Powerbook vs Inspiron - Page 3

I remember when a 20 gig hard-drive was considered overkill. Who would have ever thought anyone would EVER need that much space?

There is no such thing as "over kill" in the computer world... whatever the most advanced thing is right now, it'll be a phased out option within 5-10 years.

For someone who speaks so highly of the "value of money" he sure does worry a lot about dropping / spilling things on his own computer.

Generally speaking, Apple is geared towards people who use their computer for work, other top of the line machines are geared toward kids gaming at LAN parties. I know why I bought my powerbook and it has amazingly out performed my PC in day-to-day tasks. I will never go back.

Most people on these forums do not notice the benefits of MAC OSX because they can't quit their game for 10 minutes during the day to do any productive work. (I realize not all of you fit in this catagory so please do not flame me with your stories of incredible success.)

Frank: It is obvious, if it is not a convenient option found in their machine, they dismiss it as overkill. But wait, a 256mb video card in what is meant to be a mobil machine is not overkill at all.

Honestly, what is the point? Blah, blah, blah, windows, windows, windows. Who cares, I mean really. I am not going to compare systems, because there is really no point- if you want to use windows, fine, use windows. Kindly go stay in the windows forum.

That is one thing I absolutely love about the mac world- I have noticed that mac users, in general, are so much more mature. Seriously. This whole bang for your buck, most powerful thing you can get, etc., is pointless. Who cares. Go outside once in awhile, and use your computer for something else than gaming. I mean really. I think it is absolutely pointless to spend so much money on a laptop for gaming. Pointless.

Well said. I couldn't agree more.

I would go with the Powerbook over the Inspiron. The Inspiron is a very nice machine in every aspect except for Windoze XP. My Inspiron isnt very old and already I get a ton of errors and stupid that just shouldnt be happening. I wish i'd gone with a Powerbook instead.

I've never had a problem doing work on a Windows machine. I don't use Macs as often, so it takes significantly longer to do any work at all on a Mac, and judging by what I've found thus far when working with Macs, I'm not entirely sure that I'd ever see a speed increase that would be worth losing actual computing power over.

I'll point out, by the way, that there's no maturity in dismissing a considerably faster and cheaper platform because you don't like it. I've seen little else from the Mac fans in this topic. Nor is there any maturity in these pathetic attempts at slamming every PC supporter as someone devoted purely to gaming. I have never had a problem doing any work that I wanted done on a Windows machine. I'll admit that I don't do complex graphics editing, but I do program, record and edit videos, work on HTML, and do a number of other tasks. I have yet to see significant advantages for me with the Macintosh platform, though I mean to try it out some time.

And FrontierDriver, why don't you try Linux? Newer distros have quite good hardware detection, and it's even got Gnome, the Terminal, and nearly everything else you love about Mac OS X. Setting up Ubuntu was barely more difficult for me than setting up Windows.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to try out Macs some time, get better acquainted with them...I'm a shameless experimenter. That's why I'm currently dual booting between Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. However, I simply don't see any reason for me to buy what would essentially be a $500 toy to me, and I honestly wish that some people would understand that there are indeed people of my sort about, too. Sure, there are nice Mac features, but there are also PC advantages.

I realize PC's have great qualities too, like...uhm... games (kidding). I also stated in my response that I realize not all people fit into the catagory of "gaming 24/7" but on this forum, I would have to assume that 90% of them do fit into that catagory.

One thing to realize is, on these forums at least, most of the Mac users ALSO have a strong history with Windows. We don't make these statements about Windows without having a considerable knowledge about it. Without that prior knowledge, it'd be foolish to say something such as, "while I don't use Windows that often, it takes significantly longer to any work at all on Windows..." Our statements would hold little validity.

i'm assuming your literate since we've gotten this far, tho now i'm having visions of u making primitive signs to an interpreter to communicate, read my sig. also take to heart the idea that most of the ppl in the apple section are at least dual-platform users (most likely OS X and Windows). i don't know if u care much for UT2k4, but feel free to stop in some time. just wildcard me @ *Mutatio* i'll get the LG warmed up for ya.

oh dear, u think a 13MB RAW image is big? consider the fact that a $50,000 scanner in the professional world is CHEAP and u may start to get an inkling of what i'm talking about. not everything u work on in your pirated copy of photoshop comes from a digital camera. er wait, sorry, i assumed i was discussing this w/ someone who has a shadow of an idea of what is involved in the spectrum of digital media editing (not just photos, MEDIA). let's also pretend that such a high speed interface is just used for moving pics from a camera. didn't i refer to fw800 as ideal for external operating system/application/data storage and transfer options? oh yeah, i did. u seem to have missed that too.

