White Pox Afflicts More than Apple's 15" AlBook Screens

When the new 15" aluminum PowerBook G4 began shipping, the screens of some of them had, or soon develped, lighter spots on their screens when viewed with a light background. The white spots, or "white pox", develop in the form of a ring.

Yesterday, we mentioned this to a Wintel-owning buddy and he said "You mean like this?" showing us the screen on his tiny 6-month old Dell Latitude notebook. Sure enough, his Dell has a similar problem only a bit worse than the screenshots we've seen of the afflicted 15" AlBooks. He said it began to show up after about a month's use and has slowly gotten worse. Since it is a corporate computer, he is not too freaked out about it and plans to get a more recent model in a few months anyway.

BTW, the Dell is smaller and lighter than a 12" PowerBook G4 but it doesn't have an internal optical drive. It also has a much smaller standard battery but he has a big one that attaches to the back to get 5 hours or so. The only thing we really like about his Dell is that it has a PCMCIA slot and he uses a PC card to get wireless internet from Sprint almost anywhere. Of course, it runs Windows 2000, a definite negative.