Very nice article.

I am a new 12" iBook owner (as of July) as well. I was an Apple fanatic back in the Early Days of personal computers (circa 1983) when I bought my first computer an Apple //e. I would have continued the Apple love if I could have afforded it, instead I became a DOS/Windows switcher when I bought a 286 machine.

I feared jumping back into Apple's camp, but am so glad I did.

I got a 14" ibook back in August. Quite happy with it. Best feature has to be being able to use two fingers on the touchpad to scroll.

HItting Cmd+Q instead of Cmd+W in Safari was killing me too, until I discovered that you can redefine the shortcut key. In System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts, add a new shortcut for Safari, menu item 'Quit Safari'. I use Cmd+Opt+Q.

> The only thing that makes me curse from time to time is that the
> "select all" combination (command+a) and "quit Safari" combo (command+q) are near
> each other, so from time to time I need to start all my 25+ tabs once again.

Why don't you use Taboo?

http://pimpmysafari.com/plugins/taboo-03

When using the ibook regulary, the keyboard letters wil fade out. My 'a' completly disapeard. Follow by the 's'. After a while the backspace plastic nipple broke, and it was time to call apple. A day later a new keyboard arrived, but now (2 months later) the 'a' is almost gone again. I think an ibook is not intended for non stop use.

you should try a powerbook. The ibooks are nice enough but the powerbooks feel a lot better and have some improved features that make them really worth it. They feel a lot tougher and the all metal casing makes them quite rugged. Not to mention more upgrade options and more built in options in general.

Great article. I too love my iBook. I dual boot it with OSX and Kubuntu Linux for the best of both worlds. The battery life on mine can be up to 5 or 6 hours depending on what I am doing with it which is brilliant. It is also the most attractive notebook I have ever seen. I just want to use it when I get home just because it looks so nice! :-)

I just got my iBook 12" and I love it to death. I don't understand how I ever managed to live without Apple.

I do have some negative points. It is a bit slow (I might pop in an extra 512M of memory in it) and I can crash Safari like *snap*.

I also experienced a huge leap in my performance work wise with my mac. I have grown to love it so much (and I use/run everything because of work) that I have become a media whore for Apple telling everyone I know how superior it is. After previewing Vista and IE7 I am not really impressed at M$softs attempts to play catch up like I was when OSX was introduced. By the time they put it out we will see the next superior version of OSX. M$oft totally missed the Window on this one, their dev cycles take so long and will continue to do so while Apple puts out products that work, look stremlined and innovative. The underlying UNIX structure and access to Open Source just plain rocks! One of the real strong areas is Expose - I know there are similar things for Windows but this came standard and worked perfectly. I look forward to their Front Row app on my powerbook or mac-mini next so I can bring them truly into my living room.

Alper > the iBook used in this article is equipped with 1 GB of RAM. That's the first thing you learn when getting a Mac - always get more RAM :)

wickedcool > I couldn't agree more. This is what makes people love their Apple hardware - the software made to go with the hardware. You hear it in the PC world all the time - great graphics chip, too bad the drivers are not good enough. Boo hoo! :)

Your IE probably crashed on launch because by default the home page is set to MSN.com and recently Microsoft made a change to the MSN home page that will instantly crash IE 5 on the Mac. They may have fixed it by now. Pretty silly mistake.

Is "zipping" coffee anything like "sipping" coffee, and if so, why not just use English?

One word to describe my 12" Powerbook is 'FIAT', First in All Tests. I always wanted to buy an Apple machine but it cost too much. I held back for a long time but then thought what do I earn money for then I bought this lovekly little 12" PB and I love it the most after my wife and kids :)Somtimes it scores over them as well. I am upgading to Tiger soon. i cannot use it at work b'se MS-Project is not avaialble on OS X. I tried using Qemu but it is not working out for me.

But I love Apple. It simply delivers.

