Press reaction to Apple’s totally revamped iBook has been mostly favorable.
The most effusive praise came from David Coursey of ZDNet AnchorDesk, who said that “if you equate Microsoft with all things evil, here’s something you can do to help settle the score: Buy the new Apple iBook.” The columnist said that the consumer portable offers a alternative to the Big M.
“The new iBook beats a carry-around Linux machine in any number of ways, and you’ll be the envy of your friends without losing your connection to UNIX, since the new iBook runs Mac OS X,” he said. “As for the majority of people who actually like Microsoft, the new iBook is for you, too. You’ll still get to use Microsoft Office, making you the envy of all your friends without giving up application compatibility.”
Analyst Chris LeTocq of Guernsey Research told the San Francisco Chronicle that the new iBook “looks like a home run.”
“It’s the right product at the right price — that’s hard to beat,” he added.
According to the newspaper, LeTocq’s only complaint is that, unlike the original iBook, the new one has no handle, and Apple doesn’t include a bag.
The Financial Times noted that with its an all-white case and keyboard, the lightweight Apple notebook has “a distinctive and trendy look that is sure to draw attention.”
Adam Engst, publisher of the Mac news site TidBits, told the Washington Post that he was “generally impressed” by the new laptop. However, he felt that the entry-level iBooks should come with more than 64 MB of memory, especially if users are interested in running Mac OS X.
Engst told the newspaper that he wouldn’t miss the iBook’s bright colors — “They were getting a little old” — but said he would miss the handle that came on the original iBooks.
“It’s cute,” Lorin Evans, president of Washington Apple Pi user group, told the Post. “It’s much less clunky-looking than the old one.”
The San Jose Mercury News said that, with the unveiling of the new iBooks, Apple CEO Steve Jobs put PC giant Dell Computer “squarely in Apple’s crosshairs.”
MarketWatch said that analysts were impressed with the new laptop. Chris Le Tocq (yep, him again) said that “this is Apple’s D-Day, landing on beaches to take back education from Dell.”
Charlie Wolf, analyst at Needham and Company, told MarketWatch that the iBook is “going to be a terrific product for education.”
Terrific or not, don’t call it a subnotebook. Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior director of Portables Product Marketing told ZDNet that it’s no such critter.
“To me, calling it a sub-notebook means the manufacturer has made trade-offs, either in leaving out optical drives or cheating on the keyboard,” he said, adding that marketing the new iBook as a sub-notebook would mean pitching it toward corporate or professional users, the target market for Apple’s higher-end portable, the Titanium PowerBook G4.