iBook? eBook? Whither Lombard?

NOTE: This Miscellaneous Ramblings column originally appeared on MacOpinion on April 30, 1999. It is republished here by permission of the author and MacOpinion.

Jeff Walsh of InfoWorld Electric posted an article last week about a PowerBook prototype shown "behind closed doors" to Apple dealers who attended the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas last week.

Walsh said the unit was reportedly

• at least as thin as Sony's 0.9" Vaio
• featured a PowerPC G4 processor with speeds starting at 400 MHz
• weighed three-and-one-half pounds
• had a detachable display that can be replaced with goggles for a heads-up display.

The article unambiguously pronounced this computer as the long-awaited "Lombard" PowerBook, which it is almost certainly not.

Lombard, on the basis of many leaked reports, is an evolutionary development of the 7.5 pound PowerBook G3 Series machines. While it will probably shed a few ounces, having less than half the thickness and weight of WallStreet is not on the agenda.

Also, Lombard is expected to have copper G3 processors - not the G4, which will almost certainly be introduced in desktop machines first, and a detachable screen on Lombard is also very unlikely.

So what did the dealers see in Las Vegas? My guess is that it was a very early prototype build or nonfunctional mockup of the rumored eBook "executive" PowerBook that may roll out late next fall in time for the Christmas season. At that point, Apple would have three distinct PowerBook form factors - the big, desktop-in-a-portable-housing Lombard, the new "iBook" consumer PowerBook, and the "executive" thin PowerBook, which will probably share the iBook's guts for the most part.

At the 1999 Apple Shareholders' Meeting, Apple iCEO Steve Jobs noted that ultimately there might be three PowerBook markets: one for a low-cost consumer model ("iBook"), one for professionals who want a full-featured model that can do everything (Lombard); and one for "digital road warriors" who just want something light so they can get email in their hotel rooms (the "executive" 'Book).

An New York Times article by the' John Markoff makes an interesting reference to Apple's forthcoming lightweight PowerBook, which he describes as having "a sleek, gray translucent case and clamshell shape, according to those who have seen it, ... as radical an industrial design departure from the standard boxy notebooks as the iMac was from the conventional desktop PC."

That also sounds like the "eBook" that was shown privately at Las Vegas. O'Grady's PowerPage has posted a speculative feature set for the eBook, which is described as "Apple's ultra-slim PowerBook, due Fall/Winter 1999," to fall between the new professional PowerBook (Lombard/101) and a consumer portable (iBook/P1). According to O'Grady's "well placed sources," eBook will feature:

• A Motorola/Thomson 500+ MHz AltiVec powered PowerPC G4 processor
• PCI I/O bus
• 1-2 MB backside cache
• 64 MB SDRAM
• Max. RAM between 128 MB and 512 MB of SDRAM via 1 memory slot
• 10 - 14 GB Hard Drive
• 10/100 ethernet onboard, IrDA, FireWire, USB
• v.90 Modem
• Single Type I or Type II CardBus PC card slot
• 12.1" TFT reflective LCD display, 1024 x 768, 24-bit color, with resolution switching
• Video subsystem based on the ATI Rage 128 Chipset
• VGA video connector
• 24x CD-ROM/4x DVD-ROM
• Micro floppy drive
• S-Video out
• 1/8" speaker and microphone ports will be located below the PC card
• Dual stacked USB ports
• Single IEEE 1394/FireWire port
• 4 Mb/sec. IrDA
• New style AC power outlet that will not require a power brick
• Full size keyboard with inverted "T" arrow keys
• US$2,500 - $4,000

Sounds delicious. As I've mentioned before here, I'm smitten with the gaggle of "thin" PC laptops like the Sony Vaio and the Mitsubishi Pedion. With the above feature set and a think form factor, Apple should have a world beater.

However, before we see the eBook, Lombard will be released (soon) and the lightweight consumer iBook, likely in the palette of iMac fruit colors is expected by midsummer. Apple has trademarked the iBook name.

