Shouldn’t the new dual G4 power book be released soon?
Well, until a reliable rumor site like thinksecret.com/ says otherwise, I’m not going to assume they exist.
With what CPU? If you’re talking of the Freescale cores, those are (afaik) scheduled to be mass produced from the first half of 2006. That seems to be a while…
kelake,
If you want a nice chat app, try Adium X. I’ve been using it for a while and really like it. Other multi-protocol (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ all in one) are Fire and Proteus.
As for Mail, I haven’t had any problems with Panther Mail but I really can’t wait for Tiger to come out. I’ve tried Tiger a few times and it is really amazing. You can use smart folders like smart playlists in iTunes. I think Thunderbird might do something similar but it really has an awkward interface.
We’ll probably know what Steve Jobs has in his hat tomorrow- whether it’s a G5 or dual-G4 powerbook. I’ve bought a couple of iBook G4 in the past 10 months and have been really happy with them, but I want a G5 powerbook.
BTW, if you need local Mac/OS X help and recent deals information,
check out
Most posts are in Chinese, but lots of people there read and write English.
Well, until a reliable rumor site like thinksecret.com/ says otherwise, I’m not going to assume they exist.[/quote]
It’s a great little computer for writing and surfing the net at cafes, but if you want to do video editing, it’s good to have two firewire ports. My 12" G4 Powerbook only has one, which means unless it was only a small project I would have to capture to my hdd and then transfer the footage to a firewire external hdd. Also, I managed to crash Final Cut Pro 4 a couple of times. For music, when I plug in my M-audio keyboard adaptor to the USB, the computer just shuts down. I have Garage Band and Soundtrack, but they’re no use if I can’t even plug in a keyboard.
I thought I add a few more software thoughts for Mac OSX.
OpenOffice.org is available for the Mac, although you have to have an XServer running. Apple supplies a decent XServer, so that should not be a problem. Haven’t tried OpenOffice on the Mac yet, but it runs great under Linux and M$ Windoze.
Fire is a great multiprotocol chat client, also for free. Take a look at fink, a project to port all the Linux software onto the Mac. You can freely choose from a huge repository, including KDE & Gnome applications. There are also really great tools for MPEG and DVD processing, check out MissingMPEGTools. Fugu is a nice SCP/SFTP client, works great. Skype is also available for the Mac, just tried it out yesterday, awesome, finally wireless VoIP in my appartment.
WiFi is a snap with the Mac, especially when you want to switch between locations. I haven’t seen anything for M$ Windoze that comes to be even close to be as comfortable, so if you move around with your Notebook, the Mac is the way to go.
The Mac might be a little slow in processing, but the interface makes more than up for it, and so does the Unix framework it is based on.
I hope I did not forget anything.