Never mind the "girly" comments-- critics said the iMac would flop in part because it looks like a toy, and it's whupping some serious tail out there in retail; just the same, the iBook's distinctive style will very likely only help sales, not hinder them. What people should really be concerned with is the substance behind the style; in other words, is the iBook's feature set strong enough to lure in the buyers? For the most part it's a solid machine, but there are omissions that are causing some hand-wringing.

Once again, we're seeing history repeat. Complaints about the iBook's "missing" features sound eerily familiar when compared to all those omissions that "doomed" the iMac before it even made it onto the shelves. One has no PCI slots, the other has no PC card slots. Neither has video-out. Neither allows the attachment of peripherals by any means other than USB, though that's less of a complaint these days-- amazing what a difference a year can make, right? I mean, has anyone heard anyone complaining about the iBook's lack of a floppy drive? But anyway, there is one criticism of the iBook's feature set that didn't apply to the iMac: the iBook lacks a built-in microphone. That's kind of a wacky thing to leave out on a student-oriented laptop, since the ability to record voice notes (or even an entire lecture-- heck, audio's relatively small) seems like a natural. And what about all these cool voice dictation products we're finally going to get for the Mac from IBM, MacSpeech, and Dragon Systems? Sure, IBM's working on a headset for ViaVoice that will plug into the iBook's USB port, but wouldn't a standard audio-in port make life easier for everyone?

Well, speaking of history repeating, remember the uproar when Apple announced that the iMac would come standard with a 33.6 kbps modem? Apple relented and switched to a 56K model before the system shipped. Interestingly enough, rumor has it that Apple's rethinking the whole "no microphone" issue for the iBook, as well; according to Mac the Knife, no less an authority than Steve Jobs himself is cracking the whip, following the criticism of the iBook's deafness; if true, then a built-in microphone may yet appear on the iBook before it ships, though it's so late we consider it a lot more likely to show up in a "Revision B" model later in the year. Personally, we'd probably rather have an audio-in port plus a cheap plug-in microphone thrown in the box; no built-in microphone is likely to be nearly good enough to use for voice recognition, which is why such software usually comes with its own special microphone. But we'll take anything we can get.