Brand: MacNews

The iBook has received another glowing review, this time from Fortune magazine, which concludes: “just as the PowerBook G4 set a new standard for professional laptops, the iBook does the same for consumer portables.”

Napster, which on Wednesday was permitted to turn its free music trading service back on, has seen its usage plummet by 65 percent since February, according to a new report. Alternative services, such as Gnutella (LimeWire 1.6b, a Gnutella client, was updated on Saturday) are quickly rising in popularity as a result. Napster will be launching a paid service, with access to some copyrighted materials, later this summer.

Gateway is set two introduce two new laptops on Monday, including the Solo 1200, a laptop priced aggressively at $999 and targeted at the consumer market (and set to compete against Apple’s $1,299 iBook). The Solo 1200 will feature an 800MHz Celeron processor, 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive, and a 12.1″ active-matrix screen. For $200 more customers can add integrated 802.11b support and another 64MB of RAM. Additional specs are not yet available.

Terra Soft is selling PowerPC computers designed from the ground-up to run PowerPC Linux. The new yellow boxes, called “briQ,” use G3 and G4 processors and ship with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.

eWEEK sat down with some Apple representatives to discuss the new Power Mac G4 and Mac OS X 10.1. Among the notes, only the 867/dual-800MHz G4s feature 2MB of L3 cache — the 733MHz model does not.