook: the next one or two iBooks will have come along and, suddenly, your pride and joy's not looking so rosy anymore (more like Tangerine). Ah well. Better sell at a bargain-basement price. Wish I'd bought that Pismo...

Speaking of which, is it just me, or is Apple attempting to de-emphasise the Macintosh name by stealth? The iMac's not labelled a Macintosh; the G4's a notional Power Macintosh, but it's really a G4, right?; and the PowerBook's name's been truncated to...uh...PowerBook. And the iBook? Well that's not a Macintosh at all, is it? Does anyone say Macintosh iBook? Does anyone say Macintosh iMac? (although there was some Sales Drone who did say 'Apple iMacintosh'). At least with an early (non)Performa, you knew it wasn't a Macintosh, right?

iBudget, iBook, i Broke

But back back to the point. Where the Pismo 400 excels - even more so than the iBook - is in the versatility stakes.It's flexible, capable of virtually any project you throw at it. With an education discount it's crazy to consider the iBook unless a tight budget is your first concern. Put it this way, I would have almost bought a new iBook a few weeks back, had Apple bothered to put VGA out on the logic board. No, on second thoughts I wouldn't: I'm not giving up 1024x768 on the 14.1" display on my PowerBook G3 for anything. Besides, it's cold where I live (in an igloo, essentially), and I need a 130-degree CPU warming my frozen thighs. Saves on heating bills, see? So break the bank. Go for the Gold. Er, Bronze. Keyboard, that is (okay, okay, so we're still in Olympics mode down here in Oz).

Fact: There were 10 commandments, not 12. This's one of them: buy a Pismo. Let's face it: in the end, that Pismo Beach vacation'll cost you a lot less than Paris in the spring.