"The First Apple Portable Keyboard With Soul": More Plaudits for Mini-Me


Apple's aluminium PowerBook 12" continues to corner a market all to itself - in gushing prose. In fact, Newsday's Stephen Williams declares that Mini-Me virtually has "no competition".

Williams cites the PowerBook's 867MHz G4 and the lush keyboard as major selling points, not to mention the razor-sharp 12.1" TFT. These, he says, are enough to let the PB-12 rise above the Vaios and other Wintel notebooks in or around the Two Grand bracket. Particularly as the PowerBook costs a mere $1,799, or about $2k with the optional slot-loading DVD-R SuperDrive.

Airport Extreme and the nVidia GeForce4 420 graphics card also get their share of laudation. Williams owns an iBook, and Mini-Me dusts it handily in every department.

Some criticism is inevitable; but it's what's missing rather than what's there that comes under the gun. For instance, the PowerBook-17's backlit keyboard is on the wishlist, along with a CardBus slot. Also, Mini-Me only supports VGA out and S-video/composite out - so Apple's flat-panel displays are out.

Analysis: A couple of minor corrections: Williams cites PB-12's 640MB RAM limit as a limiting factor. But as Apple's Developer Note states, Mini-Me will support 1GB DIMMs - when they become available, which will give it a full RAM quotient of 1.128GB. Second, there is a way of using an adapter or two to connect VGA out to DVI and ADC. Not cheap - but possible. The graphics card supports flat panels, although it would be nice if it would do it out of the box. However, we suspect most PB-12 buyers are looking for the ultimate small, light laptop, and are probably less likely to use it as portable desktop system.