At least the new PowerBook works…

I bought a new PowerBook this past weekend. It’s the first new current generation PowerBook I’ve bought; my first was a generation back, a 1 GHz machine bought after the 1.33 Ghz machines were released. This is the last new Mac I expect to buy for several years if not longer. I’d love to keep moving up and keep providing fodder for my website, but I simply don’t make that much money.

The PowerBook seems to be the antithesis of the G5 PowerMac from a quality standpoint. I had read a lot of comments about the darkness of the LCD displays in this current generation of PowerBooks and had confirmed that by examining PowerBooks at the Apple Store. Yet, the screen on mine is great, at least as good and I think a tad better than the 1 Ghz PowerBook I gave up. As usual, I’m trying to get the most bang out of my bucks by getting a couple of upgrades done with one buy. My 1 GHz PowerBook trickled down to my wife who moved up to it from her 700 MHz G3 iBook. (We don’t know yet what we’re going to do with the iBook. I might try to sell it and get a few hundred bucks if we don’t identify someone in the family who really wants or needs it.) My new one is noticeably faster than my old one, not only due to the 50% faster CPU but the 5400 rpm (vice a 4200 rpm) hard drive. The other good thing about this deal was that I could swap out the new machine’s 256MB SODIMM (RAM) with the extra 1GB SODIMM I had with the older one. That’s left my PowerBook with 1.25 GB of RAM and my wife with 512MB of RAM, plenty for both of us.