The first Macworld of the new year may have left a few people
disappointed with the lack of new hardware announcements from
Apple. The second MacWorld, which took place recently in Tokyo,
made up for this nicely with a slew of product announcements.
In addidion to the new "Pismo" PowerBooks, Apple
unveiled their new lineup of iBooks. In addition to the Blueberry
and Tangerine iBooks Apple has added a "Special Edition"
graphite iBook, perhaps to appease all of the Dvorak followers.
Manly color aside, the only other significant difference between
the Graphite and fruit colored iBooks is the 366MHz processor
in the former. The
fruity iBooks still sport a 300MHz processor, and all three
have a 512k backside cache. The new iBooks don't represent
a radical redesign, but rather a redefinition of the "low
end" consumer portable. The former, now unrealistic,
standard of 32MB RAM has been thankfully scrapped in favor
of the more functional 64MB. Likewise, the 3.2GB hard drive
has nearly doubled to a very respectable 6GB.
Other than these tweaks, the iBook remains the same. While
the additional RAM and hard drive space are great, other items
on our wish list remain unfulfilled. These items include:
DVD drive, an additional USB port . The inclusion of FireWire
in the "Special Edition" would have been a nice
touch and would have gone a long way to justifying the $200
premium. Still, there is a lot to like about the iBook and
perhaps Apple decided that adding the above items could cut
into PowerBook sales. Quite the opposit may prove to be true
since the new PowerBooks now include an AirPort slot for wireless
networking. Below we provide you with a rundown of the new
iBooks' specs. and compare it to Apple's other portable options
past and present. For a comprehensive overview of the iBook
visit our original
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The
fruity iBooks still sport a 300MHz processor, and all three
have a 512k backside cache. The new iBooks don't represent
a radical redesign, but rather a redefinition of the "low
end" consumer portable. The former, now unrealistic,
standard of 32MB RAM has been thankfully scrapped in favor
of the more functional 64MB. Likewise, the 3.2GB hard drive
has nearly doubled to a very respectable 6GB.