A Month with a Mac - Part II: The Mobile Experience
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 24, 2005 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Display and Fiber Optic Keyboard Lighting
The display on the PowerBook is one of its strong points. While it doesn't hold a candle to Apple's desktop Cinema Displays, it is quite strong as a notebook display. I'd say that the display on the PowerBook G4 is one of the best, if not the best, display which I've ever used on a notebook. The 15" display has a native resolution of 1280 x 854, which is what you can expect from just about any current generation 15.2" widescreen display.Apple outfitted the Powerbook with ambient light sensors to control two things: the brightness of the display, and the fiber optic backlighting of the keyboard. The light sensors for the screen are located behind the grilles for the speakers, on the left and right of the keyboard.
Both features can be overridden, but their pros generally outweigh their cons. The best example of their use occurred while I was writing this very sentence on a flight over to Taiwan. Given the length of the flight, there are many times when the lights in the cabin are dimmed as well as brought back up again. I started writing while the cabin lights were dimmed, which caused the Powerbook's sensors to activate the keyboard lighting and dim the screen. About two hours before I landed, the cabin lights were turned up for breakfast service. Almost instantaneously when the lights went up, the brightness on the screen increased (to compensate for the higher ambient light) and the illumination on the keyboard turned off. The same types of features are useful for office environments when the lights are turned on after the end of a presentation, or in a school environment when the same occurs.
The fiber optic lighting on the keyboard is fairly impressive. Instead of being lit by a few LEDs causing bright spots on the keyboard, the face of each individual key is lit using a fiber optic network of lights. Only the letter or number on the key is illuminated; for example, the majority of the F key remains unlit, but the letter "F" itself is lit creating a very unique effect that is very well appreciated by someone who has to type in the dark a lot on airplanes.
We apologize for the blurriness of the image, but you get the point.
The fiber optic lighting isn't without its weaknesses; for starters, it does help contribute to the cost of the PowerBook, but that's not a huge issue.
You can control the degree of lighting by using the F8 - F10 keys on the keyboard. F8 will turn the keyboard lighting off, F9 will decrease the level of illumination and F10 will increase the level. Depending on how you have your keyboard settings configured, you may or may not have to hold down the "fn" key.
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RMSistight - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Hey Anand, make sure you check your video links. One of them doesn't work. Also, when are you going to release a full review of the Mac Mini? I'm dying to see it's performance and also what it looks like piece by piece under the hood.billsuspect - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
When it comes time to review the mini, please please please keep focused on the fact that it's a Grandma Machine!Entropyq3 - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
That iLife comment above - what I've found, silly as it may sound particularly from a middleaged man, is that Llife really encourages creativity in its users.Just about everyone I know that has gotten in touch with the programs have gotten more interested in some creative area - be it making tracks in GarageBand, using their digital camera much more since it's so easy to keep track of your pictures in iPhoto, getting back into music due to iTunes, or actually doing something with your videos in iMovie so that they can be shown to and actually enjoyed by other people.
Just seeing them as lightweight "getting started" apps misses the effect of them being so damn accessible that even my elderly mother can use them. And she finds surfing the web difficult. If you have a latent interest or talent, the iLife suite will let you get your feet wet and try things out. And that's important.
Entropyq3 - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Interesting to see your takes on the mac - as a long time user of many platforms I'm gratified to see a representative of the PC hardware reviewing community opening up to what other platforms can offer. Although it is a bit galling when a newbie on a platform you have used for a long time comes up with nifty features you weren't even aware was there. :)If you are going to review the Mac mini, then having a look at the iLife suite is nigh on unavoidable - it makes up such a large part of what the user experience of the Mac mini would be to many general users. But then, that would probably make the review take longer, and the suite is not at all specific to the mini.
goates - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Great article.If only more PC users were this open minded about using other platforms.
Chuckles - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
#6: You can set the trackpad to click when tapped without Sidetrack.Anand: Nice article again.
habibbijan - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
If you want to try to avoid using the mouse as much as possible, you should take a look at Quicksilver.http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
This little freeware app allows you to launch any program or navigate your filesystem with just a few keystrokes.
Hikari - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Good article!However, I sort of disagree on the screen. I think Macs have an even bigger need for higher resolutions. I hope the Powerbooks get 1400x1050 or some similar widescreen resolution soon, but that might not be until the next OS version which has resolution independence I think.
I owned a Pbook 867. :D
hopejr - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
Great article! Learnt a few things in that I didn't know about before (e.g. the fn+delete thing - not having a proper delete key on my iBook G4 always irked me, but now I know I had one all along!, oh, and the drag folders into the save window thing - that's really nice).I think I'm going to be even more productive on my laptop than I already am! (I use it as my main system too :P)
vmajor - Monday, January 24, 2005 - link
I just bought a an iMac for my elderly neighbout that has never used a computer before. There really wasn't any other choice. A PC just would not work as well - the viruses and trojans would have brought the system to its knees within a week.What surprised me was how much I liked the iMac! The machine is truly fantastic! I am a hardcore PC user - having built all my PCs over the past ten years or so. But I can really see myself owning a nice Mac with a huge wide screen (or two) sometime in the near future, and keep my XP Althlon 64 (FX) box for games.
All of you really need to play with MacOS X and admire the achievement... simple and nice and it still has a fully functional UNIX shell...