Newbie with an iBook upgrade question

[MiloMac]

Greetings all. Long-time lurker here looking for some advice, suggestions & wild-ass guesses where applicable.

I'm looking to replace the original rev A iMac w/ a 700 MHz iBook w/ Airport (like the Ti, but too many other things are on this newlywed's plate to fork out that kinda dough). It will become the home machine for general purpose stuff: net, word processing, digital pic repository, music collection, etc. What we really want is the ability to do our general computing stuff w/o being forced to spend hours in the computer room of the house. The iBook really fits our needs to a 'T'.

Here's where it gets tricky. With the rumored all new iBooks coming out at MWNY are we better off waiting 4 months, or do we look to purchase mid-November as originally planned?

Pros to Nov. purchase: known entity (current iBook's an excellent machine), OS X + classic, potential price drop if Apple's clearing stock for new model roll-out.

Cons to Nov. purchase If 1/2 of the next gen iBook rumors are true (G4, 13" screen, 1 gig max ram, even sexier casing) I'm gonna be kicking myself for years to come.

Does anyone know when Jaguar will be pre-installed on all new Macs? This is also one of the reasons why I'm holding off buying an iBook now. I would've thought that Jobs would have announced in Paris that effective 9/10 all Macs would ship w/ Jag. Surely they're not waiting until MWNY to make Jag standard, are they?

Appreciate your patience & input. I'm sure these types of questions are asked all the time by newbies.

 

[Hemingray]

Hey, welcome to the posting side of things.

Personally, I would definitely wait and see what they have in store come January. I doubt they'll be packing a G4, but at the very least there's be a better graphics card, maybe more RAM and bigger hard drives... and Jaguar will be pre-loaded, for sure. And the screen size change rumors will be interesting to see what happens there. There's been some talk about built-in Bluetooth too, but from the sounds of it it's still a ways off so it probably won't make it in the next revision either, but we can still stay hopeful there...

I'm looking to get a new iBook as well, and I'm definitely willing to wait a few more months.

 

[neilt]

If you buy any new mac direct from apple, it comes with 3 Jaguar upgrade cd's. The 2 installers plus the dev tools. They are in the box, although not on the computer.

The windtunnel's already have jaguar loaded.

neil

 

[ryme4reson]

Buy NOw

Why wait, I mean if a new iBook comes out, then sell the one you have (EBAY ASAO) and buy the new one. I have always been able to maintain a top machine by doing this. I will even sell you or anyone else my airport card out of my 933 for 60 bucks. It has never been used. as I dont use my desktop as a portable, haha

jamesk7772mac.com

 

[Hemingray]

Here's a big reason to wait... According to MOSR, Apple is working on new battery technologies for their portable line:

For one, Apple is working on new battery technology for its PowerBooks and iBooks based on new ion-polymer techniques that will nearly double watt-hour capacity compared to existing Lithium Ion batteries.

Secondly, OS X tends to use more battery power than OS9 primarily because it is more disk-intensive. OS X is physically much larger than OS9 in a typcial installation, and includes an exponentially larger number of individual files. In typical usage, OS X must read and write a much larger number of files spread out much further across the disk, and a significantly greater total data rate, than OS9 because of this. As a result, the disk works harder and drains more power.

Apple's marketing doublespeak allows for some margin in interpreting this, because system configurations with large amounts of RAM installed will tend to do better in OS X than in OS9 - RAM drains power, but dramatically less than disk usage does. PBG4s with at least 384MB of RAM (512-768MB is optimal) can cache most system data and greatly reduce these small but numerous disk accesses which cause most of the battery life problems in X.

Apple is working to implement more all-encompassing memory caching to prevent unnecessary disk access not only for battery life savings, but also for greater system performance. Also, new processor power reduction features will be included in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, due out next year.

The new Macs that will not boot OS9 due out in January are probably desktops; it will be a few more months before Powerbooks experience this problem, and perhaps 6 months-plus for the iBook. By then, Apple's various solutions should be in place, and although battery life may not be optimal under OS X until a post-10.3 release, it should be getting closer with each new decimal release - and new battery hardware due out next year should close the gap sufficiently that Mac users will have nothing to complain about.

Read the full article over at http://www.macosrumors.com. I will definitely be waiting to buy my iBook for when they increase the battery life.

 

[MacManiac1224]

jag

The Jag update program ends on October 31, 2002, so i imagine all macs coming out now or soon will ship with Jaguar.

 

[pilotgi]

I think if you need a new computer, buy it now.

I'm waiting to see what the next upgrade for the iBook will be but I already have one.

Steve Jobs loves to keep secrets and any rumors are just that. Especially rumors at Macosrumors.

If there's an update to Apple laptops in October or November like some are speculating, it's anybody's guess as to what those upgrades will be.

My own speculation: no G4's, no 13", no bluetooth.

Probably 100 MHz speed bump, maybe a system bus increase, probably 32 MB vram.

 

[oldMac]

If you can wait... you'll continue waiting

The truth is that there is always a faster/better computer just around the corner. Until Moore's law breaks (there's no slowdown in sight), then this will continue to be the case.

In my opinion, last generation machines tend to have fewer problems than "first generation" machines and tend to be a great value when the new ones come out. My advice is to wait until the new iBooks come out and then buy the previous model at a steep discount.

For personal use, it's really not that painful to be a little bit behind the curve and have a couple hundred bucks in your pocket. Now, take that extra money and buy yourself an 80GB external firewire drive. Then you'll have all your data (family photos, movies, tunes and such) easily accessible the next time you buy a new machine.

 

[MiloMac]

Thanks for the tips

I really appreciate the tips & information from all of the different sources. After weighing things I'm most likely going to wait & follow oldMac's advice. As tempting as a brand new iBook design may be, I'd rather not run the risk of buying a new model that still has a bug or two to be worked out. And a discount just means getting more peripherals (firewire drive, SoundSticks, & Airport base station). We weren't planning on buying until mid November anyway, so there really shouldn't be a huge incovenience factor there. The ol' rev A iMac's still plugging along And I'm crossing my fingers a bit that there may even be a small speedbump in the iBook soon (which of course would also mean the next gen would be at least 6 months after that).

Thanks again, everyone. I look forward to chatting w/ more of y'all from time to time.