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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1683
Toshiba Satellite v. PowerBook G4
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
February 12th 2003
Quick clicks: how do the new Toshiba notebooks stack up against Apple's range of
PowerBook G4s?
Toshiba has released new Satellite notebooks with 15" and 16" screens, and we were
interested to see how they shaped up - specification-wise - compared with the aging
Titanium 15.2, and the mega-wide 17" G4 (aka 'Dr. Evil').
The 2455-S305 (Toshiba Marketing really need to get a handle on names, don't you
think?) gets a 15" LCD, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, a 420 GeForce Go with 32MB RAM,
FireWire, and a DVD-R drive. All this for $2,099. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?
You'll be even more impressed when you find it packs a desktop P4, not a Pentium M or
Mobility CPU, which power down to a much lower clock when operating on battery. A
533MHz system bus is standard.
But delve more deeply and check out the battery life (surely, almost # 1 among laptop
users): Toshiba says you can get "up to" 2.5 hours life. That's "up to." Their words.
The system bus speed is nice, but given that hard drives only spin at 4,200rpm stock,
or a little faster at 5,400, the chances of maxing out that bus are going to be
seriously limited by the hardware itself.
One feature we do like is the expansion bay (like the Wallstreet/Lombard/Pismo and
their earlier brethren), which allows you to slot in an extra hard drive, with up to
60GB of storage. Apple portables being closed boxes these days, we'll have to concede
this one.
Hold your breath. Here comes the weight. Ready?
7.9lbs.
Portable desktop replacement? Portable desk more like.
Monitor support? RGB. How many types of display can you connect to a PowerBook G4?
Five? Admittedly, you can connect a TV via S-video, but it's scarcely anything to
write home about.
Graphics doesn't even compare. The 15" PB still packs a Radeon 9000 which, ganers and
wise people tell us, is vastly superior to the GeForce Go. And 64MB of VRAM is
standard, double the Toshiba's (yes, we know the lower-priced 867MHz PowerBook 15 has
only 32MB VRAM). Fact is, though, you can't option up the Satellite to 64MB. You can,
however, option the PB up or down, dependong on which model you choose.
Apple apparently hobbles its DVD-R/RWs by limiting them to 1x and preventing them from
writing DVD-RW (unless you use Disc Copy, perhaps). Interestingly, Toshiba also limits
its DVD-R to 1x, although RW isn't on the rejection list.
We don't see leading-edge tech on the Satellite either. No Gigabit Ethernet; no
Airport Extreme (802.11g). We note the AC adapter likes 90w, so your power bills will
be up. Also, check out battery recharge time: 7-12 hours (!) when the Satellite is on
(in orbit, if you like).
Marks for including FireWire (i.Link). But don't let any salesperson tell you FireWire
and i.Link are exactly the same thing. They're not. You can't power peripherals off it
for a start. Ask Sony. They were the ones who crippled it.
You could get exactly the same thing with a 16" screen and 100MHz more Pentium,
although Apple trumps that with the 17" screen. Plus FireWire 800 is standard. And
FireWire 400 is faster than '480Mb/ps' USB 2.0 in any case.
For Stone Age users out there, the Satellite still has a peripheral port. And the
specs, curiously, speak of a 'high-speed Infrared port'. Since when has 4Mb/ps been
high-speed? I like IrDA as a curio as much as the next guy, but it is seriously dead,
as 802.11 and BlueTooth have established.
As ever, you get what you pay for. The Toshiba looks impressive - and inexpensive - up
front, but it lacks many of the PowerBook's niceties.
Although I'm a long-time admirer of Toshiba's rugged notebook construction. You can
hit a burglar with one of those and get charged with Murder 1.
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