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The Road Warrior Mailbag + From The Archive - October 15, 2007

FastMac 550 MHz G4 Pismo Processor Upgrade

From The Road Warrior Archive - "Simply The Coolest Piece Of Hardware Apple Has Ever Built" [First published January 21, 2001]

FastMac 550 MHz G4 Pismo Processor Upgrade

From Taurus

To LoneWolf:

In some aspects, the Pismo is superior to all the Apple notebooks that followed it: None of the successors can run on battery for 10 hours (with 2 batteries installed). WiFi signal quality is better compared to the TiBooks/AlBooks, because the antenna is not trapped in a metal cage. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen is also more convenient for DTP and word processing compared to the 16:9 or 16:10 displays that are used nowadays, because if you want to view a full page on the screen, you don't have to zoom out as much.

I use my Pismo (with 10.4) professionally, day in, day out.

Of course it is more than noticeable that the Pismo is getting old. But I don't see a simple solution. The MacBook is not an option because it's such a low-cost, low-end design. Just look at that dreaded UMA architecture. But I don't like the MBP either, particularly because the case design is so outdated in my opinion. Apple has been using silver metal cases for its professional notebook line for more than six years now and an overhaul is probably long overdue. One would expect that an MBP with the black&silver design of the iMac/iPhone is in the pipeline, but with even ThinkSecret remaining silent on an MBP redesign, I don't expect anything before January, if at all. I also don't like buying bleeding-edge products, so even if a redesigned MBP is released in 2008, I'll wait at least another year before I actually buy one.

Bottom line is, I will hang on to the Pismo as long as possible. I currently have a G3 500 MHz installed, but should it be possible to run Leopard with the G4 upgrade, I'll definitely buy one. So this shows that there IS a market for these upgrades.

@Charles:

One piece of information that you may want to add to the article is that German readers may purchase the FastMac upgrade from http://www.habanet.de , thereby avoiding the hassle with customs, import tax, etc. This is the only German distributor of a Pismo G4 upgrade that I know of.

By the way, great to see you guys at the other side of the pond are using Geman "Wiha" screwdrivers. The factory where these tools are produced is in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), not far from where I live!

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Hi Taurus;

Thanks for the tip about the German source for the FastMac upgrade.

The little Wiha Torx T8 screwdriver is great! Fine quality.

I agree about the Pismo. I intend on contiuing to use mine as long as it's a useful tool, and it certainly still is at this point. A WiFi card will be the next addition.

Good point about battery life. I have three extended-life Pismo batteries, which provide 5+ hours runtime each, so I can go fifteen hours without recharging if need be (very convenient for long power blackouts, and another reason I think myself for using laptops).

Charles

From The Road Warrior Archive - "Simply The Coolest Piece Of Hardware Apple Has Ever Built" [First published January 21, 2001]

A thin mailbag this week, so time for another cruise down memory lane from The Road Warrior archive. This time I've chosen my analysis of the features of the then just-introduced Titanium PowerBook G4, first published on January 24, 2001.

I was pretty enthusiastic about the new G4 'Book at that point, as the title I chose for the column underscores, but in revisiting the commentary I'm interested to see that I was already having some misgivings about the route Apple had taken with this machine, for example the disappearance of the removeble device expansion bay that had been one of the really great features of the PowerBook from the 500 Series and PowerBook 5300/190 on. I still think ditching the expansion bay in the quest for ultra-thin form factors was an unfortunate design choice. Sure, the razor-thin 'Books look cool, but I'm basically a form follows function kind of guy if the form is going to result in serious functional compromises.

However, at the time I wrote this piece, I still anticipated that I would be getting a TiBook. However, the more I though about it, the more it occurred that the Pismo PowerBook G3 that the TiBook had replaced in Apple's portable lineup was in several respects a more desirable machine, and in October, 2001, I bought my first Pismo, which I still have and use, albeit considerably tweaked from its stock specification, in part thanks to, yes, that expansion bay. I've never regretted buying the Pismo instead of a Ti.

