Word: ibook
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BARBIE GROWS UP Often a search for the coolest design ends with the simplest. Witness the iBook, Apple's consumer-priced laptop, which underwent a profound and much lauded transformation last week. Intended as a kind of portable iMac, the two-year-old iBook started life as a bulky, gaudy rubberized clamshell that barely fit into backpacks, with a carry-case plastic handle and choice of colors that critics--yours truly included--derided as "Barbie-like...
...plastic dolls were in attendance last week when Steve Jobs showed off the iBook's smaller, wiser exterior on Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus. After the runaway success of his superslim titanium G4 Powerbook, it seems Jobs has finally figured out what the public wants in a laptop computer. The new iBook looks and feels very much like a titanium Powerbook that went through a compactor and got drenched in milky-white plastic. This is not a bad thing. The newcomer is 1.3 in. thick--a mere 0.3 in. deeper than the titanium model, yet has shed about...
Best of all, iBook will save you around 2,000 big ones. Running from $1,299 for bare bones to $1,799 for a version that plays DVDs and burns CDs, it won't break the bank like a $2,599 to $3,997 titanium model. Did Apple make sacrifices for that price? Sure. The screen is only 12 in., though it has excellent resolution. And you have to put CDs on a tray rather than slot them in like bread in a toaster...
...first unheard-of departure, Jobs actually started on time. Secondly, his audience was press only rather than press plus trade-show loyalists, which made it rather like watching the Yankees in an empty stadium; our appreciative and respectful silence when he finally held the iBook aloft like a trophy didn't quite cut it. It didn't quite feel like the Emperor was wearing no clothes (he was, in fact, decked out in traditional black turtleneck and blue jeans), but it came close. Thirdly, he was almost - gasp! - subdued during the subsequent interview. I swear, he almost smiled once...
...wait for the next Macworld and its attendant wave of adoration? Jobs claims he was trying to catch what is known as the "dads and grads" season, the mid-May madness when most computers used by students and educators are actually bought. (The new, lighter, fully-featured low-priced iBook is being heavily promoted as a boon to education, and Apple was handed a dream piece of publicity when one school district in Virginia pre-ordered a whopping 23,000 of them...