best place to buy an apple powerbook

[Ed Dooley]

I went with the 17″PB because I really like the screen real estate. The biggest complaint I’ve heard about it is its size and weight while traveling. It’s pretty big on a plane tray, and if the person in front of you puts their seat back, it may be impossible to use. But, even though I travel a lot with it, only once did the size/seat issue come up (I usually watch the Sopranos or 6 Feeet Under, or a film on a plane anyway, no serious work in flight for me).

For accesories I would get something like the Kensington wireless mouse. The USB connector stores right inside the mouse when not being used. I would also look at a one or two drive FW drive with FW800 cardbus (like the LaCie) if you’re going to edit on the road at all. I bought a 2 drive enclosure with the Oxford 912 chip and put 2 300 gig drives in it, striped them, and I edit DVCPro50 stuff easily. Kensington and others also make a multi-input charger for car home and plane, very handy.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Forgot, I bought mine directly from Apple. I told them I saw a better price elsewhere and they matched the price! I live 2 minutes from smalldog.com, but the owners dog bit me years ago (really), and the owner didn’t care, so I don’t generally shop there. 🙂
Ed

[Jeff Carpenter]

Look around to see if you can find deals, but as Ed says, getting one directly from Apple is a good way to go.

I do suggest getting the minimum amount of RAM and then buying two 1GB chips at http://www.crucial.com and putting them in yourself. They’ll charge you $390 for RAM, and you’ll have the 512 MB you took out of the computer as a backup. If you buy the RAM from Apple they’ll charge $850 and you won’t have the extra 512 MB. You can trust crucial’s quality, so there’s no reason not to go to them.

And I DO suggest getting 2 GB of RAM. You’re making a few other speed sacrifices by going with a laptop so getting the max amount of RAM is the best way to counteract that.

The choice between screen sizes is pretty hard to do online. If there’s an Apple store near you I suggest you stop by and open Final Cut on each machine and see how it looks. Obviously, if you’re happy with 15″ then there’s no sense buying the larger one. Only you can decide that, though.

Be sure to buy Apple Care. I don’t always suggest that for desktops, but for laptops that are going to be traveling it’s a safe bet. Also, start looking at nice, padded bags now!

Follow Ed’s advice about external hard drives. The internal drive is 5400 RPM which will make any effort to edit actual video from it a frustrating one. If you want to edit on planes or something like that then I suggest using the media manager to make low-rez files that you could run off the internal drive and then re-capturing them when you get home.

This next link may seem silly, but I think it’s worth the price:
https://www.radtech.us/Products/NotebookScreensavRz.aspx

It’s just a cloth that you put on your keyboard whenever you close your powerbook. I used to find that I would get little smudge-lines on my screen that mimiced the lines of the keyboard if my book was closed for a few days. I notice that that site sells cleaning materials too, it’s probably a good idea to get something. Windex or water aren’t the right things for cleaning LCD sceens, so you should get something before there’s a problem so it’s handy when you need it.

[Ed Dooley]

There’s more! Following up on Jeff’s advice on more RAM, getting the 128MB video ram instead of the standard 64MB is a good idea too. I finally got one of those expensive pieces of leather too 🙂 OWC has them too. Wiebetech has started carrying bus powered 7,200RPM 3.5″ external FW800 drives. I wouldn’t suggest using one for long plane rides unless there’s a power port at your seat, but it does help reduce clutter by eliminating one power brick in your case.
Ed

[Bret Williams]

At least you don’t live near bigdog.com!

[Mitchji]

Hi,

Would a G5 iMac with a case for easy portability work for you?

This is what a friend who is running FCP on a iMac on location says:
I just got my iMac today – infinitely faster than any powerbook I could have bought at three times the cost. I got the cheapest I could find: a new 1.6gHz 17″ with a CDRW/DVD and 256 RAM on eBay. I upgraded to 1GB RAM and got the iLugger bag.

[Ed Dooley]

LOL! Funny you should say that Bret, because starting next month, my street address will be 57 Big Dog Hill (with an indoor pool, no less!)
Ed

[Bret Williams] “At least you don’t live near bigdog.com!”