Tuesday, September 16, 2003
New G4 Powerbooks
Apple has finally gotten around to updating its 15" powerbook (my current tool of choice), woohoo! The new model has a redesigned case (including the spiffy backlit keyboard) that matches the rest of the powerbook line. The processor has been bumped up to 1.25Ghz. Bluetooth, firewire 800 and airport extreme all come standard. I think the coolest feature of all is the ability to stuff in 2gigs of ram. 2gigs of ram in a laptop? Now we're talking. :) I priced out "my new powerbook" and it comes in a just shy of $4000. Can anyone out there spot me some cash? I write code real good? The scarry thing is that it would probably only last me a year or so.
Overall its a decent upgrade but I don't think its enough of a boost to bother upgrading. I'm atually surprised that this upgrade didn't come at the same time that the 12" and 17" were announced. I guess the 15" had been in production for long enough that it took time to get through the product cycle.
There were rumors of a dual processor version but seems like that was nothing but rumor. I think a dual processor laptop would be rediculous when it came to power consumption. The thing I like most about mine is its good batter life and super light portability. Take one look good luck at my poor battered laptop and you can see I carry it all over the place.
What I am really waiting for is a new line of Powerbooks based on the G5. There must be some fairly significant cooling and power challenges that need to be worked out before they will see the light of day. I guess I have a while to wait. Its probably a good thing since it hasn't even been a year since I got my current laptop.
Still no word on the OS X 10.3 cept, "available later this year". I really wish they would atleast do a public beta. I really NEED the new user switching feature. :) The bsd style ports feature also sounds pretty interesting. I'm assuming this means that they have rounded the corners on their X11 server. It would be nice if they integrated it more seemlessly into the os. I don't want to have an extra icon in the doc for the x server. I would rather have a section in System Preferences to turn on the x server. Of course then they would have to keep track of your x windows for you... (but that shouldn't be terribly hard). That would make running all those wonderful gui opensource projects truely useful to mac osx users.
Overall its a decent upgrade but I don't think its enough of a boost to bother upgrading. I'm atually surprised that this upgrade didn't come at the same time that the 12" and 17" were announced. I guess the 15" had been in production for long enough that it took time to get through the product cycle.
There were rumors of a dual processor version but seems like that was nothing but rumor. I think a dual processor laptop would be rediculous when it came to power consumption. The thing I like most about mine is its good batter life and super light portability. Take one look good luck at my poor battered laptop and you can see I carry it all over the place.
What I am really waiting for is a new line of Powerbooks based on the G5. There must be some fairly significant cooling and power challenges that need to be worked out before they will see the light of day. I guess I have a while to wait. Its probably a good thing since it hasn't even been a year since I got my current laptop.
Still no word on the OS X 10.3 cept, "available later this year". I really wish they would atleast do a public beta. I really NEED the new user switching feature. :) The bsd style ports feature also sounds pretty interesting. I'm assuming this means that they have rounded the corners on their X11 server. It would be nice if they integrated it more seemlessly into the os. I don't want to have an extra icon in the doc for the x server. I would rather have a section in System Preferences to turn on the x server. Of course then they would have to keep track of your x windows for you... (but that shouldn't be terribly hard). That would make running all those wonderful gui opensource projects truely useful to mac osx users.
