Andrew Sharp wrote:
Now, when it comes to the iBook2, A Dell Inspriron 2100: 700MHz P3 (w/ SpeedStupid (tm)) 256MB mem external combo dvd/cdrw drive 1024x768 12.1" video 30GB hard drive 37Whour battery free palm m100 or lexmark32 printer or umax 3400 usb scanner $2227 after $100 mail in rebate. iBook2: combo drive internal, I think $2200 after $100 memory upgrade special
That's pretty close!One other factor nobody has mentioned here is SECURITY. For buffer-overflow type security holes, remote and local, almost all of the exploits are written for i386, so non-Intel platforms are inherently less vulnerable. Last week's LWN security section opened with a piece estimating that a fast worm should in theory be able to spread to all vulnerable networked machines in the world in as little as 15 minutes, which is a whole heck of a lot faster than I apply upgrades, so any time which heterogeneity in OS, server software or CPU arch can buy is really crucial.
IOW, if you just run IIS/W2K on Intel on all of your servers, prepare to have your entire network r00ted with every new security alert, like every month or two. If you have some Linux on Intel and a few ports open, without frequent security upgrades you're still vulnerable to quite a lot (like last year's worm). Debian on PPC, well, nobody uses that anyway so it's not worth writing a specific exploit for. :-) At worst the buffer overflow attacks will crash a server or two. How about a Debian/Netwinder (StrongARM) firewall? At that point, security becomes much more a function of admin carelessness (bad passwords, etc.).
For this reason, I've been buying alphas for years, but the ev6 performance/price has not been near where ev5(6) was, so that's not really an option any more. It's nice to see that Apple is keeping some prices in line with the Intel world.
Incidentally, regarding the structural integrity problems people have mentioned with the TiBook (time to put on my materials scientist hat), this is a textbook case of *bad* materials selection on Apple's part. Titanium sounds sexy, and is nice and strong, sure. But for a laptop, you really don't need a lot of strength in the case, since if you drop it, a component is going to fail before the case. What you really need, as comments on this list have underscored, is stiffness, for which titanium is not so good (which is why it makes great golf clubs...).
But, you say, the stiffness/density ratio is about the same for steel, titanium, aluminum and magnesium, so what's the big deal? Sure, no big deal in tension, but in bending, what's relevant is not E/rho, but E^{1/3}/rho, which favors lighter materials. (In fact, the best material with this criterion is- get this- balsa wood! Which is why balsa wrapped in aluminum sheet has been used in many aircraft cabin floor boards, though by today metal honeycomb sandwich structures may have surpassed this...) So of these four metals, magnesium is by far the best, which is why Sony uses it in the Vaio. Magnesium is also far easier to cast in complex shapes than titanium, and the semisolid casting process used for the Vaio case gives outstanding quality metal with minimal porosity, resulting in great strength (my two-year-old Vaio has survived three drops onto concrete with no noticeable damage).
Incidentally, this is also why aluminum makes lighter and stiffer car bodies than steel; magnesium is not a candidate there for largely corrosion reasons, but that's getting way off-topic.
In any case, it's interesting to hear that all this theory is confirmed in practice, and that the TiBook was a bad idea, as I've been saying since it came out (though not on the net).
Zeen, -- -Adam P. GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe! <http://lyre.mit.edu/%7Epowell/The_Best_Stuff_In_The_World_Today_Cafe.ogg>