I Bought a PowerBook
The verdict?
Click to enlarge
Seriously, the 12″ PowerBook G4 is excellent. It’s quite dense and heavy for its size, but it packs so much functionality in there that I don’t mind. The only gripes I have with its UI is the lack of a maximise button, and I still think the Windows start bar is better then the Dock. Window management in Windows is much better than in MacOS. I think it’s stupid how they only have one button for the trackpad. Their lack of easily accessible Page Up/Page Down buttons is also annoying and I had to remap the totally useless “enter” key next to the space bar to something more useful. Apart from that, it took me about two days to get comfortable with the idiosyncracies of MacOS and now navigating around is a breeze. The battery life is about 4 hours if you don’t run anything involving video.
It runs WoW pretty smoothly as well. There is nothing like hooking up to an online world from the comfort of a sofa without any wires in sight. When my exams finished, I went into my flatmate’s room where he was studying. I plonked myself on his bed and sat there playing WoW. He turned around.
“What are you doing lah??”
“Playing Warcraft.”
“What?! You bastard, lemme see?” He ran over. “That’s so cool man. Chee bai… now get the fuck out of my room.”
4:53pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
A couple of points…
The only gripes I have with its UI is the lack of a minimise button
There is a minimise button! It’s the yellow one. Click it an the window in minimise into the Dock.
Their lack of easily accessible Page Up/Page Down buttons is also annoying
If you hold down the “fn” key in the lower-left, the secondary functions are enabled. Up arrow is page up, down arrow is page down. I would have thought that it was pretty standard for laptops, considering the lack of space for a full-size keyboard.
(Doing so also gives you access to the F1..F12 keys, among others.)
Sorry – I meant Maximise button (edited the post to reflect that).
Also, I know that you use function to access page up/down but you need two hands to use it. I don’t mind so much that you need to press two buttons to do it, but because function key is on the left hand side, you need the two hands.
Maximising everything is a side-effect of Windows’ design. Kind of contrary to the name, isn’t it? In time you’ll get used to, and then prefer, the non-maximised working environment.
Re: dock/start bar, I completely agree. Haven’t yet upgraded to Tiger – spotlight might make this advice redundant – but my approach for now is to throw *every* icon out of the Dock, move it to the upper-right-hand-side of the screen, and launch everything with Quicksilver.
Other indispensible apps include X-Tunes and Growl. Also, I use the ‘Enter’ key for ‘send message’ in Adium, as opposed to Return for newline… so maybe it does have a good use!
I picked up a 12″ iBook last September for school. I actually like the launch bar much more than the start bar; I have my routine down pretty well and moved all the apps I use regularly into the launch bar and it’s only a few clicks and I am up and connected. As opposed to Windows, where it’s a million little double-clicks (at least it feels like it now) just to get logged into stuff. I had the major hotkeys down in less than a day and had my suitemate convinced I was a lifelong Mac user (actually, till then I was a lifelong Mac-basher) due to my quickness.
Strangely enough, my repetoire of third-party apps seems pretty small compared to Windows. A lot of the functionality is there out of the box. I run MSN Messenger (ack, I know), Azureus, Firefox on occassion (though Safari’s plenty safe for me), gCount (though gmail broke the current version) and gShisen (a little tile-matching game). Occassionally I want to rip a DVD, which I can do with Mac The Ripper or compress the video off one with Handbrake. Of course, I forgot, I use VLC Media Player rather than deal with Quicktime and a million codecs.