overkill? guess i'm going to be overkilling my next desktop w/ fw800 then. oh well. shortly after i'll expect it to start becoming mainstream in notebooks. but since it's overkill i'm sure u'll ask that dell exclude it from your machine.

maybe when your warranty expires this option will be more appealing to u. LOL i'm sure that in your response u took the time and care to investigate various policies, their reputations, and ease of service. <cough> bullsh!t <cough> it's kinda like the RAM...whyTF would u get it from the vendor if u can get it cheaper and more comprehensively from someone else? apparently u've had accidents w/ your dell? so u know firsthand how great their customer service is?-just like all the people who rave about it? there aren't too many ppl who put dell anywhere near the top of the heap in re: to customer service. simply bc their service PLAN is listed in the buying process does not make it an agreeable service in action. but then again, maybe u or a friend had a bottle of Bawls spilled frenetically on your keyboard, as u reached for it, hand twitching in hyper-caffeinated fashion, while waiting for a map to load on your notebook. afterwhich u had a splendid service from dell, which meant u only had to swig down your Bawls while damn near freaking out about having to snake your way thru the fews days it was gone on your cell phone. LOL hey, it could happen. i don't doubt it, but like others have said, for someone who seems so freaked out about saving $ u sure seem willing to throw $ at a system that is supposed to be cheap.

i've had notebooks for the last 7 years, and never a spill or drop. accidents do happen, but mindfulness will reap you dividends no money can buy.

again, u make no reference to anything to subtantiate your comment. i guess u've had 3rd party accidental coverage? guess not. and no i don't need a link tho it'd be nice, i can do just fine w/ the search engines thank u.

omg...i believe i've spotted my first dell fanboy.... quick! where's my 13MP SLR?

what, u mean we don't talk about the latest 256MB GPU in a notebook for busting out a wicked game of solitaire 3D? imo, i think that's a bit high. i think there are plenty of ppl here who go for integrated graphics systems that r looking for advice on a casual or business productivity machine. needless to say, the vast majority who r looking for discrete graphics systems will likely get the best GPU that they can for the money they have to spend. amongst the GPU seekers, i think 90% would be a fair number w/ the rest being ppl who might be looking into workstation notebooks or have other reasons.

First of all, I would like to leap to the defence of my i9300 brother and say that you probably didn't do the configuration of the 9300 in as cheap a way as it probably could have been done, because a base price of $2150 USD w/o software and warranty is PRETTY HEFTY, especially for Dell US. And that's even granting you the fact that you probably maxxed out a lot of the specs on the i9300, which may not be worth it to get the marginal performance increase, anyways. But a maxxed out i9300 would have some PRETTY impressive specs that would probably be overkill vs. a 17" Powerbook's specs (plz don't flame me here if I'm wrong, though ) Anyways, I've heard of ppl maxxing out most of their i9300's specs and getting it from Dell US with an appropriate deal for like $1645 USD. It infuriates me as a Dell Canada customer, it really does

Hmm, what else: ok, the WUXGA screen option on the i9300 should not be overlooked, especially if you'ee talking about professional developers who could probably use the increased resolution and screen real-estate. A lot of WUXGA owners really like their screens in terms of quality, too, so I should point that out.

Thirdly, accidental breakage coverage can be had for $40 USD... - oh, you said, "PER YEAR". Man, you scared me there. Why? Because I have an ordered i9300 coming via Purolator Ground that just reached Calgary, and I had ordered it with 3-years of CompleteCare coverage for $169 CDN. So I thought that I had just spent about $100 more than I needed to, had I gone with 3rd party insurance here in Canada.

Ok, so in summary, I guess I'll just say that the i9300 is one BARGAIN screaming powerful-machine that's still only 8lbs and reportedly runs disturbingly cool. And gets 5hrs of battery life on the 9-cell w/ the 128MB Radeon X300, or 3hrs with the 256MB Geforce 6800 Go. The i9300 may not come set-up for specialized professional tasks (although I think you showed that you can still configure it and add to it to get the job done), but one testament to it's suprising power can be summed up in one phrase:

Can you say, Half-Life 2 @ 1920x1200 native resolution with frame rates over 60fps (or something like that)? And I think that might even be on the CS:S stress test, and probably before overclocking anything, too.

if u're a nerd and into gaming - get the dell. simple as that.

if u're into looking great, not into gaming, do simple office/internet/email stuff - get the powerbook.