Specifications for the iBook are speculated to be:

• G3 processor with 512 KB/1 MB L2 backside cache
• 10/100 ethernet
• 56K modem
• CD-ROM drive
• 32 MB of RAM
• 4 GB or better hard drive
• USB port
• no floppy drive
• 11 inch TFT display
• weight in the four to five pound range

There's speculation that the iBook's lid will be able to open nearly 360 degrees, possibly allowing a "tablet mode" supporting use with a handwriting recognition stylus. I think this is an extreme long shot, given the price point Apple wants to meet, presumably in the $1,299 to $1,899 range. That reality will rule out such things as wireless connectivity, a DVD-ROM drive, and virtual-reality style "heads-up" goggles, at least as standard equipment.

As for Lombard, I am reluctant to make any strong predictions, but OS 8.6 is ready to go, and we should see it soon now that Apple is effectively sold out of 300 MHz G3 Series II PowerBooks and supplies of other PowerBooks are also getting scarce. Indeed, Apple's lean inventory policy is likely one of the major factors in the Lombard delay.

Vimage Cuts G3 Upgrade Prices Again

Vimage Corporation has announced its second round of price cuts this month for some of its G3 upgrade cards, including the Vpower PB 1400 G3/233 (512K of backside cache, 02.1 backside cache bus clock ratio) upgrade for the PowerBook 1400 which is now $299.

MR Mailbag

Another bunch of interesting mail from Road Warrior readers this week.

From Nico Tripcevich:

Dear Charles

Do you have any insight into the design strategy with the PowerBook G3s that would lead Apple to put the CPU on a daughtercard along with the ROMs?

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As I understand it, the CPU on a daughtercard makes future upgrading easy, but putting the ROM on the card defeats the purpose because only Apple is allowed to make the ROMs (since there is no more cloning). Therefore if there will be any upgrading of this PowerBook, it will be at Apple discretion.

As I have a PB G3 233 with no cache but a beautiful 14" TFT screen I would love to hear that there are upgrade possibilities for this machine at some point in the future. My speed scores are about 1/3 less than the same machine with a 512k L2 cache (darn).

One idea was to try to find the daughtercard for a parted-out PB G3 300 MHz a few years down the road and just swap the CPU out.

As Nico is already aware, the ROMs are on the daughtercard, and since Apple won't release the Mac ROMs to 3rd party manufacturers, chances of an upgrade for the G3 Series are slim to nil.

Apple would rather you buy a new PowerBook.

On the bright side, even though the cacheless G3 233 is slower than its stablemates, it's still pretty fast - about 50 percent faster than a 3400-240 which was considered lightning a couple of years ago.

A 300 MHz motherboard swap-in probably could work, but I expect Nico would be better off selling the 233 and buying a used 300.

Try adding more RAM as a cheaper and still effective performance enhancer.

From Ross Cottrell:

Sir,

I am interested in buying a laptop. So far I have never owned one, but they seem so useful and cool. I have been desiring to buy a Mac for a long time, and now I think I can do it thanks to an IRS refund check. I should mention that I have been a Windows user for about 9 years, and I've never owned a Mac of any kind.

For the past 3 or 4 months I've been reading your informative columns, which I really enjoy by the way, and reading everything on the web I can find. Now that the prices of the current G3 PowerBooks have dropped so much I'm having a hard time holding back. My questions are these: Is there any USB support built into the motherboard of the Wall Streets? Do USB upgrades exist?

I am going to use my machine as a desktop replacement, and I need to keep it for at least 2 years. So I know I will be buying a new mouse for it. With USB such a prevalent technology now, I'd like to be able to attach a USB mouse to the PowerBook. But from what I've read, they have no USB ports or capability of any kind.

One last question: Can a G3 266 or 300 PowerBook run Virtual PC quickly? I've heard that this program is slow.

Thank you very much. Your Road Warrior columns have really helped me to decide to buy a Mac at long last, I just need to figure out which one.

Now this is the kind of mail I really enjoy getting.

