Home > Consumer Reviews > Apple iBook Laptop 14" M9419LL/A (1.25-GHz PowerPC G4, 256 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

Pros: Right out of the box, this speedy notebook works flawlessly. I've been using it 3 months and it hasn't crashed once (Try going 3 hours on a Windows system w/o trouble!). It is pricey, HOWEVER, what good is a cheaper PC-based notebook if you have to worry about it's dependability.

Cons: The shiny plastic scratches easily.

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Well I bought into the hype and made the switch. A very expensive switch to the new 14" iBook 1.25 GHZ G4. Having worked on DOS and Windows based computers for years I was really looking forward to having a laptop computer with Apple's legendary graphics and ease-of-use. I ordered the laptop from Apple's web site without test driving one first. That was a big mistake! Had I given the thing a spin first I would have seen how poorly the text is rendered on the screen compared to Windows machines. This is a big deal to me because I use the computer for composing written material and researching on the net. I find that after using it for two hours I get a terrible eye strain headache. At first I thought something was wrong with the monitor but after some internet research I discovered that many others have the same problem with Apple. Apparently, they have an inferior "font smoothing" routine to the one that Microsoft uses in Windows. I have tried adjusting every conceivable setting on the display and in the operating system with little or no improvement. My advice, do your own research on the subject and test drive one before you buy. My only hope is that Apple will improve their font smoothing on future releases of the OS. Not recommended if you are doing anything that involves alot of reading.

This is my fifth Mac laptop and a problem that I had with the second one I owned has made a surprising comeback.

The cursor jumps around the page while you are typing, so that you can be in the middle of the fourth line of text and all of sudden the cursor has 'jumped up to the middle of the secondline.

I'm a decent typist, but this is an impossible situation. I can't type more than aline or two without it happening, and as one can imagine, it's a huge pain. I'm not talking about a typo here there but an entire train of thought broken up and inserted into a previous line.

Don't buy this model until they fix it. You can get an idea about this from the Apple Support discussion pages. I'm not the only one this has happened to, and you'll be able to track what Apple is doing to address the issue through the discussions.

It's a wonderful product in general, but wait until this bug is fixed.