Oh and remember, the dell laptop will be outdated in a year or two, and can rarely be upgraded unless u wanna pay a lot. Might as well get a desktop.

P.S. I think the Inspiron XPS is the ugliest machine ever. If you take it out 2 years from now, it'll be laughed at.Whereas the powerbook will still look great.

The i9300 doesn't look too terrible, if I'm not mistaken. And the XPS Gen 2 looks... interesting.

Anyways, what do you mean the Dell laptop will be outdated in a year or two? What makes the Powerbook any less succeptible to that (other than the fact that its hardware is ALREADY outdated)? Granted, both laptops should be able to do what they were intended to do well for at least 1-2 years. And the Dell laptops are fairly upgradeable. You can pop in/replace the RAM fairly easily, and you can replace the CPU yourself, too (either a pin mod'd 400MHz Dothan or a stock new 533MHz Dothan). I don't think you can replace the CPU on a Powerbook. Oh, and not to mention the mini-PCI cards that you can upgrade. Ppl in the i9300/XPS2 forum have replaced their wireless card with an Atheros (Gigabyte?) card that they really like. Hmm, what else... the HD is upgradeable... internal optical drive is, too (but that is probably expensive)... some ppl have even replaced the screen with a WXGA+ Sony XBrite one. Oh yeah, you can get a PCMCIA card like a sound card, too, if you don't want to go the external USB route...

Oh, and I forgot to point out that the i9300 and XPS2 have really good sound for laptops, partly because they have a built-in subwoofer.

Anyways, the Pentium M is a powerful business / general use CPU, not to mention a good gaming CPU, and I would expect my Pentium M 1.6GHz to hold out fairly well for the next two years. If you're talking about the 2.13GHz P-M on the XPS Gen 2, then that performs about as well as an Athlon 3800+ desktop or a P4 3.6GHz under varying conditions (sometimes a fair bit worse, sometimes a whole lot better).

By outdated, i mean both internal wise and cosmetics wise. of course internal wise, both will get outdated (sorry if i didn't include the powerbook before). but the powerbook is more succeptible cosmetic-wise.

The ibook,powerbook has been out for a few years now and its look hasn't been changed much. Compared it to Dell, new generations come out frequently and it's exterior will be outdated.

Would you like to carry around an old generation laptop to places, or would you carry around a good looking laptop that will not grow out of fashion for at least half a decade?

It's like... having cars
Would you like an old 1980 toyota corolla or a 1980 porshe. I'd pick the porshe!

excuse me for being so shallow about looks, but if you want to show off to your friends about your expensive 2.7k laptop, it better damn well look good! (and STAY looking good!)

as for the sound, if i was a serious hardcore gamer, i would use a high quality headsets. no damn lousy speakers (even with subwoofer) will make do if u're playing FPS - listen for the footsteps .

I agree that the intel P-M is a wicked chip, but save the money and get a AMD 3800 instead and put it in a desktop.

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to the thread starter - you might as well build your own pc tower. the upgrades will be so much cheaper, and u won't have to worry about overheating and air circulation. If u're into lan parties or watever, just bring the whole tower to the party! Unless u're going to play in a coffee shop or something (which they probrably won't let you because of the noise).

From the 2.7k or watever u're gonna spend, take 1.2k for a decent laptop (i recommend a 12" - ibook, dell 700m, asus s5a/z33a) and the rest (1.3k) on a tower. with 1.5k, it'll be ****ing amazing and will last you for like 3 years.

Oh yah, don't complain if you get bad tech support from india!

True. That dell machine may have more power, but it can only direct that power in one direction. Window's multi-tasking ability is terrible because the kernel locks into a single program. OSX doesn't have the locking kernel and while it won't be as fast on a single program because of it, you can do a lot more in the background. Then there's expose.

Here's the final word that all this arguing will come out with:

Microsoft Windows XP is a terribly unstable operating system that will crash your system, destroy your files, and come out looking like it's been through a blender. Sure, it may have faster components, but you won't be able to run any programs for long because apparently, it crashes every couple minutes.

