Check out the latest review of the iBook in the Wall Street Journal. It’s mostly favorable, and a lot more objective than the infamous Dvorak piece. Walter Mossberg keeps the target audience in mind when he reviews the various features (especially the design) of the iBook. He gives the iBook high marks in regard to the keyboard, the screen and the battery, and raves about the iBook’s battery life, power management system and wireless networking capabilities. As for the drawbacks, he says:
Well, like the iMac, it lacks a floppy-disk drive, or any removable media, even though removable media remain the main form of file transfer between PCs in the consumer and school markets. So iBook owners will have to spend at least $100 extra to get a floppy drive, and the floppy drive will take up the sole USB socket provided, which you need for a printer. The iBook should have at least two USB ports.
The iBook is underequipped in other ways as well. Its 3.2 gigabyte hard disk is laughably small by today’s standards, especially if you plan to store things like digital music. The 32MB of memory is about half what a computer should minimally carry, so iBook owners will have to shell out for extra memory.
