Home > Consumer Reviews > Apple PowerBook Laptop 15" M9422LL/A (1.50-GHz PowerPC G4, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, SuperDrive)

omfg this is soooo awesome who needs a big better performing pc when this has all the looks it is sooo fast 1 ghz!!!!! pcs get about 3.2 but this is still better becuz of the looks and the fact that it says mac on it it is completely unupgradeable!!!!! and is soooo fast i can buy music off i tunes this is a practically a steal for the performace u get!!!! i mean being able to look at the user friendly (soccer mom) software is an honor !!!! THAKN YOU MAC

The presentation of this unit when it arrived was very impressive. The packaging, the body, the little details that Apple has thought of were very nice. However, I had wanted this machine mainly to do some digital photography work and had been attracted by the included software (e.g. iPhoto). iPhoto does not compare to My Pictures. It is cumbersome, difficult to file pictures in a useful way and tedious to use. It might be useful to show pictures to your family in a relatively unorganized fashion, but with all of the other excellent slide show software out there that do a good job, you would think that Apple would get the hint. And finally, when I loaded over 20GB worth of photos into Pictures, iPhoto went into some kind of spin where it never stopped trying to load the photos. I was finally able to stop it when I dumped the photos.

I had this unit for two weeks and while I had it it froze up on me twice. I decided that this was not something that I needed to have especially since for me this was a switch from Windows XP on an Acer which has worked very well. Thus, I decided to retun the unit and am now waiting for Amazon to return my money.

I bought my apple directly from apple on line. I had problems with the base port station from the start. I spent 2 hours on the phone with tech support in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the problem. I also had problems transferring my files from my old pc--they weren't supported on a mac operating system. I can handle the latter problem and assume there must be a way (although time consuming) to resolve. However, at this point I had enough, and decided to return the mac and stick with a pc. Guess what?!! apple wouldn't accept the return because I had the memory upgraded from 60 to 80 Gb. They said that I had it "specially configured" and this was covered in their "no returns" policy. Absolutely INSANE!!! Their website was completely misleading because the ordering process directs you to choose between hardware and software components. The minute you choose one option over another, your computer has magically become "specially configured" and therefore is now NON-returnable. Now I'm stuck with a $2.5K computer I hate. I will NEVER buy another mac product!

I bought this machine principally because of the UNIX interface as I am usually disappointed with portable PC linux installations. Well this is worse. It worked fine for about a month then I did a routine software upgrade a recommended by Apple. Now everytime I use the mail utility or ssh to another machine, all open programs crash.

In short, the concept is good but the execution stinks.

Other design issues. Unix users need a three button mouse. No excuse for the single button on this machine.
It is too heavy.
It runs too hot. It will burn your lap after about 15 minutes.

I will shortly be sending this back to surplus and have my lab buy me a (much lighter) Windows machine. Maybe I will try a dual XP/Linux boot again...