I'm a firm believer in the maxim "if it aint broke, don't fix it!" Lately I've been getting a lot of use out of an Apple iBook that Mike very kindly loaned me. It's one of the later white G3 models (900 MHz PowerPC 750cxe, 384 Mbytes RAM, built–in 802.11b wireless, 40 Gbyte hard disk). One of the reasons I've been getting more use out of it is that I was able to install Apple's X11 server so I can run programs on other computers and have them appear on the iBook as though they were run locally (the iBook displays each program's output and feeds it keyboard and trackpad events).
So far as computer hardware is concerned, I've been concentrating lately on servers, minicomputers ("mid–range" if you're an IBM person ;-) and the odd LAN workstation. A discussion prompted me to look at notebook computers and it struck me that Apple are shipping machines that are physically quite similar to the G3 iBook I'm using to type this blog post. The innards are different of course, but they've stuck with the same form factor for their white G3 and G4 iBook and now their Intel–powered MacBook. It's not quite as small as the PowerBook Duo, but it doesn't need a DuoDock for LAN connectivity and of course the screen is quite a bit larger, even on the 12" or 13" models. The iBook is fast enough for most of what I do, but if I had to go out and buy a notebook PC today, it's nice to know that I could get something a lot like this.
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