Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Or: the heavier side of things ...
By this I mean issues and thoughts concerning the actual physical and tanglible sides of things. This thing, to be more specific. This PowerBook. What I'm thinking mostly about at this time is temperature, weight and the keyboard.
Yes, the 12 inch PowerBook does get warm. Not burningly so by any stretch, but the underside heats up enough for me to heed the manual and avoid placing it on soft things that might decrease ventilation more than intended. For the hands the heat really feels quite comfortable, you won't feel your fingers start to go numb and cold while using this machine! At some angles I think I can feel hot air seeping out through the keyboard, which feels pretty cool (uh, you know what I mean ...) too. As long as nothing gets cooked in there ... But I think it's okay, because the fans take it easy most of the time. And easy means completely turned off in this case. They've turned on a few times when things got demanding, but that didn't make them much of an annoyance. So the heat issues feel very bearable so far.
Addition on June 21st, 23:41
On a warm day with the power adapter connected, the heat can really bother me. Not harm or pain me, mind you, but sure bother and make my hands all moist. The power adapter is the big "secret" here, as soon as you're not connected and charging the heat stays very much lower. All the more reason to roam freely with the laptop the way it's meant to ...
Don't let the size or design fool you into thinking this is a flimsy, fragile computer. Once you start using it you realize it feels very solid, and weighty enough to make a single arm holding it quite tired after not too much of a while. Perhaps I can use this as a nice way to combine fun with exercise?
It's yummy, and I feel I've got used to it very quickly. This is probably quite related to the fact that I've been using laptops a slowly increasing amount of time over the past year, but it also is a very nice and comfortable keyboard I'm dealing with here. It uses the available space so well that it looks cut off on both sides, like there wasn't room for a final bevel, and the enter key is the slimmest thing I've ever seen. At first I found it a little hard to hit properly, but I'm only into my second day of usage and it already feels much better. The keys also have a nice amount of travel and a solid feel, and the arrow keys are all setup just like normal. I think there was something odd about their setup on mom's iBook, because I didn't expect them to be this nice before I saw them.
I've mentioned this on the iBook page, but it should go here too: Macs sleep and wake up wonderfully. Close the lid (provided you have a laptop), or wait your set time interval, and the computer goes to sleep in a few seconds (say two or three), activating the friendly pulsing white LED in the front in the process. Open the lid again and you're good to go again in an even shorter time. And, just like I said on the iBook page, sleep is totally silent. I never turn Pomum off, I just reboot it when software update asks me to in its friendliest voice.