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Rating: 
Summary: One of the best Laptops I have owned
Review: A fantastic ultra portable laptop. I bought the 12" Powerbook G4 1Ghz, and have been blown away by it. It has a good metallic design and its size is very easy to carry around, this is the major disadvantage of larger bulkier notebooks. I have had mine upgraded to 1.25 GB Ram, and the performance of applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop is great. You can even play games like Halo on it pretty well, if that is your thing. You can have up to 80GB of HD, and my advice is to buy the largest you can afford. I also have an Airport (802.11g) card installed, and it allows wireless connectivity with a pretty good range. In addition, Bluetooth built-in allowed me to use a very nice wireless mouse with it. The Keyboard is of good quality, an important feature if you have to write long documents in Word! The LCD screen is of good quality too. All in all it made a pleasant switch from my previous bulky Sony Vaio Lap. I would recommend this computer very highly.
Rating:
Summary: Great little laptop
Review: Finally retired my Sony Vaio (850Mhz) and made the switch to a powerbook--wanted to do that ever since I realized that Mac OS X is pretty much BSD Unix with a killer desktop. What a great machine this is. Much better than the comparable IBook...twice the processor cache for starters...and none of the problems that have plagued the 1Gz iBook. Weighs just 4.6 pounds and is very portable...aluminium case is very scratch resistant. I get GREAT range with the add-on Airport Extreme card going to a LinkSys 11g access point (there's an antenna in the lid of the unit). I'm very happy with the battery life, the operating system, and the apps I use on this machine (Office X mostly). About a month after getting and using this machine I got a G5 for my desktop and I'm quite happy. If you're looking for a gaming rig, forget Apple but if you're looking for a business-oriented machine that fits in very smoothly with a PC-based office, this is the ticket. Networks much easier than a Windows machine!
Rating:
Summary: Yes, I love it.
Review: Having originally jumped on the Powerbook train when the TIs were introduced, I was way ready to graduate to a faster processor, newer Powerbook. I had a 15" TI and experienced most of the normal complaints one reads about in the various message boards (heat, bad paint). Given the vast differences between M$ products and the way the Apple performed, my sanity said go for it!To sum up. The aluminum case, the size, the reliability make it worth it. It's a head turner. I get lots of comments in Starbucks when I check e-mails and do some work. My only advice would be to invest in a good case. The latch is flimsy and probably will fail if you carry the Pbook around naked a lot. The Airport Extreme card is a worthwhile accessory, too. So many places have 802.11 access these days. There are also after market car and airline chargers available which will effectively allow you to work from the time you leave your office and fly to a far off destination. Battery life is good so far. From talking to other owners and personal experience, I recommend going with the manual recomendations. I consistently get between two and three hours depending on what I am doing. I would expect two years of usage from this notebook. By that time, Jobs and Company will have something faster and better that you won't be able to live without.
Rating:
Summary: The best computer I've ever owned
Review: I bought a 12-inch Powerbook after I gave my old Sony Vaio notebook the Pete Townshend treatment - I put my fist through it. (Yes, it looks like a stained glass window.) I hadn't used a Mac in years, but I decided I'd had it with Microsoft and Windows. All it took was one weekend and a good book - "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual," by David Pogue -
however, and I mastered the machine. SOFTWARE
The computer comes with some great software. iTunes is the best media player on the market. I have almost 5,000 songs stored on mine. With the search function and browser display, it is easy to find a particular song. iTunes also keeps track of the number of times you've listened to a song and it allows you to rate your songs. It's easy to create a playlist. Also, burning one of those playlists onto a CD can be done with one click. Safari is a great web browser. It has a Google search box built into the toolbar, prevents pop-up ads (I've never had one), has tabbed browsing (preventing a cluttered desktop), and allows for bookmarks to be added with one click. iChat allows Mac users to customize their AIM and Rendezvous chat sessions in ways that the normal applications don't allow, such as adding pictures from iPhoto to their profile. I haven't mastered iPhoto yet, but it is downloading pictures from a digital camera is as easy as plugging it into the USB port and clicking a button. Also, Macs are less likely to get a virus or be overtaken by spyware. The iCal and Address Book look good, but if you are going to sync a PDA with your Mac, you are better off using Palm Desktop software. Hopefully the functionality of those programs will be improved in the future though. Finally, most of the programs work with each other. For example, if someone on my iChat buddy list is online, a green dot will appear next to a message from him or her in my Mail inbox. I also use Microsoft Office, Quicken, Dreamweaver MX, and Palm Desktop - they all work well on the Mac. Office shares files perfectly with PCs. HARDWARE
Spend the money and get the superdrive (CD-RW/DVD-R). DVDs have more memory than CDs and blank DVD-Rs are becoming more affordable. If you are into collecting videos of concerts, a DVD-R is a must. I'd recommend upgrading to at least 768 MB of memory and the 80 GB hard drive. Burning a DVD requires a lot of memory and can take a while - this way you can use other applications while burning a DVD (on my old PC, if I was burning a CD, I couldn't use anything else). The hard drive space is really cheap. Plus, if you load your CDs on your computer, they can eat up a lot of memory, even as MP3s (my 5,000 songs take up about 25 GB). Also, there is a lot to be said for getting the Airport Exteme card (although you can buy a third-party base station for less). I am able to browse the Internet in any room of my house - well worth the extra $100 or so. I have the 12-inch monitor, but that was because Apple hadn't released the 15-inch in the new style when I made my purchase. The 12-inch is fine - it's much clearer than my old PC notebook - but if I had the opportunity, I'd probably go with the bigger monitor. DRAWBACKS
-While most software is available for Mac OS X, there are some programs that aren't (Google toolbar, Yahoo! toolbar, Kazaa, AvantGo) or minor problems in software that is available (Quicken can't access accounts on Ameritrade via Macs)
-The PowerBook doesn't have a fan, which is great for the battery, but can cause it to get a bit hot underneath where the user rests his left hand. Regardless of those drawbacks, however, buying a Mac was an easy decision. If you have any questions about it, click on my profile and send me a e-mail.
