Drool

Justin Blanton -

I’m assuming most of you are aware of the new 15 PowerBook that was introduced a few days ago at Apple Expo 2003. What a brilliant machine. I’ve been working all week on trying to sell my current TiBook to a fellow student. I figure that I should be able to get the new one without paying much, if anything, out-of-pocket. My TiBook has the SuperDrive, but I have no problem getting the new Powerbook with just the Combo drive — new PowerBook with Combo drive and education discount = $1978.00. I should be able to get close to that for my current notebook. We’ll see though, there are other things that have to be taken care of before I can start thinking about that, though the longer I wait the less my current notebook will be worth. Grr.

The new model offers countless improvements to the TiBook:

  • Aluminum alloy body
  • Backlit keyboard (only on SuperDrive model)
  • Ambient light sensor which adjusts the brightness of both the screen and the keyboard (only on SuperDrive model)
  • Built-in Bluetooth
  • FireWire 800 and USB 2.0
  • 512K L2 cache
  • ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
  • 333MHz DDR SDRAM
  • 802.11g

The biggest additions for me are the aluminum body and built-in Bluetooth. I find it incredibly annoying to have to plug in the dongle each time I need to connect my phone to the computer. Also, as I use my computer all the time in class, it would be really nice to pull out a Bluetooth mouse and be done with it; this goes for home use as well.

I’m assuming that the new model won’t suffer from the same keyboard-imprint-on-the-screen problems that the TiBook and iBook do, but that is yet to be determined.

In related news, Steve Jobs’ keynote from the expo was put online yesterday.