As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
The Mac I bought came with 512 MB memory. In Glendale they don't have any more memory to sell me (waited five minutes to find that out) but it will cost about $200 (waited another five minutes to find that out as the salesgirl went back to the back room yet one more time). I am assuming I will want to put this up to a full gig. It holds 2, it says on the box. I have asked Kingston and Crucial what kind of memory packages they have for this machine, and both have responded: I'll try both, but my experience has been that anything sold by either of those two will be more than satisfactory.
I already know I need more memory. If you are going to use a PowerBook with the new Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) you will want at least a full gigabyte; less will condemn you to long periods of watching the spinning pinwheel known as "the beachball" (and sometimes "the Beachball of Death"). While that beachball is spinning you can't get much done even if this is a multi tasking operating system the GUI is generally non responsive during these episodes, even though the underlying Darwin FreeBSD core is active (and indeed can via accessed remotely via ssh if one has enabled that option via the System Preferences utility). But you'd have to know to do that. <continued>
