An Apple Ready for Hard Knocks

Judging by how hard it is to get one, it seems that Apple Computer (AAPL) hit the sweet spot of the consumer market with its new iBook portables. The combination of some clever marketing and a visually exciting design has made the blue-or orange-and-white iBooks very appealing to retail customers in a world of look-alike, work-alike laptops.

In fact, the iBook is perfectly acceptable as a consumer notebook, even if at $1,599, it's somewhat overpriced and underfeatured. The true value of this innovative design will become apparent when it is used in the arena for which it was really created--school.

SCHOOL SMARTS. Many design decisions that seem odd in a product for homes become exciting in a product designed for students. Take the handle, which seems a superfluous addition at first glance. Kids, however, have a hard time holding a laptop between thumb and forefinger the way adults do. Besides, the handle isn't just a handle. The solid aluminum rod that runs through it is part of a tough hinge. And passing a cable through the loop allows a classroom's worth of iBooks to be secured with a single lock.

Other little touches make the iBook well suited to school use. The top is held shut by spring loading rather than a latch because latches break under rough handling. Two recessed contacts on the bottom allow a number of iBooks to be charged at once in a special rack or cart. The generous margins of tough plastic and rubber around the screen, which make the display seem even smaller than its 12.1-inch size, provide extra protection for a laptop's most vulnerable, and expensive, component. You have to remove two screws and a cover to change the battery--a nuisance, but it's additional protection against hard knocks. As compensation, the battery life of more than five hours is exceptional.

One of the most interesting features of the iBook, the built-in wireless networking, will eventually become important in the home, but it's ideal for schools. A $99 AirCard installs under the keyboard and, using an antenna built into the cover of the iBook, communicates with the $299 AirPort Base Station at 11 megabits per second. The base station includes a 56K modem that allows a number of iBooks to share a dial-up Internet connection, or it can link the iBooks to a wired Ethernet network. (The iBook also comes with a standard Ethernet cable jack.) With wireless networking, students will be able to move their computers around the school as long as they stay within some 100 meters of a base station. And $100 per station is considerably less than the cost of running Ethernet cable.

I couldn't test the system because the base station won't be out until November. But I recently attended a conference where 200 Windows laptops communicated using the same wireless networking technology, a standard called IEEE 802.11. The AirPort is compatible with networking systems from 3Com, Symbol Technologies, Lucent Technologies, and others. Apple also has put AirPort into its new iMacs and high-end G4 desktops.

PUNY DRIVE. There are a few things I don't like about the iBook design. Like the iMac, it has no built-in floppy drive and uses the universal serial bus as its only way to connect accessories. I don't miss the floppy or the old Mac modem and printer connectors, but I wish it had a second USB jack. Plug in a mouse, for example, to use in place of the touchpad, and you can't connect anything else. Even more serious is the lack of a PC card slot, which means that there's no way to connect a standard video camera to an iBook. And the 3.2-gigabyte hard drive is puny.

One reason that the iBook seems relatively pricey is that the features for educational use don't come cheap. Among Windows laptops, for about the same money, you can get a Toshiba Satellite 2590CDT with a faster processor, more memory, and a bigger hard drive. Buyers committed to the Macintosh would probably be better off with an iMac, unless portability is essential.

For school use, however, there's nothing like the iBook. With its ability to put computers wherever they are needed in a school, or to allow movement between school and home, the iBook could open a new era in educational computing.

Questions? Comments? E-mail tech&you@businessweek.com or fax (202) 383-2125

By STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM

TABLE: Apple's New iBook

PROCESSOR
300 MHz PowerPC G3

MEMORY
32 MB base/128 MB max

HARD DRIVE
3.2 GB

DISPLAY
12.1-inch active matrix

PRICE
$1,599

DATA: APPLE COMPUTER INC.