Unpacking the TiBook I could immediately appreciate both the quality of the design and the improvements Apple has made since then. The Titanium case feels very sturdy, much more so than plastic PC notebooks, but still not as solid as today’s unibody aluminum MacBooks. It’s thin and light as far as notebooks of the time period go, but heavy compared to Apple’s latest. The latching mechanism is cool if a bit delicate compared to the magnets used today. The keyboard is great. But the trackpad…the trackpad leaves a lot to be desired. Every tap click is a ‘thunk’ and this is perhaps my one major disappointment in this model. It feels like a step back from the trackpad in a PowerBook PDQ, and pales in comparison to Apple’s best-of-class track pads today. Track pad aside, this would have been the notebook to have in 2002.Īs for my specific TiBook, the only real disappointment is that the screen has a line of light scruffs across the middle. But you just cringe when you realize someone stored something between the screen and keyboard, and whatever it was had a surface rough enough to scruff the screen. What are people thinking when they do stuff like this? It’s just annoying enough that I might take on the task of replacing the screen with another one off eBay. RAM is cheap, a new Superdrive is cheap, and the only thing that scares me about the screen is the possible work involved replacing it should I decide to. I didn’t order RAM when I ordered the TiBook (should have), but I did have a spare 64GB KingSpec PATA SSD on hand. At one point I tried putting this in my PowerBook PDQ, but that PowerBook wasn’t happy with it for some strange reason. I prepared the drive on another Mac with Mac OS X Tiger and the Mac OS 9.2.2 System Folder that the TiBook requires, and then installed it. Having spent a lot of time recently restoring and playing with older classic Macs I wasn’t prepared for what a TiBook on a SSD would feel like. With some caveats this machine feels as snappy and fast running Mac OS 9 as my MacBook Pro feels running Mac OS X. Office 2001 launches instantly where the latest and greatest takes 3-4s on a MBP. The apps themselves also feel snappier in use. But given the vast difference in hardware your latest version really shouldn’t lose this race.) (Come on Microsoft! I realize later software has more features. To Adobe’s credit their latest version of Photoshop on a MBP launches a bit faster than Photoshop 7 on the TiBook. And of course image processing is something that’s going to exercise the CPU hard, meaning a 1 GHz G4 has no chance in a race against a Core i7. Still, Photoshop 7 is very responsive, and editing an image on the TiBook isn’t terrible unless you try working with larger files. The web? Classilla, which was a disappointment to me on the older 60x Power Macs and even the PowerBook PDQ, runs very well on the TiBook. So does TenFourFox when booting Mac OS X.
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