The TiBook did improve substantially over its relatively long, 2 1/2 year + production life, and the last iterations, especially the ultimate 1 GHz unit, were decent machines. However, the Ti was also a realtively fragile beastie, and while I have no hard figures on the topic, I would guess that a substantially greater proportion of the older Pismos built are still in active service. The aluminum PowerBooks and MacBook Pros that followed in the TiBool's wake were and are unequivocally better machines, but the Ti did set the metal-cased notebook paradigm that has served Apple and its customers extremely well.

Anyway, here are my thoughts at the beginning of the metalBook epoch.

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Simply The Coolest Piece Of Hardware Apple Has Ever Built [First published January 21, 2001]

A look at the technical side of Ti. Does it measure up as a desktop replacement?

Back in 1998, I argued here in The Road Warrior that Apple's then-new G3 Series PowerBooks had essentially removed the necessity owning a desktop computer for a majority of Mac-users. With more speed than any but the very fastest desktop models -- Mac or PC -- and an inventory of features that would have been considered the pinnacle of high end only a couple of years ago, a PowerBook could finally be "the computer to have when you're only having one" with no excuses necessary.

That contention this certainly proved true in practice for me, and I have been using WallStreet PowerBooks as my main workhorse computer since shortly after I posted that column. I can't recall a single instance where I have wished that the WallStreet was a desktop machine. PowerBooks, at least for me, are truly "the logical Mac."

So how does the argument stand up in 2001, with the introduction of the new titanium PowerBook G4?

Pretty well, I think, and I'm not the only one. John Siracusa of Ars Technica noted last week that "One of the stated goals of the PowerBook G4 project was to create an 'unreasonably thin' portable computer while retaining all the functionality of a full 'desktop replacement laptop... It's faster and more capable than my desktop computer. It weighs about as much as my keyboard. I want one." Me too.

However, not everyone is as blown away by the TiBook as John Siracusa and I are. Some have noted, correctly, that in practical use relatively few people will notice much of a performance boost from the 400 MHz and 500 MHz G4 chips in the titanium machine, compared with the 400 MHz and 500 MHz G3 chips in Pismo. Others have complained that while the Ti's new 15.2-inch display looks spectacularly larger, it in fact offers no significant increase in resolution compared with the 14.1-inch unit on Pismo , Lombard, and many WallStreets, and VRAM remains at the relatively puny 8 MB PowerBooks have had since the introduction of Lombard in 1999.

Then there are the matters of one fewer FireWire port than Pismo has, and no expansion bay, and the fact that, at least for now, Ti does not support large capacity RAM modules that normal people can afford. These criticisms are all true, and in the short-term people who prefer Pismo to Ti are in excellent shape, because they can buy a leftover Pismo at fire sale prices, and end up owning a very fine PowerBook for little or no price premium over an iBook. If you are so inclined, go for it!

For me however, nothing but a Ti will do for my next machine. I'm happy with my WallStreet for the immediate future, but my next PowerBook will be titanium if all goes as I hope.

So let's take a closer look at the technical aspects of Ti.

Ti's display, while it looks humongous, as noted actually does not up the resolution ante all that much from the 14.1-inch displays that have been available on PowerBooks for more than two and a half years. The new 15.2" unit's native resolution is a respectable but modest 1152 x 768, as compared with the erstwhile 14.1 incher's 1024 x 768. This is no hardship from my perspective, and indeed I prefer moderate resolutions to gazillions of teeny-weeny pixels, but then again, I am not a graphic artist. For text-crunching, which is the bulk of what I do with computers, the 800 x 600 resolution of my Wall Streets 12.1" screen suits me fine. I could just use more real estate, and the Ti's display strikes me as a fine compromise. Ti's display will also support 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 resolutions, as well as 1600x1200 on an external monitor.

