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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1804
"The First Apple Portable Keyboard With Soul": More Plaudits for Mini-Me
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
March 11th 2003
It even comes with "lay-zers".
Apple's aluminium PowerBook 12" continues to corner a market all to itself - in
gushing prose. In fact, Newsday's Stephen Williams declares that Mini-Me virtually has
"no competition".
Williams cites the PowerBook's 867MHz G4 and the lush keyboard as major selling
points, not to mention the razor-sharp 12.1" TFT. These, he says, are enough to let
the PB-12 rise above the Vaios and other Wintel notebooks in or around the Two Grand
bracket. Particularly as the PowerBook costs a mere $1,799, or about $2k with the
optional slot-loading DVD-R SuperDrive.
Airport Extreme and the nVidia GeForce4 420 graphics card also get their share of
laudation. Williams owns an iBook, and Mini-Me dusts it handily in every department.
Some criticism is inevitable; but it's what's missing rather than what's there that
comes under the gun. For instance, the PowerBook-17's backlit keyboard is on the
wishlist, along with a CardBus slot. Also, Mini-Me only supports VGA out and
S-video/composite out - so Apple's flat-panel displays are out.
Analysis: A couple of minor corrections: Williams cites PB-12's 640MB RAM limit as a
limiting factor. But as Apple's Developer Note states, Mini-Me will support 1GB DIMMs
- when they become available, which will give it a full RAM quotient of 1.128GB.
Second, there is a way of using an adapter or two to connect VGA out to DVI and ADC.
Not cheap - but possible. The graphics card supports flat panels, although it would be
nice if it would do it out of the box. However, we suspect most PB-12 buyers are
looking for the ultimate small, light laptop, and are probably less likely to use it
as portable desktop system.
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