I agree with you on your ibook review on most counts except three things. 1; the ports on 'one side' may look cool but it is not practical. I am right handed and have a little corded mouse for desktop use and the cord is significantly shortened by having to be plugged in on right side. 2; there are heat issues with the ibook especially around the wrist rests. not even continuous use of "cooling pads" or elevated pads help this. 3; apple really could have paid more attention to the keyboard design... the white keys Look Cool but are often difficult to use in terms of find and recongize needed keys, and the subset of features in the number row. the typing experience is also a bit frustrating as far as most laptop keyboards go.

other than that, its definitely a sweet and slick piece of hardware.

You didn't mention anything about screen resolution on 12" iBook. I am planning to buy an iBook, but i am worried about its resolution. Mac OS X uses 12pt fonts (not sure), and how many terminal windows can you keep side by side without overlapping? This is a (buy or dont buy) decision making question for me, can you please answer?

To BVK:
You can use the size of the font you like in the terminal. With a 10 pt font size you can put 4 terminals 80x24 side by side.
Much more if you lower the font size but anyway with the window transparency and the function key to switch to any other terminal window, it's easy to have 10 terminal windows on one screen. Moreover, you can install desktop manager and switch between virtual screens with more terminal windows using just a key combo.

May I be the first to diss the iBook?! I have had a 12" model for close to 2 years now, for only half of that time it has worked flawlessly. Since the beginning of the year it has given nothing but trouble. Dodgy repairmen (who diagnosed logic board failure, not harddrive failure), bad customer service and a broken lcd backlight is enough to put me off buying another mac for a long time.

If you must buy a mac, get a powerbook, they appear to be built a little more solidly.

Doesn't anybody complain about the unix keyboard of macs ? Pipe, brackets, and many other chars are hard to get for any new mac user. Maybe apple should re-think the keyboard labels. huh ?

Some people have mentioned that you can remap your "Quit" keystroke to an alternate one or use Taboo. I will suggest yet another one.

Saft is a program I've grown to love after a while. Especifically after it installed crash and quit protection for tabs. Before that it was mainly a Kiosk application for safari and now it's pimped mainly for the tabs and search features.

Saft always knows what your tabs are in each of your windows. Should safari crash it will reactivate all tabs as they were. If you quit the program with tabs opened they will reopen when you reopen the program. That means you can safely quit Safari or restart your machine at ANY time sure that it'll come back to the state it was.

It does quite more things than that and some of them I'm so used to that I don't even recall what are parts of safari and what are additions, but I have it clear. I wouldn't use Safari without Saft.

(it also lets you rearrange the tabs, moving them around)

There are other cool additions to Safari (like Pith Helmet, Acid Search and Developer Extensions/Format Source), but Saft should be bought by Apple and included in Safari :)

Chris Mear and val1984: thanks for good links I will definitely check it out. I also received an e-mail regarding this article with a good tip regarding this issue.

Taboo is a simple Safari hack which provides a warning before quitting or closing a browser window containing multiple tabs.

Homepage: http://www.ocdev.com/

Joshua McFarren: Lol, that is a silly mistake. I cannot check it out since IE was installed on the computer for 2 minutes and than immediately went to /dev/null ;)

Dionysian: You have a point there with the left side ports comment. The USB mouses I use have long cords so I didn't even think about that. Actually when I think about the ports, on some occasions, I cannot plug two USB dongles at the same time. Of course this is because of the size of the dongles, but on the other laptop the USB ports were on both the left and right sides, making it possible to use two larger USB sticks at the same time.

BVK Chaitanya: Orion gave a perfect answer to your question. Btw as regarding the screen resolution, if you aren't a multimedia type of geek, 1024x768 if just enought. Well it suits my needs fine, but if you need better resolutions than this, check out other bigger models.

Orion: True, true - I forgot about this. I need to use pipe on a regular basis, so it is a pain in the ass to go to insert symbols. As soon as I get some free time, I will get into changing one of the keys to serve produce me pipes.

If you're tired of Safari crashing, I suggest you try Opera. It's a MUCH better GUI.