Congratulations to Ross on his decision to forward migrate to the Mac platform. That IRS windfall (so to speak - it was Ross's money to start with) couldn't have come at a better time, with the G3 Series prices so low.

Several PC Card USB Adapters are waiting in the wings, and some may be shipping. I know for some units, the holdup has been the intro of OS 8.6, which went Golden Master last week, and should be out around the end of the month as a free upgrade for OS 8.5 users. One of these adapters should do the trick nicely. The new Lombard 'Book will have onboard USB support, but will cost many $$$$ more than a current G3 Series II.

The G3 Series 'Book is as close to a desktop machine in a portable form factor as you can get, and it should serve admirably in that role. Ross needn't worry about "growing out" of it in two years. There are many 10 year old Macs still in commercial service.

My favorite mouse is the MacAlly 2-button programmable jobbie, and it is so cheap, the USB support would not really be much of an issue in that context. It's available in both USB and ADB. I'd just buy the ADB model to use with a Wall Street - (in fact I did!)

As for Virtual PC's speed - or lack of, think in the neighborhood of 125 - 150 MHz Pentium. Not fast, but usable. For PC software that forward migrators want to keep using, at least during the transition, VPC (or SoftWindows) is a good solution.

And now for a letter that I didn't enjoy (but did appreciate) receiving.

From Matthew Schultz

Have you heard any juice about these continuing and escalating quality issues? It's reached epidemic proportions with our customers. We're extremely concerned...

I just got off the phone with a customer of mine whom I recommended buy a PowerBook G3 in December. She bought the 233/14.1 model.

She took it into XXXXXXX XXXXXX, Apple authorized service dealer here in Littleton. The power supply board caught fire and burned up the laptop, as well as the top of her desk. It could have been a total disaster had the fire spread. She is in shock.

Earlier this week another friend of mine lost all her data and her PowerBook would no longer start. Dead hard drive, dead power supply. She bought it in September. It's also in the shop, they've told her about 3-4 weeks. My experience is that it'll take a minimum of 2x - 3x that estimate.

There have been a continuing quality problems associated with these units. I have four friends whose PowerBooks have died for one reason or another over the last 6 months and eleven customers who have had a slew of problems and down time. My own company has had extensive problems with four separate PowerBook G3 units.

Please be very careful with your new PowerBook. back up, back up, back up. DO NOT leave it powered-on unattended. If there's a way you can possibly get a refund, I would urge you to do so.

This is distressing stuff, although I hasten to add that it looks like Matt's friends and customers are experiencing atypical reliability problems with their PowerBooks. The one that burned sounds like a different occurrence than the one or two Doug Landry at the PowerBook Zone was able to confirm in his series about blazing G3s.

I forwarded Matt's letter to a contact at Apple tech support requesting comment, and thus far have not received any. I also asked Matt if he could supply names and email addresses of the individuals he referred to, and received this response:

Thanks, Charles, it would be helpful knowing what you discover.

I will ask each individual. I know several of them have had to sign NDAs, so they are under legal restrictions (I refused to sign the NDA). Three of them, a doctor, a sales rep and a nurse, no longer have email since their computers are shot. The nurse is a sweet lady, she's an angel of mercy, really, and the fire in her laptop has her so upset (she was crying when she called me), I don't believe she will ever turn on a computer again. There's no way that PowerBook's going back into her house, whether Apple service fixes it or not. I'm kinda feeling really bad about it, it's mostly my fault, I told her to buy the thing.

We've stopped recommending the machines to our customers until we get some sort of indication that the quality and reliability issues are being tackled. It is also my contention that the heat generated by these units, which I have measured at typically 50-60% greater than what our Dell and IBM laptops here generate (sometimes significantly more, on the order of 2x to 2.5x), MTBF and/or L10 on many components will suffer. This will equate to long term product failures which because of life expectancy curves, will fall outside of the warranty window. There is really no debate about this. Nothing kills electronic circuitry like constant heat. That's another reason we can't recommend that our customers purchase them.

