First impressions of the Powerbook

I think now would be a good time for me to make a public confession. I’ve switched. My desktop computer finally died and after much debating, I’ve decided to go with a Mac, a Powerbook 15.2” to be exact. When I opened the box about 3 weeks ago, I almost shed a tear. It looked absolutely beautiful sitting on my desk, so simple, so elegant, so sleek, so (your favorite adjective here). And then I turned it on. Using OSX is like a breath of fresh air.

OK, I’ll admit I’ve breathed that air before. I’ve owned a 400Mhz Powerbook “Pismo” G3 in the past but decided to sell it on eBay due to such poor performance of OS X on a G3 chip. However, in light of the performance advancements of the newer PowerBooks, I decided to take the plunge and go with the Powerbook as my desktop replacement computer. Like many I thought that the Powerbooks were way too slow since they were only 1.67Ghz compared to the 2.4Ghz+ PC laptops but after using a few at the apple store, I couldn’t notice a difference in speed when using applications like Photoshop and Office; video editing; or surfing the web. As many have noted in the past, the clock speed wars between powerpc and x86 were effectively more smoke and mirrors than reliable benchmarks.

So what do I use my computer for? Primarily I use it for writing documents, bible study and digital video editing. The video editing capabilities of this Powerbook are quite impressive. In my old PC I used the Pinnacle Studio for DV editing which was simple to use. However creating the DVD with that video proved very frustrating. I used Roxio DVD creator to make menus and chapter selections for video that I shot for weddings, performances and vacations. I have never been able to create a DVD video (with Roxio) without the application locking up or exiting due to a DLL error. In a nutshell, Roxio sucks eggs.

On the other hand, iMovie and iDVD are a joy to work with. iMovie compares well with Pinnacle DV studio. Pinnacle actually has an edge on iMovie with all the provided sound effects and “Hollywood” transitions, but then again Pinnacle studio is a $99 product where as iMovie is free.

In the next part, I’ll cover the hardware and software features of this Powerbook instead of the random meandering you’ve read here.