My 12" G4 Powerbook arrived on Thursday, precisely 9 days after ordering. Excellent time considering I custom ordered.
When I first unpacked it, I was stunned...it's a work of art. Incredible fit and finish and form factor. The Apple designers and Jonathan Ive should be proud.
The first thing I did was install the Airport Extreme card. The process is very straight forward and easily done. You remove the battery, open a little hinged door, slide the card in, connect the antena, close the door and replace the battery.
Next I booted it up. Initial startup took about 40secs, rather slow, but acceptable. The battery had about 50% charge and it started the configuration and registration process. Amasingly, it recognized my D-Link routed wireless network and self configured itself instantly without me having to enter any settings. Once that was done, Software Update launched and I updated 10.2.3 which came installed with the Powerbook to 10.2.4. Thank you OS X for making this so easy and transparent.
I proceded to setup the System Preferences and install some software. I followed up with permissions repair, but that's all. File sharing, once activated, worked seamlessly over the Wi-Fi network.
One thing about the Powerbook is that it's extremely quiet. There is no fan and I had to place my ear practically on top of the laptop to hear the hard drive. The installed Superdrive does make some noise but it's not bad.
The aluminium alloy chassis does get quite warm, but not hot and it's comfortable resting in contact with the body.
OS X runs quite speedily on the 867MHz processor with 640MB RAM, even without the L3 cache. Photoshop doesn't seems to miss it either. Will see how it does with iMovie and iDVD.
The battery needs to be conditioned to give optimal life and I'm doing that now. I got about 3 hrs. on the first full charge with heavy Superdrive usage (installing software, testing DVD play, ripping CDs, etc). If I can get 4hrs with normal use, I'll be happy.
So far I have nothing negative to say about this PB, time will tell. I'll keep y'all posted.
