Sayonara Powerbook

Today I finally unloaded my old G4 PowerBook. It was a great little computer but it's age finally caught up with it. For a long time I've gradually become distant from the old girl, my last fling with her occurred after I installed Leopard. It wasn't pleasant, it took seven tries at a clean install, finally I reinstalled Tiger and then tried an upgrade install and finally, it worked. But, in the end it was to little to late. Leopard is not really at its best on a G4, I never really got used to it and I never bothered to go back to 10.4.

I think the 12 inch Powerbook had the combination of elegance and utility that the new MacBook Air can't even come close to. In fact the "Air" is well, kind of like a beautiful woman with no substance or depth. Sure it looks incredible, but without well, everything, a decent ultra potable needs it's pretty much useless. Instead we get an under powered over priced, style is everything, substance can't be found, piece of crap. I think it's proof you can be to thin. A 12-13.3 inch MacBook Pro with dedicated graphics, a Superdrive, and high end core two duo processor with a 250 gig hard drive would have been a world class, kick ass, road warrior machine. The MacBook Air is a fine lapdog for some spoiled, whinny, air head, who mindlessly stairs at her Myspace page, pouting cause daddy won't buy her a bimmer.

Enough already on the "Air". The PowerBook was hard to part with. I almost backed down on the sale at the last minute. Now it has a nice home with a young college student who will hopefully get some more quality time with her. I gave it a clean install of Tiger so the thing is actually useful. Fact is, I just didn't need it anymore.

My new production laptop is a beautiful 4 month old Dell Inspiron 1420. It's not as pretty as the PowerBook but with 2.2 ghz core two duo, and a 7200 rpm 160 gig hard drive it it pretty much smokes any other computer I've used.

One of the better jokes going around right now is that the 15.4 MacBook Pro is the fastest notebook for running Windows Vista out there. The hardware spec on the high end Mac's is impressive, but I doubt it will match the high end XPS Dells or Alienware machine's out right now.

Another compelling reason for not buying a Mac notebook is the difficulty of doing an upgrade. I recently upgraded the hard drive on a 4 year old Dell. It took exactly 1 screw to get the hard drive out of the computer, 4 more screws for the enclosure, and that was it. Try that on a new MacBook or MacBook Pro. Just forget about it unless you have a weekend to kill.