Widescreen iBook?

is this perhaps one of the first MacTel's to hit the market?

Nice if it is true.
All laptops should be in widescreen format in my opinion.
Much more practical I think.

On another note: I want those mactels already!

is this perhaps one of the first MacTel's to hit the market?

First I would not be surprised if you are right. And then I think that the 15,4" ibook is realy needed. A cheap 15" laptop would make a lot of people happy. I wonder if the mactel will use the motherboarde from intel or apple. I hope that apple and intel together can make some stuff, that way new tech will come faster to mac owners, like s-ata hd in laptops ++++

About the tablets, that would be very sweet indeed IF they are pratical. They only need some smal good apps to make them a hit. They have to find the smal things, like Tigers widdegs.

Nice if it is true.
All laptops should be in widescreen format in my opinion.
Much more practical I think.

On another note: I want those mactels already!

more practical for what? watching movies? for many people the most practical thing would be a vertical screen, since documents (paper) are in general longer than wider!

I actually think non wideangle screens have the best compromise and that wide screens are only nice when they are very big, so a vertical document still has a decent size.

A sensible replacement for the 14" iBook.

I'd like to see the small PB and iBook go to a 12" or 13" widescreen: there'e extra "margin" on the sides to use anyway, and the screen height would be smaller (in inches) than now--which means a smaller case front-to-back would be possible. Smaller palm-rest area because the screen would be closer to the shape of the keyboard than it is now.

First I would not be surprised if you are right. And then I think that the 15,4" ibook is realy needed. A cheap 15" laptop would make a lot of people happy. I wonder if the mactel will use the motherboarde from intel or apple. I hope that apple and intel together can make some stuff, that way new tech will come faster to mac owners, like s-ata hd in laptops ++++

About the tablets, that would be very sweet indeed IF they are pratical. They only need some smal good apps to make them a hit. They have to find the smal things, like Tigers widdegs.

I think that if the 15.4" iBook is one of the first MacTels, it will be much like the others - it won't use a motherboard straight from Intel or straight from Apple, but rather an Intel-based motherboard with Apple-specific customizations.

Your points are true, but at the same time wide IS practical in many ways--for more than just movies:

* Room for a document window plus palettes to the side. (And, I recommend, your Dock on the left.)

* Room for a work area on the right and a source list on the left (like iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, Mail, bookmark managers, etc.)

* You can (and always will) scroll docs vertically anyway--so at least make the width as wide as possible so you can view your file nice and big and sharp without any horizontal scrolling.

* First-person games are great in widescreen.

* Column view in Finder is the most useful view, I find--and great with extra width.

* Your menu bar has room for more goodies on the right.

* Even my 15.2" PowerBook screen CAN fit 2 documents side-by-side, and I often do. Not as nicely as a 17" or 30" :)

* Timeline-style editing is now common for consumers: there's iMovie, GarageBand, Final Cut Express, Logic Express, and many 3rd-party apps. And of course many more for pros, including 3D animation programs. So horizontal document scrolling/editing is very important these days, not just vertical word processing and web browsing.

hopefully the resolution on 14' iBook will finally crank up. OS X in 1024x768 is a pain IMO. I found it barely enough on my 15'PB with 1280x854. I miss my big screen of my desktop with 1600x1200. This with a resolution independant OS would be very attractive for this price point. OSX is pixelovore lol

Widescreen would shrink the difference between iBook and PowerBook even further. Apart from the better video card and nicer looking Aluminum, will there really be any difference?

Perhaps they'll wait for the Intel chips, and put out fast widescreen iBooks, and turbo-fast, dual-core PowerBooks?

Widescreen would shrink the difference between iBook and PowerBook even further. Apart from the better video card and nicer looking Aluminum, will there really be any difference?

There really isn't that much difference between them right now. Aside from the display resolution and software-block against dual-head operation.

There was only a significant difference back when the iBook was G3-based.

When the Intel boxes eventually ship, I suspect we'll see a 32-bit chip in the iBook and a 64-bit chip in the PowerBook. But until then, I don't think there will be very much difference between them.