Apple Price Tags Tease The Laptop Lovers

Sydney Morning Herald

Sunday July 17, 1994

SUE LOWE

APPLE Computer is a big tease. It releases its latest model of portable computer that is so beautifully designed you cannot help but want one. Then it sticks on a price tag of $7,500 - roughly eight times more expensive than my car. Who is going to pay that kind of money for a computer? Especially a second computer, as portables often are.

Typical of Apple to leap out ahead of its IBM-compatible competition with a product that is so totally desirable and at the same time accessible to the masses (in terms of intuitive use) and then slap on a price tag that makes it untouchable by all except senior managers and the disgustingly rich.

For some reason - it seems strange marketing to me - even before releasing this new range, Apple took its previous PowerBook models off the market. True, these models were slower, using the now outmoded 68030 processors and were in every way inferior to this new range, but they were still one of the best notebook designs of their time, were very functional and highly popular. Why not leave them on the market with much reduced price tags and let their customers decide how much they want to spend?

At the moment it is impossible for anyone with a budget of less than $4,400 to buy an Apple portable. That's a risky move when Intel-based notebooks are widely available for under $3,000. Apple is, however, planning to fix the problem to some extent with a low-end notebook, currently codenamed Jedi. It is expected to sell for around $2,500 but, for that, you're back to the old 68030 processor.

Maybe Apple's thinking in getting rid of the old range was that once potential buyers had seen the new range they would no longer be satisfied with the old. There may be something in this.

The new range is called the 500 Series - not nearly so tuneful as the codename Blackbird.

Quite unsolicited, Apple's PR department sent us the top-of-the-range model 540c to review. Apple knows it is as much of a gem as any of the company's previous major successes. And for most aspects of the machine's design and configuration we'd have to agree. Apple has put out a machine that is way above average in design, general feel and ease of use. And its design incorporates many new technologies that make it state of the art. However, in supply and pricing it's a bit easier to pick holes.

The two most obviously "new" features of the top-end PowerBook 540c are the trackpad and colour screen. It is also billed as "Ready for PowerPC upgrade".

The range is based on the 68LC040 processor. That's a 68040 without the maths coprocessor, presumably to make it less power hungry. Apple says it is comparable with an Intel 486SX2 (in Intel speak that's one up from the 33-megahertz 486DX). But Apple says all models will be upgradeable to the PowerPC processor "sometime next year".

With the 500 Series, Apple has replaced the trackball of the early PowerBooks with a flat, touch-sensitive pad that you stroke rather than roll around.

Apple was one of the first manufacturers to incorporate a trackball into its portables - a move many Intel-based notebooks have now followed. The trackballs were a squillion times easier to use and more convenient than the clip-on style of mouse and this trackpad is a step ahead again.

The trackpad is in the same position as the trackball used to be - dead centre of the wrist rest (another design plus). Directly below your thumb - as you stroke the trackpad with your index finger - is a single large mouse button. I found this combination comfortable from the outset and not in the least idiosyncratic.

This is the first Apple portable to have a full-sized keyboard layout which is a definite plus, particularly for regular desktop Mac users. I found the keyboard very springy but everyone else who tried it, including a 10-finger typist, was happy with it.

The screen on all models is significantly larger than the early PowerBooks. On our model it was also colour - and crystal clear colour at that. One of the programs I tested the machine with was Fractal Design's Painter. For this program not to be very frustrating the machine needs to have a lot of grunt and even more colour. The 540c has both.

This model owes its picture quality to the active matrix colour screen. There's also a passive matrix colour version which is cheaper but would not be so readable. In fact, it is often wiser to go for an active matrix monochrome over a passive matrix colour. Apple Australia believes, however, that people won't pay the necessary price for a mono active matrix display and won't be bringing the mono 540 into Australia, so that's not an option.

Even the monochrome 520s, the cheapest of the 500 series models at $4,400, seem to have been in very short supply here. One Apple dealer said he'd had"maybe one or two" units in the month or so these machines have been on the market. Apple admits all models are in short supply and will be for a few months.

But back to the nice new features. Another is 16-bit, "CD-quality" sound from two small stereo speakers set to each side of the monitor. There's no external microphone, so you get a fair amount of environmental noise when you record, but its fine for recording your own event alarms or attaching voice messages to documents. Having created a document, a manager might want to record a list of instructions as to what to do with it. This is now a standard facility in Microsoft Word for the Mac and is as easy as inserting a voice annotation and clicking on record, then OK.

The PowerBook 540c has a 320 Mbyte hard disk as standard to record these sound bytes (they tend to hog space). The 540 mono has 240 Mbytes and the 520 colour and mono have 160 Mbytes - all pretty substantial. All models also come with 8Mbytes of system memory which can be expanded to a massive 36Mbytes.

The 540c also provides the luxury of two batteries. Apple has moved to improve the poor battery life of the earlier PowerBooks by switching battery technology to nickel-metal-hydride. With two batteries - as provided as standard with the 540 - Apple quotes up to eight hours of battery life, depending on power conservation settings. With two batteries, the 540 drains one battery, then switches over to the other side, allowing you to recharge the first.

Information on power conservation and availability is always readily available and quickly adjustable. A small control strip sits across the bottom of the screen with an array of power-related icons. If you don't like the strip - small as it is - hogging desktop space, you can collapse it down to just a small tab.

When unplugging from the mains, this strip instantly changes to show a power gauge as well as power availability in hours. Apple has made power-management, which in many Intel-based laptops is something of a black art, a snip. It is all very obvious and intuitive.

In the future, the plan is that one of these battery slots can be used for a PCMCIA "cage" instead of the second battery. This is the first time Apple has supported the PCMCIA standard. But with these small credit card-sized storage and communications devices being increasingly demanded by mobile users and providing an ever-widening breadth of additional functions, Apple would be foolhardy not to support them.

When the PCMCIA cages eventually ship - one dealer was not expecting them for two to three months - the card will slot into the cage and the cage will slot into what is now the battery socket - a neat design.

We noticed that there was no reference made to the PCMCIA support in the documentation, nor is there any PCMCIA-related icon in the control panel. So maybe this was an afterthought and there is still work to do here. Apple couldn't give a date as to when they would be available.

PCMCIA card-compatibility is still something of an issue, even with Intel-based laptops. Everyone says it's an industry standard and there should be no problem, but there often is a problem. So to put to rest any compatibility concerns, Apple would do well to provide a list of approved cards that have been tested with the PowerBook.