However Apple's current ADC displays are not supported by Ti, which still has a VGA port because the PowerBook is unable to supply power to the monitor through ADC. That's fine with me. I prefer to have the potential of VGA's vastly wider selection of monitor choices than the proprietary ADC.

Some have indeed complained about the demise of the PowerBook expansion bay in Ti. However, in order to get the thing down to one inch thickness and 5.3 pounds, something had to go, and I have to concede that I have never actually used the expansion bay in my WallStreet for anything other than the standard CD-ROM drive. On the other hand, my daughter now has both an expansion bay hard drive, and expansion bay ZIP Drive for my old PowerBook 5300, VST units in both cases, and the expansion bay concept is very cool in practically use. Nevertheless, I can live without it. The standard, slot loading DVD-ROM drive in the Ti will probably suffice for my needs. A CD-RW drive would have been nice, but realistically, Apple has held Ti to a price point just one hundred dollars higher than the entry level Pismo .

Happily, there is still a PC card slot in Ti, so that expansion avenue is still open. Compared with Pismo, Ti has also dropped from two to one FireWire ports. There was not room for more than a cumulative three USB and FireWire ports, and Apple reasoned that most FireWire devices have provision for daisy-chaining, so the second FireWire port got the bum's rush.

Without having opened one up yet, I infer that ease of getting inside Ti for upgrading and service has been somewhat enhanced from Pismo, which represented a retrogression in this department from WallStreet and Lombard. Ti's metal case has facilitated a removable bottom panel, fastened with 7 screws. Instructions for its removal can be found in the battery bay. The only officially user-serviceable part in there is the hard drive, however. RAM upgrades are still implemented by removing the keyboard, which one wants to handle like eggs when it is unsupported. I hear.

Ti comes with 128 MB of standard SDRAM on the low-end model, and 256 megabytes on the high-end machine. 128 MB is no more than minimally adequate these days, especially with OS X coming. I thought that 192 megabytes of RAM in my WallStreet would be luxuriously ample, but I still have to revert to Virtual Memory or RAM Doubler to avoid running out of RAM with my usual suite of applications open. Ti uses the same PC 100 RAM that was incorporated into Pismo, but supports only up to 1.5" low-profile DIMMs, and ships with a 1.25" DIMM installed.

The TiBook has two memory slots, one above the other. The upper memory slot can accept a SDRAM module that meets the following specifications:
• Small Outline-Dual Inline Memory Module (SO-DIMM) format
• 35 mm (1.5") height or shorter
• 64 MB, 128 MB, 256 MB, or 512 MB
• 144-pin
• PC-100 Type RAM

The maximum amount of RAM you can install in Ti is 1 GB, using 512 MB DIMMs in both the upper and lower RAM slots using currently available (but obscenely expensive) memory modules. For information on how to install memory in Ti, visit: http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/N88063

Another disappointment that has been expressed about Ti is its modest video support -- essentially the same ATI Rage Mobility 128 video accelerator with 8 MB of VRAM that was used in Pismo. That seems plenty to me, compared with my WallStreet's pedestrian 2 MB of VRAM, but I guess it seems picayune to the high-end graphics and hard-core gaming folks. Again, that price point had to be reached somehow.

The low-end machine's 10 gigabyte hard drive seems stingy by current standards though, and I find it alarming how quickly I am filling up the new 10.2 gigabyte unit in my WallStreet. I think that Apple should have made at least a 12 gigabyte HD standard, which would have been a minuscule cost difference. Ti offers the same 10, 20, or 30 GB, 4200 RPM hard drive options as Pismo, and supports drives up to 12.7 mm in thickness.

Ti's slot-loading DVD-ROM drive also functions as a 24x CD-ROM or 6x DVD-ROM, and is capable of reading both DVD-RAM and DVD-R.

The computer has two USB ports, and an IrDA infrared link capable of transferring data at up to 4 Mbits per second. An AirPort Card wireless LAN module is available as a configure-to-order option or as a user-installable upgrade.

