New PowerBook
Well, my new 1.25 GHz Aluminum PowerBook finally came. I got it unpacked, set up the hard drive, cloned my old hard drive over, and I'm up and running. My old 500MHz TiBook is now packed away until I can sell it.
Major bummer: They packed the wrong power adapter. There are two adapters for the PowerBook line: the original 45W, and a 65W that was introduced during the time of the DVD-burning TiBook. Apple has a tech info article that explains the difference. 45W ones have "45W" marked on them, and have a silver plug. 65W ones are marked "65W" and have a white plug. The adapter they shipped me has a white plug, and is marked "45W".
So is it a 45W or 65W? I ran the computer on it to charge the battery, then ran the battery dry. Once the AlBook shut down due to lack of power, I plugged in the adapter and tried to wake the machine. No go. Not until I plugged in my spare adapter (a 65W) did it wake. So it's a rare 45W/white plug model. I called Apple to complain and get a new adapter.
The screen's very nice. No sign (yet) of any white spots. No dead pixels. The only complaint is that the bottom-right corner's backlighting is faint. Not worth the hassle of sending it in.
Headphones don't fully plug in. There remains a 1mm gap. That's annoying.
The FireWire 400 port is pointing the wrong way. Major annoyance. Draw an arrow through the port (for FW400, parallel to the long axis, pointing to the thinner end; for FW800, perpendicular to the long axis, pointing to the thinner end). The arrow must point either down or to the right. I think this is mandated by the FW800 spec, but is only recommended for FW400. Nevertheless, the AlBook getting this one wrong is disappointing.
The sound is much quieter than the old TiBook. I used to have the volume set at one notch. For the AlBook, if the volume's not at the half-way point, I can't hear it. And it's more muffled, too. In the TiBook, the sound came clearly out of the speaker grilles. But in the AlBook, the grilles seem decorative. The sound actually seems to come from below the keyboard, slightly left of the middle.
The video performance is much better. MAME's OpenGL plugin was useless on the TiBook; it's amazing on the AlBook. iTunes's visualizer flies.
Processorwise, this thing clearly wins. Compiles are faster, and XCode is actually usable. M1 can crunch through songs with no skipping or jamming.
Probably the most impressive display of processor power now is QuickTime Player playing a MIDI file. No, really. If you want to see a Mac brought to its knees, play a complicated MIDI file with a 100 MB SoundFont. QuickTime is embarrassingly unoptimized there. The TiBook would choke; the AlBook goes happily along using 70% of its processor time.
So those are my initial thoughts. Haven't even yet had a chance to burn some DVDs or do heavy-duty 3D. But the backlit keyboard is très cool.