Hi there:
My setup has been running on the Mac for about 3 years now.
The idea that Macs are huge ignores the excellent laptops that Apple has sold for a long time.
My first was the smallest at the time called the PowerBook 2400c. This machine was souped up to the max with 80MB of RAM a G3 320 and a 40GB hard drive. It's still working in my shop playing music using Sound Jam. (the precursor of iTunes).
this little machine used to run virtualPC (an emulation environment) with Copilot and playing music in the bg.
The second was a Pismo-class G3 400 laptop with firewire and usb. This one worked very well and ran OSX. This one had DVD and could connect to the internet via infrared and a GSM cell phone. When I upgraded to OSX I also upgraded to copilot 2003 but unfortunately at the same time (and still now) virtualPC for OSX broke it's usb connectivity and it has not been fixed. This setup had a 12" ELO touchscreen and a Kensington programmable trackball (so that I could keep my eyes on the road) and connected to a Kenwood Vz907 through a VGA to composite video transcoder.
I am now running a 12" PowerBook G4 and it ROCKS! The little sucker will run all kinds of stuff at the same time and it can connect to the net with a bluetooth phone. Now with a bluetooth GPS (Global Sat) I can also go back to the navigation world as OSX makes it look like a serial port to virtualPC. I'm running Street and trips (with the fast-update hack), Street Atlas and others. All while playing music through iTunes.
I also have an infrared keyboard mounted on the visor with a little flasher that points down so that the receiver can catch the pulses down below. There is an iMic USB audio adapter which isolates all electrical noise from the audio output and I just installed a 250AMP alternator to handle the dual battery setup.
So as you can see, I didn't give up.
The mac is an excellent platform for the car because the laptops are small (especially the iBook), wake up in seconds (2-3) and all the software is provided. iTunes, DVD Player, etc.
The laptop approach also avoids a lot of the problems with bigger systems in terms of engine noise, etc. and more importantly, can be removed from the car pretty quickly. I can remove the laptop and disconnect the screen plus have it all packed in a small case I have for this in about 10 min, 5 if I'm in a hurry.
I just purchased a Xenarc screen to see if I can get the touchscreen working and build it into the dashboard. (See my other post in this forum)
Feel free to contact me with questions or suggestions and if you would like to see the setup (sorry, only one pic right now) you can go to
MacTahoe or see my post in the show your system forum here.
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/show...5&pagenumber=4
It's near the end of the page, but unfortunately, the pictures I posted are not there anymore and I have not had time to build a site, but I have to say that the help and motivation I have gotten from the users of this forum has been invaluable.
Linear Mode
