GETTING STARTED   YOUR HOME Home Buyer's Survival Kit Get the Most From Your Home Sale Tapping Your Home Equity   CAR Tune Up Your Car-Buying Skills Smart Shopper's Guide to Auto Insurance The Best Cars of 2003 MORE... SPENDING TOOLS   YOUR HOME Search for the best mortgage rates in your area How much will my home payments be? How much can I borrow? Which mortgage is better: fixed or adjustable? Am I better off refinancing?   YOUR CAR Kiplinger's Car Finder Search for the best auto loan in your area How much will my monthly car payments be? Figuring the car lease payment How much will my monthly car payments be? PICK OF THE PCs   To see how the latest PC notebooks compare, see "Packable and Powerful" in the November issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

TECH
Picking An Apple Notebook
by Ronaleen Roha

If a new Apple notebook computer is on your shopping list this season, picking your machine may be easier than for those looking for a Windows-based one. The PCs come in a bewildering variety, but Apple notebooks only come in two types: the consumer-oriented iBook G4 and the heavy-duty PowerBook G4.

Both series are head-turners, sleek and stylish, reflecting Apple's commitment to clean, elegant design -- smooth cases, gleaming white polycarbonate for iBooks and lightweight aluminum alloy for PowerBooks -- without a sharp corner in sight.

The iBook series screens measure 12.1-inch and 14.1-inch on the diagonal and PowerBook screen measure 12 inches, 15 inches and a huge 17 inches.

You can buy an Apple notebook to fit any weight class you have in mind. The lightest PowerBook (12 inches) and iBook (12.1 inches) weigh 4.6 pounds and 4.9 pounds respectively, putting them in the ultraportable range beloved by road warriors for saving shoulders.

But even the heaviest, the 17-inch widescreen PowerBook, only tips the scale at a fairly diminutive 6.9 pounds including the battery and optical drive -- about the weight of many thin-and-light Windows notebook PCs and a lot less than some PC desktop replacement notebooks, some of which weigh in at nine or ten pounds.

Apple of my iBook

The iBook series is a good choice for home users and students for mainstream computing tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, digital photography and music and even some gaming (though perhaps not extreme 3-D gaming). They use Motorola's PowerPC G4 processor, running at a middling, not Indy, speed of 1 GHz to 1.2GHz.

The iBooks are just under 1.5-inches thick, have rubber-mounted hard drives for impact-resistance, and include a variety of ports such as two USB 2.0 ports for connecting digital cameras, PDAs and printers, an Ethernet port, and a FireWire port to connect digital camcorders and the popular iPod music player, among others.

Standard iBook configurations range from $1,100 to $1,500 but at the Apple Store you can customize a few components such as random access memory (RAM), hard drive size and, on the 14.1-inch model, the slot-loading optical drive.

The 12.1-inch iBook (starting at $1,100) comes with a combo optical drive that plays DVDs and plays and burns CDs (DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive), but you can outfit the 14.1-inch iBook (starting at $1,300) with a DVD burner (DVD-R/CD-RW) drive for $200 more.

Wi-Fi is standard on the 14.1-incher but expect to spring $80 for Apple's AirPort Extreme (802.11g) wireless network card for the 12.1-inch model since it makes little sense to buy a portable computer without wireless capability. A Bluetooth module adds another $50 to the iBooks. Bluetooth is the short-range counterpart to Wi-Fi, allowing you to connect Bluetooth-enabled devices, such as some phones and PDAs, wirelessly up to a distance of about 30 feet.

1   2      NEXT