Powerbook, switching, and backpack

I've now had my 17" 1.33ghz G4 powerbook for a month, and a Tom Bihn Smart Alec backpack for it for 3 weeks.

All told, switching has mostly been a win.

The powerbook seemed huge when I first got it. Now it doesn't. The 17" seems like a very natural size. The battery life is better than expected (although expectations were low). It can tear through a SETI@Home work unit in about 7 or 8 hours. For comparison, My dual-2.2ghz Xeon desktop tears through one in about 4 hours, and the 333mhz Sun Ultrasparc-II server in my basement takes about 16-17 hours to eat one, but with the ultrasparc, I'd bet the whole thing fits in cache. The ultrasparc has a 2mb cache, and the Xeon and the G4 both have 512kb of cache.

However, the machine sometimes feels slow - the Safari web browser is often slower to render a page (specifically, my my.yahoo.com home page) than Mozilla 1.5 is on my old 500mhz P3 thinkpad. I don't know why that is - my guess is the display model is to blame, doing compositing rather than bitblts. But I'm not sure. And Virtual PC is slower than molasses in january. It feels like a 90mhz pentium - maybe not even that fast.

The backpack is great. Kudos to Tom Bihn for a splendid product. I had thought that the pack would be smaller than it was, but it's actually a very practical size - there's enough room for all my goodies, the backpack looks stylish, and I feel like the machine is safe inside it. Laurel also likes it!


I carry my machine, a writing tablet, some pens, a power adapter, my tungsten-T, my sunglasses, a bottle of water, bizcards, and sometimes full-size headphones. That all fits, and there's room for more. I could fit a couple cans of diet coke, a t-shirt, some CDs, my iPod, a couple magazines, and the backpack would hold it all with no complaints.

The customer service is also award-winning. I carried on a corespondance with someone at their offices before deciding to buy one, and they answered all my questions in detail. Afterwards, when the pack arrived, it was missing two pullstraps on the side zippers. I emailed to ask if that was intentional, and two pullstraps showed up in the mail a couple days later.

Highly recommended.

Oh - and it's not just for powerbooks...