We've seen problems associated with hard drives, LCD's, power supply cards, connectors, power cables, LCD cables, modems, CD modules, floppy modules and one instance where the battery bay latch just wouldn't work (when the unit was picked up and tilted, the battery would just fall out). One 266 unit I bought was DOA right out of the box (power supply). I immediately shipped it back to the distributor for a refund ... after much arguing with Apple and having to put a stop payment order, etc. - in contrast, when we asked Dell to return 2 of the 16 laptops ordered, we received the paperwork via Airborne the next day, no questions asked.

But it's not just the frequency of the issues that's bothersome, the response has been poor in our opinion. 11 weeks for a hard drive. Four weeks to receive a third modem (the 1st two died). We had one unit die when the hard drive was corrupted by a MacOS software update. One gentlemen told me that he waited 20 weeks for an LCD replacement. He was infuriated at us for our council and we have lost an important long term customer. I owned a 250/13.3/192 MB for 27 weeks, 15 of which the machine was inoperable. Once it was finally repaired (at my expense... no NDA, no service), I sold it. It got to the point that we couldn't run our business anymore and we had to go out and buy some other laptops.

I'd hate to see Apple lose it's momentum because of quality. Especially since they killed Motorola & Power Computing [clones], there's no MacOS alternative. I think they're going after market share - volumes - instead of quality. Although we moved our business to Win98, most of us still have Macs at home.

So, enough rambling! It would be great to hear what you've discovered and I will ask these customers and my friends if they can and would be willing to share specifics and details with us.

Thus far, I have not heard from anyone else on this issue.

There will be people who will criticize me for publishing Matt's letters. However, it would be irresponsible not to. If problems like these exist, they need to be out in the open, not wallpapered over or swept under the rug.

On the other hand, the fire hazard appears to be extremely rare, and has bee attributed to either shorted RF shielding and/or a batch of bad capacitors. I have not heard of any G3 Series II machines being affected, so the units currently being sold should be OK. We have two G3 Series IIs in the house, both of which get heavy use and which have been problem free - one since last November and one since January. While they get pretty warm, the internal cooling fans rarely cut in, and I'm assuming that Apple engineers factored in the heat issue in designing the internal components.

As for Apple's commitment to quality, in the New York Times piece by John Markoff that I referred to above, Markoff notes that "Apple's designers take a SWAT-team approach to fixing bugs.

When the company's innovative iMac computer first shipped last year, [Apple chief hardware engineer Jon] Rubinstein attended a midnight store-opening celebration in Palo Alto. By the next morning, after hearing consumer complaints at the store and on Macintosh enthusiasts' Web sites, he knew that the machine had some problems - the worst being that the computer did not work with a newly designed Epson printer.

A software patch was created in a matter of days and widely distributed with the aid of the Internet, sidestepping a potentially serious public-relations stumble for the new iMac.

However, it would be more reassuring if Apple would reply to the concerns Matt Shultz has cited here.

A reader identified only as gober writes:

Dear Mr. Moore,

For the last three years in the springtime I always enjoy the introduction of the new Apple lines of PowerBooks. Every year I say to myself that this is the year that I am going to purchase one. This year more than any other year I have been following the prices because I DO plan on purchasing a PowerBook.

The problem is that as an educator in a school district that is low wealth and low income most of my computer and computer related purchases are purchased for the use of my students at school out of my own funds.

Most of these purchases are usually a year or more after they are introduced so the price is low enough that I can afford to purchase them, but yet still have enough power to make them worthwhile. So for my purposes I do not need the exact top of the line models.

>Last year when the WallStreet (Series I) was introduced it looked like it was a winner! In September though Apple came out with the Series 2 PowerBook and prices fell. In January of this year through today, the prices seem to be still going down with every supplier coming up with its own price for the WallStreet.