Besides having an easily accessible zoom (you won't believe how useful this is until you try it), Opera remembers all your tabs when it quits, so starting Opera puts you right back where you were when you left. Totally cool..

Lol - keyboard on the ibook is good? No way! Try the old Powerbook G3's (wallstreet->pismo) - THEY were good keyboards. The iBook's keyboard is tacky and flimsy.

I've always found that my ibook is notoriously slow; it really doesn't feel like a modern machine compared to a Pentium M-based XP laptop.

OSX is also getting progressively slower with each release, not to mention Tiger shaved 20minutes off my battery life :|

Then again, a few months ago I quite liked it :(

me want !

I've always wanted a Mac and having a brother who has worked on mac since the late 80's, I've always been fascinated.

Nice article.

I like windows tho, heck, I like Linux too.

Embrace difference - it's good for yout !

Being a die hard linux geek, I run my iBook on Ubuntu Linux, however, Apples hardware is just great. :)

Keit: that thing you posted about OS X getting more and more slow with each release is just false - sorry!

Mac OS X Tiger is much faster in the same HW than its predecessor, Panther. I'd say in overall performance not less than 20% faster, and there are a lot of tasks in which it may very well be as much as 50% faster. Every piece of knowledge you happen to find on this subject on the Internet will tell you the same thing.

My 2003 iBook G4 800MHz has just received a new HDD, and, O Lord, it is fast! :) I'm so happy I could cry. I just L O V E my iBook :)

Yeah, I was pretty happy too when I got my 14"inches ibook one year ago or so.

it has it's good sides too, don't misunderstand me. but unfortunatly, some stuff just don't *keep* at being all shiny and perfect about it. exemple?

the battery life. Mine, at the beginning, used to last 6 hours if I wasnt running much and 5 hours if I had many apps running/cd, etc, whatever. Well, now, one year and a couple months later, it barely last for 2 hours.

the weird sound that you use when using the pad, increases over time. Now when I use it, my homemate can hear it from the room nextdoor.

and as for the rest, I'm a little disapointed at the lack ( kind of) of freeware for mac.Of course there are some. But you have to really look for it. Most of them want you to pay, this is when I really miss Linux, and even windows.

gwengivar > I don't think the battery issue is an iBook specific issue. I've had an Asus notebook that went from 2 hours to 30 minutes of battery time in a year. The Gericom Berislav used went from 2 hours to 0 minutes actually, it doesn't work anymore without being plugged in.

As for the freeware, there is less for the Mac, but the shareware is much better then on the Windows platform, at least everything I use.

Check out http://www.freemacware.com/ and maybe you'll find something interesting.

Great article! I totally agree with your love for this Mac. I got a 12" G4 iBook earlier this year (1.2ghz) and LOVE IT. This is the most fun i've ever had with any computer of the many i've previously owned (and currently do, which are all Macs ranging from SE's to a G4 tower to a G3 600mhz iBook) and the XP Pro Dell that I use at work.

I have been so happy in the seven months or so that i've had this that I just can't express how much utility and value it has. Works like a champ and is a durable little beast to boot. Much better than my beloved G3 that i'd only purchased eight months before the iBook G4 love took effect.

Thanks for the great article.

MacLifer

This is not specific to the 12" iBook, but I found the font settings for Terminal unexpected but welcome: being able to adjust the horizontal and vertical spacing besides the font family and size made me wish I'd switched years earlier.

gotta say, i wish the ibook were a little more rugged. mine's a three-ish year old, refurb'd 14" ibook 2.2, and in the time i've had it, i've needed three... count'em, three new mobos. why? because i actually carry my ibook around with, and it just doesn't hold up under the stress of being toted about all the time. (well ok, two of the replacements were for know-bad mobos where the gpu wasn't solidly sodered to the mainboard; the other time my cat knocked a glass of water onto it.) also, there's a glaring scar in the crystals on my display just from having a book on the lid. this seems like reasonable use to me, but my ibook hasn't thought so.