Home > Consumer Reviews > Apple Powerbook Laptop M8592LL/A (800-MHz PowerPC G4, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive)

I've had one since the end of May 2002, and I love it.

I use a Powerbook at work for most of what I do and I don't know how I lived without it. I only have two complaints: the LCD screen is clearly the cheapest component on the machine and isn't very bright. I bothered to look up the specs one day and yeah, it's pretty low on the scale for contrast and brightness. Shame on you Jobs. Still it is more than adequate for my needs, I just turn the lights down when I use it. My other complaint is Apple support is the pits. You can't get a human on the phone and they are ignorant of the most basic computing questions. I work for a small graphics company and we don't have a big IT staff. We are a good customer for Apple and you would think they would give us the time of day! Nope.

This machine incorporates too many catastrophes to list. In an effort to make this easier on myself I'm just gonna list 'em as they come to mind. The speakers are insulting to the ear(they are roughly the size of a dime). Battery endurance is a joke. The lack of any sort of cooling aperatus other than a tiny grate at the rear causes it to literally reach burning temperatures! This is particularly problematic to a new unsuspecting buyer...The hinge with which the base is connected to the screen seems to be made of balsa wood, or something of the sort, and is much too rigid. If you look at the LCD while adjusting the screen you will see the stress running across it as if you were trying to bend it in half. Not good. Now for an even greater flaw: the OSs. Yes, it's no typo, I said OSs. This brings along the first problem. A little over half of the applications will only run in Mac OS 9 forcing you to constanly make the greuling switch between the two. Also, both OS 9 and OS X are the most crash prone OSs you can buy. 'Force Quit,' which erases all unsaved information, will become your best friend(for anyone who doesn't know, that's a VERY bad thing). The only real way to avoid crashing about every ten minutes is to not use the...thing. Not very helpful if you ask me...Oh, I almost forgot, in order to avoid switching from OS X to OS 9 every time you use AOL you must download the beta, which is just that, a beta(in other words, it's a unfinished trial version. Betas are often loaded with bugs). There are infinetly more problems I could document, however, I'm not gonna waste all day with bad things. It's kinda depressing. So please, spare yourself. Something I need to add to this review is the shoddy quality of the mechanical parts. I'v now had this thing for a few months. I treated it like a queen and...is falling to pieces. The little thing that holds the screen closed has ceased to function, making it look like the notebook is always a little open. So much for the good styling. And, the hinge for the screen is taking its last breaths. The longer I have this laptop the worse it turns out to be.

This is my third Powerbook. Although not as sturdy as the Powerbook G3 500MHZ (Pismo) it is MUCH faster. And the screen is near perfect. It could still stand to be a higher resolution, but is perfect for DVD's.

I got burned by an iBook that I returned (so slow I couldn't run any usuable software), broke down and went out today and bought a Powerbook. I am much happier.

The screen is a usuable size! Yeah! The 12" iBook screens are unusable and the 14" screens are poor quality. The screen on my Powerbook is great!

My only complaint? I use PCs at work and they have left Apple behind by a mile when it comes to performance. The first thing I did was go to work and installed some benchmarking programs. The result? My Powerbook BLOWS AWAY the iBook! However the PC (a 1.8 P4 notebook) was 20-100%.

Still, I will take the performance hit (it's good enough for me) in order to stick with the Mac. Hey, I'm a nerd and proud of it!!