Now there's even more to love about Apple's iBook notebook. Weighing in at an easily portable 5.99 pounds and featuring a 600 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 20 GB hard drive, and 256 MB of RAM (expandable to 640 MB)--plus AirPort wireless networking and FireWire, USB, and Ethernet ports--the iBook connects to hundreds of peripherals designed to fit your life.
This system features a brilliant 14.1-inch TFT XGA active-matrix display and razor-sharp 1,024 x 768 resolution. It's the perfect place for doing everything from working on spreadsheets to displaying your movies and digital pictures in millions of colors (incidentally, the iBook display scales down beautifully, again with millions of colors, for special games and applications optimized for 800 x 600 or 640 x 480 resolutions). It's a marvel that such a wide screen has been fitted into a notebook computer that measures just 12.7 inches wide, 10.2 inches deep, and 1.35 inches thick. Note also the fit and finish that has always been a big part of the appeal of the iBook, as well as the subtle design touches that make it the quintessential consumer portable.

Included is a CD-ROM drive for playing games and music CDs, as well as the option to upgrade with a DVD-ROM for enjoying DVD movies. The 600 MHz iBook ships with a 20 GB Ultra ATA hard disk drive, or upgrade to an optional 30 GB hard drive for even more storage space. In addition, this system comes with the ATI Rage Mobility 128 graphics accelerator with 8 MB of SDRAM and AGP 2x support for gorgeous 3-D graphics.

The iBook also comes loaded with iPhoto, the cool new software application in the easy-to-use tradition of iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD. iPhoto makes it a snap to manage your digital pictures. You can present them in a full-screen slide show (accompanied by your favorite music), e-mail them to your family and friends, print them on your inkjet printer, order Kodak prints over the Internet, or have them made into custom-printed, linen-bound books.

In addition to handling digital photos with ease, the iBook lets you make your own movies--and show them anywhere. Capture digital video footage on your DV camcorder and turn it into engaging movies with the iMovie 2 software that comes pre-installed. iMovie lets you transfer video clips from your digital camcorder to your hard disk using the included FireWire port. Use iMovie to snip out the boring parts and enhance the best parts with cool effects, transitions, and titles. Then add a great soundtrack and you're done. Now watch your finished movies full-screen on your iBook or use the iMovie Export feature to select from a range of predefined QuickTime formats for creating and sharing movies. You can, for example, compress your movies so you can burn them onto a CD or post them on the Internet, or use the VGA video output port (for video mirroring on an external display) and an AV port to show your movies and presentations on a big-screen TV or projector (just add an optional Apple AV cable).

For those interested in audio as well as video applications, the iBook comes with iTunes 2, the software that lets you convert (or "rip") the songs on your music CDs to MP3 format, simply by clicking a button. iTunes compresses CD-quality audio files to about a tenth of their original size with very little loss in audible quality. These significantly smaller file sizes enable you to store thousands of songs on your iBook's hard disk drive.