Article from Today's Wall Street Journal (note the last paragraph) - These reviews remind me of when Dell introduced its notebook in August of '94 (beginning of turnaround)
After a Few Tough Years,
The Macintosh Is Back
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
LADIES AND gentlemen, we have a winner from Apple Computer. After a couple of years of churning out mostly mediocre Macintosh designs, Apple has introduced an elegant new model that evokes the company's great past.
This momentous Mac is a laptop, the PowerBook G3, and I'm writing these words on one. Actually, it's not a single laptop model. It's a whole series of laptops that share the same striking new design and speedy family of processor chips, and which Apple is willing to customize in just about every key respect for every purchaser. The result is over 1,000 possible configurations of screens, processor speeds, disk drives, memory and modems at prices ranging from a modest $2,299 to a hefty $6,519.
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Walter S. Mossberg answers selected computer and technology questions from readers in Mossberg's Mailbox. If you have a question you want answered, or any other comment or suggestion about his column, please e-mail Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.
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Even the cheapest of the new PowerBook G3 machines is a very powerful computer, armed with a new line of processor chips, called the PowerPC G3. Apple claims this new chip handily outpaces the Intel Pentium II, the fastest processor available in mainstream Windows computers. Lacking a test lab, I can't vouch for this, but I can say that the midrange PowerBook G3 I tested is blazingly fast.
Processor speed is often overemphasized. The PowerBook G3, however, has other things going for it, including its handsome and functional styling, great manuals and help screens and better Internet integration than in the Macs of a few years back.
The new laptops also benefit from Microsoft's recent introduction of a vastly improved Mac version of the company's market-leading Office suite of software. It isn't included with the new PowerBooks, but it ran quickly and flawlessly on my test machine. Similarly, Intuit's recent reversal of a decision to kill the Mac version of its Quicken finance software is a boost for the new Macs.
The few downsides and compromises in the new PowerBook are far outweighed by its strengths.
THE MODEL I tested, with a 250-MHz chip, costs $3,899 with its very sharp 13.3-inch active-matrix screen, 32 megabytes of memory, fast internal 56K modem, floppy-disk drive, CD-ROM drive and comfortable four-gigabyte hard disk. The cheapest configurations have a still-roomy but less sharp 12.1-inch passive-matrix screen and a 233-MHz version of the processor. The costliest versions sport a huge 14.1-inch active-matrix screen, and a 292-MHz G3 chip.
It's impossible to list here all the prices and feature combinations available to PowerBook G3 buyers at Apple's on-line store on the Web. On-line shoppers can choose one of nine preconfigured models or design their own, while the Web site calculates and recalculates the price. Other companies, such as Dell, have on-line "configurators" like this, but I've never seen such a flexible one for laptops. If you're not comfortable buying on the Web, you can also order PowerBooks over the phone from Apple or buy them from CompUSA and some mail-order houses. Apple says it takes two to three weeks to build most configurations.
Like top-of-the-line Windows portables, the new PowerBooks aren't the lightest laptops in the world, and they aren't for frequent fliers. At over seven pounds, they should be seen as desktop replacement machines, for people who have limited desk space, or who want to tote the same machine between office and home, or who travel only occasionally with a computer.
But they are striking to look at, with curved sides and rounded corners and a rock-solid feel, done up in a rich black color. On both the top and bottom, there's a large wineglass-shaped inset made of a soft, easily gripped rubberized material, with a large, raised Apple logo in the center that's white, instead of the company's usual rainbow colors.
ONCE YOU OPEN the sturdy front latch, the PowerBook G3 reveals a big, comfortable keyboard that's not quite as good as IBM's ThinkPad's, but that still has a very nice feel and well-spaced keys. The cursor is moved by running your fingertip over a touchpad, a device I find inferior to the pointing stick used by IBM and Toshiba. But the PowerBook G3 version is the best I've seen, with a large butterfly-shaped mouse button below it and ample side wrist rests.
One of the coolest features of the PowerBook G3 is the way you can swap batteries and disk drives in and out of the two bays embedded in the sides. Each bay can accept a battery or floppy disk drive, and the larger right-hand bay can also house a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. Best of all, you can change these components while the computer is running.
Battery life is acceptable, but not fabulous. In my tests, the lithium-ion battery, which has convenient lights on the outside to show how much power it has left, lasted about 2 1/2 hours without any of the computer's power-saving features turned on. Apple claims it can go up to an hour longer than that using the power-saving settings, and you can double your portable power by ordering an extra battery for $199 and putting one in each expansion bay.
Like all modern Macs, the PowerBooks G3 can read floppy disks recorded on Windows machines. And some Mac software, such as Microsoft Office, can open and save Windows data files. But Apple erred, in my view, by not including on every PowerBook G3 one of the two popular programs that permit a Mac to actually run Windows software titles, many of which aren't available in Mac versions.
Still, Apple has hit a home run with these new PowerBooks, and that's a good omen for a once-great company that just last year seemed aimless and listless.
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