New PB G4-15-Widescreen, Disappointing, and slow

Question

I just took delivery of a brand new 15" Aluminum Powerbook 1.67 GHz G4 (Widescreen Edition) as a replacement for my aging 15" Titanium Powerbook.
My first thought was how much I was underwhelmed by the appearance: that is, I recall first seeing the TiBook in person, holding it at my side, and being really impressed with the whole design, ergonomics, etc. The AlBook seems to have dumbed down the TiBook's appearance to a much less impressive look and feel, less svelte, clumbsier, etc.
However, I can understand that some of the changes were necessary: ie, the lid had to be a little thicker to prevent keycaps from marking the LCD, etc. Fine...I can live with that.
But upon using it I was constantly wondering why the AlBook felt so much slower than I expected: so I ran some benchmarks.
Using xbench 1.2 on both PBs, my TiBook generally ran a benchmark score from as low as 20 to as high as 24. The AlBook, however, is topping out at 42, and more often than not scores in the 40 range. 3.5 years newer and barely twice as fast?
What sense does this make? And how could it be?
1. Both PBs have G4 procs. The AlBook at 1.67GHz should be 250% the raw speed of the TiBook's 667MHz.
2. The AlBook supposedly has 128MBs of a "much improved" graphics processor, compared to the ATi Mobility (16MB I think) of the TiBook.
3. The AlBook has 1.5GB of supposedly much quicker ram, compared to the TiBook's 768MB.
4. The AlBook supposedly has 80GB of a 5400rpm HD, which is less than half full, compared to the 30GB 4200 rpm 90% full drive in the TiBook.
5. Here's the unknown: the TiBook still had OS X 10.3.x (latest available) compared to the AlBook's OS X 10.4.2 or 10.4.3 (ran both). However I ran top to ensure that neither had any extra processes running that would impact benchmarks (ie, I shut down dashboard, etc).
I've used various system utilities (Cocktail, Macaroni, SOX) to ensure that both are as up-to-speed as they allow, and ran iDefrag just to ensure I didn't have any strange fragmentation on the new PB (I didn't).
I'm also not a new Mac user: I've owned literally hundreds, going back to my first - a Mac Plus, which I saved up for and bought while in Highschool - and have worked as a Mac consultant for several years over the past 15.
So somebody please tell me: what's wrong here? Is there a chance I just have a lemon? Did I get a slow drive? Underclocked proc? bad ram? Or is there that much extra load from 10.4 compared to 10.3 as to make this difference?
Thanks,
DM

Answer 1

Well...I guess I'm still disappointed. Every previous new computer for me has been like buying a new house: you get to buy a little more square footage, live in a nicer neighborhood, have a bigger pool, with better landscaping, and so on.
This new AlBook is like getting a new pair of shoes: not as worn out as the old pair, certainly shiny and nice looking, and a somewhat more modern style, but all in all providing the same basic experience as the old pair did when new.
I'm still disappointed with the overall look and feel, though it's better than the cheapie ($499) Dell laptop I bought as a spare PC for the wife a few weeks ago. I guess it's sort of like the difference between the Lombard (which I owned) and the Pismo (which I did not), the latter being a slightly clunkier, less fresh, slightly faster but not quite as sexy version of the former.
That said, I like the built-in Bluetooth, key-lighting is very cool, seems to be quieter than my TiBook. Unrelated to the hardware, but specific to my full-time jump from 10.3 to 10.4 I have to say that I think that Dashboard Widgets are done a bit more nicely than Konfabulator was (and I loved Konfabulator as an OS extension; easy to understand why Apple copied 'em). I imagine this comes from having a crew of coders that are part of the OS team.
Where it fails compared to the Dell, however (especially when considering that it's 4x the cost), is in some fairly critical performance issues: Airport range is absolutely, unbelievably bad. I have a Linksys wrt54g with Talisman firmware, jacked up to 200mW, coupled to a pair of Hypergain 14.5dBi antennas, which will let me get across the street with the Dell (and its cheapie built-in Intel-based wireless chipset) on 802.11g, and 24+Mb bandwidth. The AlBook fails outright 30 feet away (and I've tried different options, ie Interference Robustness settings).
This means that some critical aspects of my life - such as sitting in bed with the AlBook on my lap - just plain can't happen.
Now that I've disabled a big chunk of my Ram, the 'book isn't crashing and the WiFi isn't dropping out...as much. But it still doesn't live up to it's forebears.
I'm still holding out hope that there will be some future OS or firmware upgrade that will address several of these things. As a multi-platform user (considering my old TiBook could boot into OS 9, OS 10, YD Linux and Win2k via VPC) I still vastly prefer the Mac OS to the alternatives. It's still a joy to use, mostly, compared to the hum-drum experience of using Win XP and it's siblings.
I suppose what bothers me the most is that I have never in the past been disappointed with a new Mac. They've always met my expectations, and exceeded them in some respects. It's hard for me even to admit it, because in general I'm an optimistic, idealistic sort of guy. But in the end, much as it hurts me to say so, this upgrade has been a significant disappointment.
I'm already looking forward to - hopefully - trading it in on the first generation of Intel-based Powerbooks.
DM