My concern is that I do not know what to do at this point regarding a PowerBook purchase. Yes it is true that I am waiting for the price to possibly drop more, but I am not waiting or speculating about future products (Lombard) as Fred Anderson, Apple's chief financial officer suggests may be happening with purchasers. If that was true then I would wait to purchase the low end Lombard which will have as more in it then the top of the line 300 MHz WallStreet, at about the same price. If I could purchase that 300 MHz for the price listed for the purchase of 10, I would do it in a heart beat. It would be a worthwhile investment. With that being said I wonder if the Lombard will be a better machine. I have read reports that it runs cooler than the WallStreet in which a few have even been known to "flame-up". If I have to spend more than I originally intended, than I want to be sure that what I am getting is a good value for that money.

This is probably why I haven't purchased a PowerBook yet! The more information I get the more confusing it is for my decision.

Thanks for taking the time to hear me out.

First I assure you, even a 233 MHz Wall Street has more power than most normal people need, at least for the foreseeable future.

Secondly I think G3 Series II prices have probably about bottomed, because they are running out of stock.

Lombard uses a copper chip, which will definitely run cooler than the chips in the Wall Streets. However, I haven't found the heat especially onerous on my 233. The ones that smouldered/or caught fire were not due to heat from the processor, but rather from an electrical short circuit in the RF shielding and possibly a batch of faulty capacitors.

Whatever and whenever you buy, desktop or laptop, 6 months later you will be able to get something faster and with more features for the same or less money. The trick is to decide what you need and pick the right time to buy. Now is the right time for Wall Streets. The Wall Street is a fantastic machine. Lombard will be even more fantastic, but you'll have to wait 10 months or so for the low prices to return.

From Troy Lewis:

I recently purchased a 5300cs PowerBook through auctions.yahoo.com for $600. It has a brand new 2 gig drive, a color 12" screen I think not sure about size at 256 colors, 24 megs of RAM which I now have tripled and 100 MHz 603e chip.

It also came with a Color StyleWriter 1500 with both black and color cartridges, two power bricks for the PowerBook, and the first 2X speed CD-ROM, I think Apple ever made, but hey it works with my computer. It also came with MacOS 8.1, but I am now working on the 8.6 build 9 and am having no problems. (All of this for $600) I also got a 33.6 PC card modem with it, but I have since upgraded with a $50 V.90 X2 card that works flawlessly.

>When I first got it I went from 7.5 to 8.0 and then suddenly had to reinitialize but that didn't bother me since I hadn't put anything on it myself yet. Oh yes, some part of the monitor had been recently replaced before I bought it, all in all, its working fine. No explosions, no meltdowns, and I am hoping this continues this way. I am also looking on advice on upgrading this machine, can a new motherboard be installed with a faster PowerPC chip??? What's the max ram I can upgrade to as I already have 24 megs installed, and are there any cheap CD-ROM drives I can get that are faster than 2X?? Thank you for your time and if anyone found a better deal on a 5300, could you drop me a line and let me know??

Sounds like Troy got a great deal on the 5300cs. With the stuff included, $1000 would be not have been out of line. By the way, that screen is a 10.4" unit, not 12".

PowerBook 5300s don't explode or melt down. Only two machines were even affected, and it was the Sony LiIon batteries, not the 5300 itself that was the fire hazard. All of these batteries were replaced (only 100 machines ever reached consumers with the bad batteries, and none of these caught fire).

You can go to 56 or 64 Megs of RAM with a 5300. Depends on RAM card. You'll have to remove the 16 MB upgrade. If you can find a 56k card, that will give you 64 megs. They are rare. I included a piece about a company that makes 5300 Ram in a Miscellaneous Ramblings a few weeks ago. Can't remember which one, but you can check in the archived columns on MacOpinion. I imagine the chances of finding a used 56k card are slim to nil. A 48 MB card will give you 56k - also tough to find used. Most Ram outlets carry 40 MB cards for the 5300.

The only motherboard swap that's practical would be the 117 MHz from the 5300 ce, and it would hardly be worth the trouble.

MacWarehouse and others sell reasonably cheap 24x and 36x CD-ROM drives. I am rather partial to the old slow drives. They're quiet and don't vibrate.