Rating:
Summary: Macs rule...what can I say.
Review: Other then...you wasted a great deal of money that you could have spent buying this item directly from apple.com. If you are a student or faculty of any kind of accredited school, you could have saved another 200.00$. I don't know what the hell amazon thinks it is doing selling this at the price that it is. However, if you don't care about money, please feel free to purchase your new powerbook. It seriously kicks ***.
Rating:
Summary: Macs rule...what can I say.
Review: Other then...you wasted a great deal of money that you could have spent buying this item directly from apple.com. If you are a student or faculty of any kind of accredited school, you could have saved another 200.00$. I don't know what the hell amazon thinks it is doing selling this at the price that it is. However, if you don't care about money, please feel free to purchase your new powerbook. It seriously kicks ***.
Rating:
Summary: No Pop Ups
Review: There are almost no pop-up ads with Macs, and the computers don't slow down considerably like PCs in the course of months. If they do, I have found that reinstallation takes about twenty to thirty minutes as compared to hours upon hours for PCs.
I love Expose, it makes navigation so much easier, as well as GarageBand, proof that Apple has the customer in mind and is always improving. Itunes is without a doubt the best digital music player. Graphics are very crisp and clear on Macs that I find myself in awe of my own screensaver.
My only real complaint is that the laptop does get extremely hot, and is not very stratch resistant. I find myself putting little cartoon stickers over the heavily stratched/bruised areas. For the next generation of Powerbooks, I would love to see Apple come out with multicolor Powerbooks, kind of like what they are doing with the iPod minis. I would be the first in line to buy a dark blue Powerbook with a cooling unit.
Rating:
Summary: it's great!
Review: This is a great laptop. It's light and sleek with tons of great features. I especially like the built-in Bluetooth, which lets me connect to my printer and PDA without wires. I highly recommend this PowerBook!
Rating:
Summary: nice refinements
Review: This is a wonderful little machine. Very speedy and the keyboard is absolutely fantastic. The build quality is excellent and the aluminum casing exudes class. Compared to the first 12-inch PowerBook, it runs cooler and is quite a bit snappier. Plus it supports DVI out and USB 2. That said, its battery life and Airport range are not quite as good as an iBook's. So unless you're going to do a lot of serious video/graphics work, you may want to consider one of the new G4 iBooks -- they're great machines for the price. Really, you can't go wrong either way, depending on your needs.
Rating: 
Summary: Great machine, few flaws
Review: Yeah, I know it's a little more money than the knock-off PC clones from Dell and Gateway, but this is a far superior computer. The Mac platform is not only the most powerful one available, it is also the simplest and most versatile - once you learn it. The 15-inch is the perfect size for me. I looked at both the 12 and 17-inch models and felt they were a little too small/big respectively. There is something attractive about the 12 inch - a friend of mine has one and he carries it around everywhere, able to write anywhere anytime. And seated at a desk the 17-inch is also attractive, presenting a massive, bright screen to work on. But all in all, the 15-inch provides the best both worlds. It's very portable - maybe not as easy to tug along as the 12-inch, but certainly manageable with a small backpack. The 17-inch can be problematic on a plane if there are people crowding you, and it's certainly cumbersome to maneuver in tight spaces, whereas the 12-inch is easy to maneuver but can cause a little eyestrain from a distance. I definitely recommend a Mac, first of all, and within that I recommend the 15-inch G4 notebook. If you must have a 12-inch, you might take a look at the 12-inch iBook, which is cheaper but obviously not as feature rich (the iBook's graphics card is not as powerful and the processor is slower, most notably). The complaints I have are exterior - the computer doesn't age well (i.e., it nicks and scratches rather easily) and there should be some sort of elevation device to raise the back end while typing (like the older Powerbooks had). All in all you can't go wrong with any Apple laptop you choose. They are truly making the digital life a reality with all of their integrated software - iTunes, iPhoto, iSight, and the iPod are particularly cool. No other laptop will have an operating system with so many fantastic programs that are so perfectly integrated together. If this is remotely in your price range, go for it. It can literally change the way you operate on a day-to-day basis.
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