Home > Consumer Reviews > Apple PowerBook Laptop 12.1" TFT M8760LL/A (867-MHz PowerPC G4, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

Unlike many laptops, this PowerBook is so small and light you can't help but want to bring it everywhere you go.( There are smaller laptops, but they omit the CD/DVD drive. Carrying an external drive would defeat the purpose, in my opinon.) The PowerBook is a no-compromise portable. You really have to touch it to appreciate it--preferably with a PC laptop handy for comparison. The G4 processor is very responsive, especially with the GeForce 4MX graphics board to manage OS X's beautiful but demanding graphics. The screen is small, with (sometimes painfully) high resolution, but clear. Keyboard feel is better than any other laptop I've played with. AirPort Extreme works fine with existing networks (Haven't seen a 802.11g network yet.) I do, however, suggest you upgrade the base memory.

I have a 466mz SE clamshell ibook that was my main computer prior to this purchase. My roommate bought a newer ice book last year and I had serious laptop envy. I am a grad student, who does some video editing. Recently I decided to purchase a refurbished powerbook - but waited to see what Mac World would bring, in case prices would go down again. I was still planning to buy a 15" refurbished after the announcement (affordability was a big issue), until I took the time to go into the new Apple store in town and try the computers out.

I was and still am entranced. It is so unbelievably fast compared to what I was used to. Jaguar practically sings. I have had it a week, and have not yet loaded Final Cut Pro. Although the screen will be a bit small for editing, the portability more than makes up for it. I bought the clamshell just after the icebooks came out, because I liked the style, the handle, and the durability. Also at that time it was 466 vs. 500 mhz. However, it was a pain to drag that thing back and forth to school. This baby fits in my bag that has a padded area for a note book. 4.6 pounds vs. 6.7 pounds is a huge difference. The keyboard is great - because of the springy-ness of the keys, I am hitting the keys more accurately, as if I was on a real keyboard. It is also sturdy. One of the things I worried about with the 15" was the delicacy of that machine. This is a marriage of the durable iBook and the sheer power of the Powerbook. *And* it is affordable.

The screen is incredible. Like the others, I do have a concern about the lack of expandability for RAM. I went ahead and maxed it out at 640MB. Still, for my purposes, this is the perfect notebook. I can type papers, surf the net, and do video editing when all the work stations with the big G4s and displays at school are taken. I am also really looking forward to airport extreme and using the blue-tooth capability. It is a computer that I can grow into.

Being a former PC user myself, it's amazing to have a computer where everything works exactly how you expect it to. The screen on this is amazing. Going from a desktop keyboard, I was worried that the 12" was going to be to small to type on- but not true at all. It does get pretty warm--which is unexpected because the machine runs so quietly you forget that it's working--but to its credit, it cool soff rather fast too when you put it to sleep. So far I have been nothing but completely happy with computer and would recommend the wireless internet card...it's worth the extra $...for the card and the basestation to have such complete wireless freedom.

The first compuer I bought myself was a NeXT Station, in 1992. When I had to
move on, linux was the only sensible option, and I've been happily using since 1995 or so.

I needed to replace my laptop this winter, and I had noticed that OS X seemed to have many of the virtues of NeXTStep. I needed to be sure that the software I use would be available for OS X, though. A friend pointed me to the Fink
project (fink.sourceforge.net), which ports unix software to OS X using the superb debian packaging tools. It seemed possible to make the powerbook work with OS X and Fink, and so I took the plunge.

I've been using the computer for about a month now, and I'm very pleased with it. Here are some observations.

Hardware. First, it's amazingly quiet. I think there is a fan, but it turns on very rarely. The hard drive is almost inaudible. Second, the keyboard is very good.
Third, I seem to consistently get at least three or four hours of battery life while doing text work and surfing via wireless connection.

Software. Mac OS is excellent. It is robust and the user interface is efficient. It took some getting used to: many things aren't set in /etc as is usual in unix, and many things which can be set in /etc get overridden. See /Applications/Utilities/Netinfo Manager, for example. The public betas of the safari browser (which I believe is based on the khtml code written for the konqueror browser) and X11 work very well. Thanks to X11 and fink, I have been able to make the transition at my own pace. For the first week, I ran everything out of X11 and almost ignored the rest of OS X. Now, a month later, I spend only a few minutes a day in X11.

Some of the software shows the rough edges that come from closed-shop development. For example, evolution and kmail have some nice features, for example, which are lacking in Mail (virtual folders, local file sources of mail). Fortunately, GNU Emacs runs both under X (Fink) or natively.

The hardware-software integration is tremendous, as it ought to be. No issues with sound cards or apm.

My main wish is that OS X software packaging were as good as debian, so I could for example uninstall software efficiently.

I usually advise maxing out the RAM on a laptop, and did so in this case, although I gather that 1GB chips may become available for the slot in this machine in the next year or so.

Forget the negative reviews, this powerbook is great.

Yes it gets hot, but I never use it on my lap so that is fine. The battery life is decent, but it takes close to 4 hours to charge a fully drained battery.

Mac OSX is a breeze to use, and I was able to create a local area connection with my PCs to share files and printers in no time.

If anyone is looking for a light notebook with ample performance, there is no better option than the powerbook G4 12 inch.