Buying an iBook (Maybe!)

[LWA]

Guys,
I am looking at buying a new laptop/notebook for my final year at University. After posting on Hexus about a laptop I found one that looked pretty decent and other users provided me with other options.

However after looking in this (very useful) forum I liked the look of the 12" G4 ibook. I found out with an educational discount it costs:

iBook = £750.83
Airport Extreme = £74.26

Total = £825.09

Basically I am asking for users of iBooks to provide me with feedback of their experiences.

For example do you think their are any other upgrades that are worth taking?
What kind of warranty do you get with the iBook?

Any other comments will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Leon

[Jonny M]

Only upgrade I'd think about is doubling the RAM to 512MB, will probably work out cheaper to get that from Crucial and fitting it yourself. And spend the £20 or so for the 40GB hard drive, cause it's only £20 and you will use the space.

And in my opinion it's not worth the £199 for AppleCare

[Jonny M]

However, if you forgo the student discount and the oppertunity to upgrade the iBook via the Apple store, and buy it from:

http://www.johnlewis.com/stores/prod...&sku=230198558

(shameless pimping of place of work )

Then not only will you get a 2 year warranty, but you will get the oppertunity to extend it past 2 years at a pretty good price, and are pretty much guaranteed a service better than Apple can provide, since we lose enough money handing out replacements and giving money out as goodwill gestures for items which need repairing.

[XiXora]

i agree with caged i had 3 ipods thru john lewis and they were happy to take them back ( i had pc errors which i thought i fixed but werent each time then i ordered a 30gb ipod... 3hours later 40 gb ipod was out.

john lewis are good

[LWA]

Thank you both for your replies.

Caged: Quick question, can you upgrade the iBook you buy from John Lewis? So for example, it has a Airport Extreme built in?

Thanks again.

[Jonny M]

You can't upgrade them before you buy them, but we sell the Airport Extreme cards which are a piece of piss to install yourself

[pritsey]

Hi,

My iBook arrived a week ago. I had the airport extreme and bluetooth installed. However it is easy peasy to install the airport ex card as I had to remove it to install the extra RAM I ordered from Crucial. I didn't bother with anythign else, but I think that I'm going to get the other external dongle so that I can plug it into svideo/composite as the dongle that comes with it is VGA only. Get the monitor spanning hack and you're good to go!

[LWA]

Hi,

My iBook arrived a week ago. I had the airport extreme and bluetooth installed. However it is easy peasy to install the airport ex card as I had to remove it to install the extra RAM I ordered from Crucial. I didn't bother with anythign else, but I think that I'm going to get the other external dongle so that I can plug it into svideo/composite as the dongle that comes with it is VGA only. Get the monitor spanning hack and you're good to go!

Did you order yours from John Lewis?

Think I'm going to order one of these :-) Went to PC World yesterday to have a look and a play with one, very nice.

[LWA]

Just another quick note: I notice that stores like game sell games for the mac however they are expensive. Are there places where they aren't so expensive?

[Jonny M]

Nah £35 seems to be the going rate

[LWA]

Thanks Caged for all your help.

One last question: What is the iBook like for word processing? Does it come with some kind of MS Word equivalent? Also do you happen to know whether you can get a jdk for the mac?

Thanks again.

[Jonny M]

Not really, but

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/oo...downloads.html

Is a free MS office equivalent. Try it before you shell out for Office.

And Apple are loving the software developer, and they appear to like Java as well, so no doubt something exists.

[XiXora]

but office 2004 is excellent...