iBook monitor spanning

To:  Apple Computer

To:
Apple Computer, Inc.
Mr. Steve Jobs, CEO
Mr. Jon Rubinstein (Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering),
Dr. Avadis Tevanian, Jr. (Senior Vice President of Software Engineering)


We, the undersigned, would like to express our sincere wish that Apple Computer, Inc. officially adopt monitor spanning for the iBook line of portables, enabling a second monitor to be driven in addition to the internal display, at a variety of high resolutions and display frequencies.

It has recently been shown that this feature is already partially implemented in the current line of G3 iBooks (700 MHz), and that only a slight change in the software is necessary to fully take advantage of the iBooks display abilities.

We would like to encourage Apple Computer, Inc. to implement this change in software itself, and not to further limit the iBooks capacity to drive an external display.

We feel that there are enough features which differentiate the two portable lines of Apple’s Computers, the iBook and the Powerbook G4, from another, to warrant individuality and to minimise sales ‘cannibalisation’.

These include first and foremost the processor (G3 vs. G4), the screen size (12.1 or 14.1 inch vs. 15.2 inch), the maximal amount of installable RAM (640 MB vs 1 GB), the size of the largest available hard drive (40 GB vs. 60 GB), the ability to use PC-Cards internally (no ability for the iBook vs one PC Card/CardBus slot in the Powerbook G4), the bus speed (100 Mhz vs 133 MHz), the identity and size of the graphics chip (ATI Mobility Radeon with16MB graphics memory and AGP 2X support vs ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics processor with 32MB of DDR SDRAM video memory and AGP 4X support), the speed of the ethernet connection (100 BASE-T vs. 1000 BASE-T) and finally a DVI output port, which is currently only available on the Powerbook G4.

This non-exhaustive list shows that Apple has ample possibilities of marketing these products to different segments of the market, in addition to justifying the difference in price.

We feel that the ability to drive an external display at high resolutions is additionally important, now that on the one hand large CRT displays are becoming increasingly popular and affordable, and on the other, that large LCD displays show inferior picture quality when using low, non-native resolutions.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The iBook monitor spanning Petition to Apple Computer was created by current and future iBook owners and written by Sven Sewitz.  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no express or implied endorsement of this petition by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. The petition scripts are created by Mike Wheeler at Artifice, Inc.  For Technical Support please use our simple Petition Help form.

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