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PowerBook
Here is my ode to the almighty PowerBook, my computing hardware of choice since the line of Macintosh laptop line was created in 1991. There's also a story of what things were like before the PowerBooks descended from heaven (or Cupertino).
My happiness with the 520c was marred only by one ugly lie from Apple marketing: the pending arrival of the PowerPC upgrade daughterboard. It was shown at the San Francisco MacWorld Exposition (in January 1995) inside the "YYY" PowerBooks, and verbally promised for delivery in a few months. But it wasn't to arrive for almost a year later. The problem wasn't the slipping ship date, nor even it's premature promised delivery date, but that Apple never publicly said what the cause of the delays was; whether it was redesigning the board with a later, greater PowerPC, or if someone had misplaced the plans, or even if the product had quietly been dropped. As seems to be Apple's modus operandi, it burns down the enthusiasm of owners and developers alike, only to have to rebuild it with the next cool product release. Seems like a lot of extra work to me.
My 520c survived until just before my Eivissa and Gran Canaria trip. The PowerPC PowerBook 5300 was to be released and my 520c to be passed on to my uncle in Eivissa. Of course Apple's announced release date was weeks premature, and a major engineering setback and PR disaster didn't help the situation. The first laptop to use the new lithium-ion rechargable batteries, the 5300 was shipped with Nickel-Metal Hydride cells after two of the Sony-made Li-Ion batteries in Apple development prototypes caught fire. The switchover caused long shipping delays and was a major embarrassment. (We all make mistakes, but that one isn't going to look good on a résumé. :-)
During my ill-fated trip, during which the 520c got zapped by Eivissa's poor excuse for electrical power, I had a friendly shop in San Francisco ship me a rental PowerBook 150 (the one at left, on the table of the Deutsche Gasthaus Atlantis) until the trip was over. (In the interim I wrote chapters of my book on a transparent Newton.) I'm writing this a week before the trip is over. The same shop emailed me last week to say my 5300c/100 has arrived and is waiting for me. I'll write the next section of this web page when I have that, the latest PowerBook model, in my hot little hands.
Of course, the 5300 was perhaps the most obviously buggy hardware ever shipped by Apple. Especially vexing is the AC power adapter, which sticks far out of the back of the laptop, waiting to act as a lever to wiggle the female connector loose from the logic board and crack the female connector. It's happened twice to me in these last few months. Damn! Doesn't anybody at Apple actually use these things?
Even worse, the unit has extremely flimsy monitor screen hinges, causing the bezel to crack and separate, pulling the video ribbon cable tight and wiggling the connection loose, resulting in intermittent (or no) video output. Sheesh, it's not like it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that a laptop will be opened and closed from time to time. Boneheads. This has been one long inconvenience, shipping my 5300 back four times in five months. Hardly worth the effort.
The problems of this engineering nightmare were so widespread that the outcry forced Apple to issue an extended 7-year warranty on these flaws. Ever heard of such a thing?
These fast, portable machines, when coupled with the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connection to our house, make for a wonderful work-at-home environment. I have "Linux" running on the Wallstreet. Solaris 7 is on the SPARCstation 2, also connected to the Ethernet hub in the bedroom. We're an Intel-free zone; what if it absolutely has to be Microsoft Windows 95, 98, or NT? Connectix Virtual PC does the trick, down to the little sheep which toddle across the screen.
Right. That reminds me. I put the stock 10 MB hard drive into the Lombard and the 20 MB IBM TravelStar drive into the Pismo. Now we're ready to go. Say goodbye, Mac OS 9.
It's not that I don't want one of these beauties, just that I can't financially justify buying one right now. When the next revision is released, perhaps with a speed bump and another pound or two less onboard (as has been reported in the press), then we'll see.
The recently-released PowerBook G4 (DVI), now at 800 MHz, is here. This is the computer for which I was lusting. The native 1280 by 854 resolution of the incredibly bright 15.2-inch screen alone is a thrill (compared to this white-blue screen the sickly yellow of my Pismo is depressing), but the speedy 6-gigaflop processor makes working a lot more fun. I haven't yet used the built-in Airport card, but in a short time I ought to be within range of the San Francisco Wireless Broadband project. The ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics processor with 32MB of DDR video memory is nice for gaming right now, but as the Mac OS X "Jaguar" release comes, and the Quartz Extreme code will make the entire desktop a fully accelerated OpenGL scene, it'll take over rendering from the CPU. The whole Macintosh interface will become a first-person game :-)
As I've done several times before, especially when it seems as though the advance of progress is slow, I buy AppleCare before my initial warranty expires. That's me betting that something will go wrong before another compelling PowerBook release will come to pass.
Actually I've had pretty good luck with my PowerBooks, and rarely had to use the warranty, but even once more than pays for AppleCare.
My luck with my 800 MHz TiPB seems to have run out. In October intermittent inability to see the internal hard disk became the norm. Then complete failure. Luckily I have daily backups and an external hard disk from which to book and continue working.
The nice folks at Apple work on it, returning it in three days, having replaced the stock 40 GB drive with an 80 GB model and replacing all the worn titanium skins. Thanks, Apple!
A month later, in late November, the same thing happens. Luckily I have those backups and external drives. Even better, an old friend passes along a 12-inch PowerBook G4 for me to do work on his not-for-profit venture.
It's a very amusing trade-off, size for portability. The 12-inch seems much more portable, even with a full-size keyboard. If I'd started with this computer I'd not notice the lack of real-estate, but being used to a 15-inch widescreen it is a bit shocking. But not unpleasant.
And because the PowerBooks have a full complement of ports my work goes on. I can hardly wait to see what's going to happen with the repairs on the 15-inch. AppleCare warrants that machine until August 2005.
Update: the repairs are done quickly, the *third* hard drive seems to be working, the skins look great, and the machine flies along. The 12-inch has been returned from whence it was borrowed.
My wife, Rose, has started using the TiPB recently to watch movies - thanks, NetFlix - and so I'm in the market for a machine to hold me over past the first few revisions of the Intel-based PowerBooks. Today I found a next-to-latest model, refurbished, at the Apple Store. The seriously discounted price on that machine, plus the educational discount (for PTA officers) on the AppleCare, did the trick.
[Update: Almost twenty months after getting the PowerBook G4, which is a workhorse, I migrate to the Intel-powered MacBook Pro.]
Most of the photos on this page belong to Apple Computer; used without permission (but with gratitude :-).
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