My first major disappointment with the new iBook came yesterday as I realized that something was missing that had become so ubiquitous with laptops that I hadn’t even bothered to research whether it was supported.

The extended desktop, or the ability to connect an external monitor and see different things on each screen, didn’t work. Mirroring, where you see the same image on both screens, worked, but there was no splitting in order to increase the usable desktop area. This was particularly surprising since Apple pioneered this feature, and Macs had it years before Windows ever did. Today, just about any new PC laptop with an external monitor port has this feature, so why didn’t my new iBook?!

Thinking I must be missing something obvious, I took to Google for the answers. It turns out I wasn’t missing anything, because while the computer has the capability, it was intentionally disabled by Apple, presumably to incent people to check out the much more expensive (but only marginally more powerful) PowerBook line.

There is good news, though. Luckily, the option to disable extended desktop is an open firmware setting, which can be changed by the user. There’s even a handy utility to do it for you, which works like a charm on the new 1.2GHz iBook with the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 video card. Now I have the best of both worlds: lots of screen space while I’m at my desk, and the mobility that comes with a super small screen.