Originally posted by Kwyjibo
i've used both a 12" ibook 800 w/384 MB of ram and a 12" powerbook 867 w/256mb extensively and i must say that the powerbook runs circles around the ibook. If your ripping cds in itunes the powerbook will go at about 7x with no other apps sometimes 8x and with the ibook it will go 5x...no matter what u do. Slot loading drive is much nicer than the tray. The keyboard feels alot nicer. The powerbook does not scratch hearly as easily...no swirl marks or anything like the ibook. The powerbook does get hot but its tolerable to me. and when my ibook would do similar tasks it got almost as hot just not as fast. you get a mic jack on the pb....nice to have.
Macspeedzone.com did some
in-depth tests of the iBook G3 900 (14 in.) and the PB G4 867 (12 in.), and, surprisingly(?), the iBook beats out the PB in most of the desktop tests (by a narrow margin). In most other tests though, the PB won (by a narrow margin), and showed it's Velocity Engine power in the Photo shop Altivec filter test (1.87 x's faster), and in the Altivec Fractal test (5.34 x's faster). But, in the cd-ripping/encoding test, the PB only won by about 6%, so it doesn't look like cd-read speed has much to do with performance here, if it does read faster. Check
the tests for yourself, they really seem to contradict what you hear about G4 dominance (except in Altivec tests).
You should buy your memory from someone else than Apple. You can get a stick of 512 for either machine for ~$100 from OWC and other online companies. Here they have some
ibook memory , and some
powerbook memory for about the same price, saving you some money for the PB.