Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / February 2004

For video capture and playback, don't worry too much about rotational
speed. What you are after is sustained MB/Sec that  has no hiccups.

I have had two 4200 rpm PBooks that are perfect for video capture and
print. They get away with it because the bits are jammed together like
passengers on the London Underground at five in the afternoon.

Rotational speed becomes more important when you have zillions of
little files you want to access at once. Multi-track audio applications
might benefit from quickly rotating disks.

Apple has two portable computer lines: the iBooks and the PowerBooks.
Apple's web-site has the current offerings listed with convenient
specification tables.

Before the Aluminum PowerBooks, the Titanium PowerBook G4 was around.
It's nice, but a bit delicate. The Pismo is the last G3 PowerBook. I
like it, but it is getting long in the tooth. Current iBooks offer more
power and a similar feature-set (without expansion bays or some of the
video goodies).

Apple keeps specifications of all of its machines available from its
support page. Other mac websites have specifications and comparisons of
these machines in various places. I don't go to those places so someone
else will have to chime in about which ones are the best for you.

[snip]

Just buy the drive. Assuming that file formats are compatible,
everything just works.

There are USB audio and MIDI devices.

HTH

I don't know anything about the audio stuff, don't have a single song on
my computer.  But everyone I have ever seen on TV demonstrating audio
stuff from professional song writers and producers to club disk jockeys
has used a power book.  I would be surprised if there were USB devices
and they did not connect to a Mac because they seem to be the tool of
choice for most professionals.  If you want a floppy drive you can get an
external reader, Mac abandoned the floppy before the rest of the world
did, but they are cheap.  For video the simple truth is there is no
substitute for horsepower and horsepower costs money.  Looking at the
numbers posted at Apple it looks like the G4 ibooks are roughly
equivalent to the last Titanium powerbooks in terms of performance.  
Which means they are that much behind and closer to obsolescence. You
sound as though you are going to be a high end user if you are not
already.  My advice is to either:

Get the Powerbook, it gives you the ability to add a lot more ram later
and L2 cache is 512 instead of 256. Its better for what you want now and
later and should keep you happy longer.

Get an ibook knowing your probably going to update to a Powerbook in a
year or so, most people myself included would be happy with the ibook
performance but listening to you, you sound more and more like your going
to be a professional user.  In a year the G5 Powerbooks should be out and
there is going to be a big jump not an incremental jump in performance.  
Your going to want one even if you buy the Powerbook now.