The lack of a quick change battery bay is being panned by some. While the nominal five-hour battery life in Ti is reportedly a lot less optimistic than it was with Lombard and Pismo, it's still too short for some users. It is not impossible to carry two were more batteries for Ti, just slightly more of a hassle to change them.

Ti's internal bus speed remains at 100 MHz, as opposed to 133 MHz in the new desktop G4 Power Macs. It is likely that there will the a 133 MHz bus PowerBook in the future, perhaps in the Revision B Ti, but remember that the iBook is still struggling along with a 66 MHz system bus. Ti has a new pipelined system bus that is more efficient than the system bus on the PowerPC G3 microprocessors. The new bus design, called MaxBus, allows for much greater efficiency of bus utilization than was possible with the previous design.

Ti uses the Motorola MPC7410 ("Nitro") G4 microprocessor, running at 400 and 500 MHz, and "detuned" for lower power consumption. The MPC7410 supports up to 2MB of external L2 cache, and is offered in 400MHz, 450MHz and 500MHz clock speeds, with a 550MHz version promised soon. That would facilitate a speed bump to 450 MHz and 550 MHz for the second generation TiBooks.

Ti's PowerStep feature allows the user or an application to change the processor's clock speed, either slowing down to conserve power or speeding up when more speed is needed. The system software includes a new Energy Services Library that provides the API that allows applications to change the speed setting. The user interface for this feature is a check box labeled Reduce Processor Speed in the Advanced Settings panel of the Energy Saver control panel. On the PowerBook G4, the slower clock speed is 100 MHz slower than the rated speed: 300 MHz on a 400-MHz model, 400 MHz on a 500 MHz model.

Here's an omission I will growl about. Ti has no analog (PlainTalk) audio-in port, and depends on digital audio input via the USB or FireWire ports, meaning a much narrower choice of potential microphone choices, and the necessity of purchasing a new mic for folks like me who lean heavily on dictation software. There is a built-in microphone as well, but it's not adequate for dictation. There are built-in stereo speakers.

Back in the plus column, Ti has an autosensing 10/100 Base-T, PHY interface IC/Auto-MDIX Ethernet port that will switch from straight to crossover when it is plugged into another Mac likewise equipped. To connect with older Macs, a crossover cable will still be required.

Ti has a single battery bay. The battery uses lithium ion cells and provides 50 Watt-hours at 16.6 V (full charge).

Ti's 45W power supply is not interchangable with the G3 Series 'Books, drawing 28 watts instead of 24 and having a smaller connector where it plugs into the PowerBook. Unfortunately, the yoyo-shaped power adapter design continues.

The screen hinge clutches that have been a problem area on the G3 Series 'Books have reportedly been successfully tested through 15,000 cycles to simulate a lifetime of use. And on a more trivial note, the Apple logo on Ti's lid of in now right side up when the lid is open, and it still lights up.

One of the most significant beefs I have is not with Ti itself, but rather Apple's insistence that all US PowerBook service and repair be done at their central facility in Texas, rather than allowing local dealers to at least handle the small jobs (although happily, this does not apply in Canada where I live, and where Apple Canada authorizes its Apple Specialist Dealers to fix both PowerBooks and Cubes both warranty and post-warranty service, and to repair anything on a PowerBook that for which Apple has parts). I have held forth on this issue before, and will again in the future, but for now I will just say that this policy continues to be bone-headed stupid (see this week's Road Warrior MailBag), and in the case of out-of-warranty problems, Apple's charges, especially for smaller jobs, represent an egregious rip off of consumers. This issue is another reason why I am inclined to wait for the bugs to be worked out of Ti before taking the plunge. While I'm at it, Apple's one-year warranty is pathetic compared with, say, Dell's three-year, on-site, warranty policy.

That said, I look forward to getting a TiBook, which I really do think is the coolest piece of hardware Apple has ever built.





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cmoore@macopinion.com


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