How a 22 Year Old Guy Writes

PowerBook's in, but so is WoW

Hi folks. I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't updated in a bit, and for that, I'm sorry. In truth, it's been a busy week. The professors at school are doing their best to make me miserable, so that takes up time. Also, my brother somehow convinced me to go ahead and install World of Warcraft, a day-consuming MMORPG that has devoured any ounce of free time left in my schedule. My new 12" PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz arrived. It's a superb replacement to my iBook G4 800... nearly double the speed, a bit more RAM, and new technologies like the scrolling trackpad.

All in all, it's been a fun and hectic week. The future looks a little less time-consuming, so I'll pop in to update the blog a bit more often.

Since I'm too busy to write a long post, how 'bout some news?

The first hospital in the US was opened in Pennsylvania on this day in 1752. Robert Fulton patented the steam boat in 1809. Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990.

Thomas Edison was born in 1847. Tina “Ginger” Louise was born in 1934.

Carly Fiorina is out at Hewlett-Packard, saying she quit in a dispute with the board over the future direction of the company. The board’s chair was quoted in the NY Times as saying “These things always seem precipitous when they occur. But the board has been deliberating the company’s performance, and the C.E.O.’s performance, for quite some time.” But don’t cry for me Fiorina, Carly’s getting a severance package worth $21.1 million. HP shares closed at 21.53 up nearly 7% on the news. When Fiorina started with HP in 1999 the stock price was over 40.

Oh, and I've sold my iBook G4 on eBay in order to upgrade to a 12" PowerBook G4, I'll keep you posted with the details.

Oh boy! New Mac laptops

The new PowerBook G4s have arrived! No, they're not the G5-based machines everybody was secretly hoping for, but they do bring in a slew of technical improvements, slightly better pricing and higher clock speeds.

Finally, Apple has built "sudden drop protection" into their professional class of laptops. Basically, if the laptop feels a sudden change in force or a hazardous impact, in a few micro-seconds it will freeze and lock the drive heads as to prevent damage to the most fragile part of a laptop, the hard drive. Once the shock is over, the machine will unlock the drive and continue running. This technology first appeared on IBM Thinkpads and has saved many careless laptop owners a lot of data loss.

Besides force sensors, the new trackpads allow for two-fingered scrolling, a feature previously only available with the use of 3rd-party programs, and no doubt a feature that will be appreciated. Older PowerBook owners are out of luck, as this feature is only for new P'books.

The faster clock speeds are not a HUGE deal, but they're noticeably faster. The 17" PowerBook now has the option of running the monster 30" Apple Cinema Display thanks to a new 128MB video option (the PowerBook minimum is now 64 megabytes, pretty nice). The prices across the line are down a shard, too. The 12" model still misses out on the back-lit keyboards, though the 15" and 17" now feature an improved backlit setup. 5400RPM drives, Bluetooth and Airport Extreme is now standard equipment across the line.

I must admit, staring at my year-old iBook, I do feel a tad jealous, but for my needs... the iBook G4 has done a fine job. I do hope OS X 10.4 Tiger will get along with the slower specs, because from the demos, it looks like it needs a lot of processing and video power.

Apple exec's have said a PowerBook G5 will be "the mother of all thermal challenges." Only time will tell whether some brilliant engineer finds a way to modify the current PowerPC 970, or if a G5-mobile chip gets developed.

For you dose of Apple news, I'm Mike.