Apple Titanium G4 Powerbook

Apple's Titanium G4 PowerBook is a welcome revision to the company's professional laptop range. It is available in 400Mhz and 500Mhz varieties, and we managed to get our hands on the high-end model, although many features are common to both. The 2.4kg 500Mhz model is packed with features, has a 20Gb hard drive and ships with 256Mb of SDRam, with a maximum memory capacity of 1Gb.

Apple continues to develop innovative industrial designs, and the 2.6cm thick, 34.1cm wide, 24.1cm deep PowerBook G4, encased in sleek, silvery, 99.5 per cent pure titanium, is no exception. Titanium is used for jet engines because of its lightweight, heat resistant properties.

This resistance means the computer feels warm to the touch, but this is a good thing, as the whole body acts as a heat sink, aided by a tiny, quiet fan. This means Apple can use a low-heat G4 processor at the heart of the machine. The high running temperatures of G4 chips have hindered PowerBook development, until now.

The brain of the system is its PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine (VE). VE can process data in 128bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32bit or 64bit chunks used in other processors. This accelerates the performance of applications that are optimised to take advantage of VE, although to our knowledge only Adobe Photoshop and Apple's Final Cut Pro are VE-ready at this time.

Non-optimised applications run swiftly on the chip, which boasts a 100Mhz system bus, and 1Mb of Level 2 cache with speeds up to 250Mhz. This means that, in action, the PowerBook G4 simply fries data.

There's plenty of desktop real estate to spare; the PowerBook G4 sports a 15.1in wide screen TFT with a native resolution of 1152 x 768 pixels. Resolutions of 896 x 600, and 720 x 480 pixels at 3:2 aspect ratio and 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, and 640 x 480 pixels at 4:3 aspect ratio are also supported.

There's a very slim, slot-loading DVDRom drive at the front of the machine. Apple claims that the PowerBook has a battery life of five hours, but says that this falls to two if watching a DVD film.

The PowerBook ships with an S-Video to composite video adaptor and hosts D-SUB and S-Video outputs. Video demands graphics power, and to supply this the PowerBook ships with an ATi Rage Mobility 128 chip with 8Mb of dedicated graphics RAM.

The keyboard is full size, although some keys as usual have dual uses. The touch pad is large and very sensitive, and the PowerBook has two stereo speakers and an internal omni-directional microphone. Sadly, the speakers don't provide much volume.

Most of the PowerBook's ports are hidden behind a sturdy flap at the rear of the machine. Two USB ports jostle with the video outputs, 10/100 ethernet port and the V.90 modem's socket. The headphone socket is accessible on the left-hand side of the computer, just beside the single PC Card slot, but it can't accept the thicker Type III cards.

One FireWire port has been sacrificed in comparison with previous PowerBooks, but as 63 powered FireWire devices can be daisy-chained to the surviving port, this is no tragedy. In the rear left-hand corner there's an infra red (IrDA) port, and this is good to see as many PC-based notebook manufacturers are currently removing them from new models.

On either side of the computer sit two AirPort antennae windows. These are covered indents that let radio signals escape the titanium shell.

AirPort is Apple's Wi-Fi 802.11b wireless networking solution, offering file transfers and internet access at up to 11Mbps within 45m of an AirPort Base Station. To use AirPort on this PowerBook we would have to buy and install an AirPort card and purchase a base station.

There are also two easily overlooked extra design features. One is the magnetic catch, which only clicks into place when the lid is almost shut, otherwise it nestles in the casing - so we had no worries testing the PowerBook in long-sleeved shirts. Second is the Apple logo mounted on the lid that glows when in use. On previous generations of PowerBooks, the logo appeared inverted when the lid was open; it now appears the correct way up.

The PowerBook G4 ships with Apple's easy to use video editing software, iMovie 2. There's also a copy of Apple's iTunes. This is similar to the latest Windows Media Player, as it can import music from CDs, play back MP3s, access internet radio stations and provide visual, abstract representations of music as it plays.

The operating system is currently Mac OS 9.1, though Mac OS X will be installed from 24 March. PowerBooks began to ship in limited quantities in January, but will be on the shelves in volume in early March.

This is an extremely powerful and attractive portable workhorse. If you need a versatile, fully featured laptop - and want to be the envy of friends and colleagues - check out this machine.