Apple! – It’s time to put the PowerBook to bed!

Of all the Macs, the PowerBooks will always be my first love. Though I’ve used many different desktop machines over the years, all the Macs I’ve bought for myself have been portables, beginning with the (rather ghastly) PowerBook 150 back in 1994. So it is with a little sadness that I watch the current line-up of PowerBooks gently sinking into mediocrity.

OK, on one level the G4 PowerBooks remains nice machines. The styling is as sharp as ever, and standard features like built-in wireless and a DVD burner are certainly nice to have. But heck, they’re still running a G4 processor and come with hard drives running at a ho-hum 5400 rpm. The big 15 and 17 inch screens hardly qualify as unique features any more, with many PC laptops coming with similar sized screens.

Of course the killer for many mobile Mac users is the knowledge that an Intel-powered PowerBook is going to be released sometime in the next year or two. So why buy a new PowerBook now? The G4 processor is not only relatively slow by modern standards, but is also likely to be dropped by the next version of the Mac OS. Even many programs available today work best, often only at all, with the G5 processor. In this light, even the recently-refurbished line up pf G4 PowerBooks cannot be viewed as a must-have purchase.

But we’ve been here before. Back in 1993/1994 Apple had the succesful but by-now hardly cutting-edge series of PowerBook 100s, running Motorola 68030 processors. They new that within a couple of years they’d be shifting everything across to the PowerPC chip, so upping the PowerBooks to the ‘040 processor would be a stop-gap measure at best. Their solution — a brilliant one as it turned out — was to commission a PowerBook designed for a limited lifespan, one that didn’t need to fit into their product development plan, wouldn’t be upgraded, and didn’t need to match anything else in their range. In short, they came up with the PowerBook 500 series.

These computers, if you don’t remember, were innovative and handsome. Colour screens, built-in Ethernet, double battery bays, and a full-size keyboard are things we take for granted now, but on the 500 series PowerBooks they were revolutionary. Even more innovative, though hardly used, were PC expansion card slots and even a processor-direct slot for adding the equivalent of desktop computer expansion cards. The styling was superb, and though a little dated perhaps today, was far in advance of anything any of the laptop producers of the time had produced, including Apple.

So here’s the thing: Apple could do this again. Pull out all the stops, and turn out something that doesn’t have to last the ages as far as styling and specification goes, but is different enough to become a fun lust-object in its own right. What would I like to see? Well, the latest IBM hard drives run at up to 7200 rpm, so let’s see a few of those installed to improve read and write performance. Stick in a cool graphics card to make the machine a winner for gaming. But above all, try something fun with the styling. A shiny, black, curvy PowerBook might be just the thing. Or maybe blood red. Or gold. Whatever.

Basically, lets give the G4 PowerBook a decent send off.