Mac OSX is a kiddy, childish operating system that is used only if you're too stupid to use a real operating system. Its a ripoff, but its the most stable operating system on the planet, and that's barring everything else. If you use Photoshop on it, it'll magic increase your productivity by 50%!

Basically, you're going to get biased sides on each. Just decide for yourself... nobody can tell you what kind of notebook to get, and trying to compare the raw power of a Powerbook versus an Inspiron is literally comparing apples and oranges; just because they're both computers doesn't mean they're necessarily comparable. Considering the availability of both X86 laptops and Apple Power/iBooks, there's really no reason why you can't just go in and click around. The Apple Stores are really fun to be in, and they'll bend over backwards to make sure you're pleased.

P.S. Stop trying to pick apart operating systems... you know you have no idea what you're talking about, and everybody else does. You're wasting time trying to convince other people of software superiority when you're basically just a consumer like the rest of us. Try sticking to viable reasons when promoting an operating system...

Hey Triadone,I do have Ut2k4 but I don't play it much anymore! I have moved on to BF2 and I am curently playing the Fear demo! (if you like Ut2k4 check it out!) Hey if either of your comps can handle BF2 (the apple can't,don't think the 512 of RAM and ATI 9600xt can either but it might.) and your ever on; my id is bluesupra98, we can get a game going!

And it will perform similarly in games and a lot of other application types to a Pentium M 2GHz or 2.13GHz. From what I remember of the benchmarks.

Apparently the i9300 and even the XPS Gen 2 to some extent perform pretty "coolly", even when gaming.

Ummm, bring a whole tower? How about the monitor? And then all the cables and accessories? I will agree; it can be done. But if you can get a suprisingly high-powered gaming laptop like an i9300 or XPS2...

So will an i9300 and XPS2, to a similar extent. Although I'd say about 2 years, and then the 3rd year will be more like "tolerable".

I think Dell Canada beats Dell US on this one

Oh, but in summary:
I should agree with jdlewh that the Dell Inspiron 9300 and XPS Gen 2 systems are quite different from the Powerbook/iBook lines. Often times, it will be like comparing apples to oranges for different user types.

Windows XP isn't that unstable since SP2. The absence of protected memory or kind of annoying though. My issue is with driver conflicts, lots of manual maintenance tasks, security problems, and a less than ideal GUI. yes, i have used it as my main operating system. It's not bad, but it's not that good either. It has the advantage of Microsoft being smart enough to license its use to other companies.

Funny, we use the ripoff term to describe windows. Microsoft was working with Mac source code for development purposes and then came out with a remarkably similar GUI program for DOS (non-NT windows is technically not a operating system since it runs on top of DOS.) a short time later. MS has a history of copying the work of others or flat out buying a program instead of coming up with their own ideas.

Most big companies are like that!

You guys should stop talking about XP vs. OSX.

Back to topic.... Ok, maybe I really WANT a gaming laptop.... Would I buy from dell? No.

Why? Reputation really blows chunks.

1) They use low quality parts to make their great "deals" if they are deals :P.

2) Pentium 4 laptops overheats! (unsure about PM, but i think they have cleared that problem. But still!)

3) They adjust prices so that with or without deals, u'll get the same price in the end (not entirely true, but for the most part).

4) Here's an example of why dell reputation sucks...
And i read that in the Dell inspiron 700m, there's some problems with the mic recordings having a lot of static and background noise. It turns out the motherboard was causing the issue (because it's cheap), but Dell won't acknowledge or accept the fact that their motherboards are the problem. They would give you a new motherboard, but it'll alawys come out the same! Anyways, I only know half (if not all) the story but from what i've read, I will never buy a Dell even tho i was tempted at times because of the prices.

5) Dell support REALLY sucks. You get transfered to someone in India who reads off a manual in an accent that you just can't understand! Even if you FOUND and ISOLATED the problem, they will still follow the whole list until they exhaust your patience until YOU hang up. Leaving messages to managers do not help as they willl not get back to you!

As for the debate on Dell Support Canada VS. US support.
Well, even if dell canada support > US support. The mere fact that the prices in Dell US is couple of hundred $ LESS than dell Canada, should explain why there's a difference in support .

If you dug up some more shit on dell, u'll probrably find a huge amount of 'em.

If you are planning to buy a dell laptop, make sure you get like 2-3 years warranty, that extra support crap, and an external harddrive and back up every file you create/modify!