I'm fortunate to have had the opportunity to choose from among 12, 15 and 17-inch PowerBooks for my everyday use. I chose the 17, despite its heft and the fact that only one laptop bag in ninety accommodates a 17-inch, cinema ratio notebook. In addition to living in Word, I write code, read docs, chop up video, manage my lab--sometimes sizeable as it was for a server virtualization package I just finished--from I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity to choose from among 12, 15 and 17-inch PowerBooks for my everyday use. I chose the 17, despite its heft and the fact that only one laptop bag in ninety accommodates a 17-inch, cinema ratio notebook. In addition to living in Word, I write code, read docs, chop up video, manage my lab–sometimes sizeable as it was for a server virtualization package I just finished–from the road and enjoy various other real estate-hungry pasttimes. Having to whittle my choices down to one machine had me worried–what if I really want to carry a 15 to give my shoulder a chance to slip back into its socket? I so hate having options closed to me. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I’m attached to the 17.Apple recently gave its 15 and 17-inch PowerBooks a speed bump to 1.5 GHz, and it added the keyboard backlight that was only on the 1 GHz 17-inch machine to its entire PowerBook line. I’ve had the 17-inch, 1.5 GHz machine for a couple of months now and know it well enough to submit some early findings, good and bad, that aren’t part of Apple’s marketing material.The 18 month old 1 GHz PowerBook had flaws that sometimes bugged the ever-living hell out of me. First, when the machine got hot, as it did when I used it while charging, the trackpad and keyboard would screw up badly. The cursor wandered all over the screen and some keys went dead while others repeated. The machine made a bizarre sizzling or scratching sound, like a hard drive ready to go bad. A user on one of the Mac forums thinks he tracked it down to a chip under the keyboard, but there was no fix as far as I know. When the audio was muted, the old notebook’s speakers popped every time an application tried to make a sound while the sound circuit was in power saving mode. The sizzle-sizzle-POP-sizzle really got on my nerves when I was already stressed out. This is like finding out your significant other snores to beat the band and chews with her mouth open, but after she has moved in with you. You still love her, but damn, on a rough day you just want to eat and sleep in the car. The battery life on the 1 GHz 17-inch PowerBook sucks terribly. Like Thinkpad, dead after an hour and a half on a busy day terribly. That’s a key reason I so resisted giving up the 15-inch Titanium PowerBook. Its battery gave me four hours, four and a half when I was just writing or surfing. The 17? There is an earlier entry in this blog about the crazy things I had to do to stretch the battery to 3 hours. I thought that was brilliant at the time.The 1.5 GHz 17-inch PowerBook is better company. The sizzle and pops are gone. The battery life is much, much better; I’m back to about four and a half hours from a charge unless I’m hitting the disk and display hard (e.g., playing a DVD), and that’s without the bush league antics I pulled to extend the workday of the old 17. And while I loved the light weight of the charger, it wasn’t battle rated. The insulation at both ends of the cable between the charger and the plug at the notebook end splits. Once that happens, the barely-there insulation on the tiny wires inside fray. Watch out–those wires spark until the power block shorts itself out. One of my war stories involves setting a hotel bedspread, more likely the dust on it, on fire with a sparking charger. That was as much my stupidity as Apple’s poor design: I was in such a bind that day that I kept using the charger after the insulation gave out. I twisting the wires this way and that to get the charging light to come on. The spark that endeared me to the Marriott was several sparks into this boneheaded exercise. Now you have another reason not to be like me.The charger has now been Yager-proofed. The cord leading from the charger to the notebook has a larger diameter and isn’t as easy to kink. There is a strain relief where that cord leaves the block, which was, unbelievably, absent from the chargers that preceded this one. I can now recommend actually coiling the cord around the nifty flip-out ears Apple put on the charger. Using that is how I frayed mine.The new design fixes the heat-related keyboard problems, but the trackpad woes remain. The shallowly-recessed trackpad picks up pressure from the palm rests on either side of the pad. When my machine gets hot, the pointer sprints widly around the screen, and since I have the pad set to interpret a tap on the pad as a mouse click, the manic cursor selects text as it flies around. That’s lovely when I keep typing as that action erases the selected text. Once the jumping cursor sets in, there’s no way to stop it short of letting the machine cool down. By the way, this still happens for me when there is good airflow under the notebook. The 80 GB drive is just as quiet as the 60 that preceded it. While I haven’t measured it here, higher density equates to higher read/write speed and lower latency. One small gotcha, though. Using Apple’s Disk Utility, Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner or the “asr” shell command (Apple system restore) makes quick work of cloning old drives to new ones. But there are two ways to copy. There is file-by-file, which really hurts if you’re waiting to do something else, or block-by-block, which is comparatively painless. It escaped my notice until recently that you can only do block copies to drive partitions that are smaller than the source partition. I’m sure there’s a better way; if one comes in I’ll share it. Anyhow, I copied my 60 GB drive to a 55 GB partition just to get the block copy. I set aside the rest of the drive to hold an emergency OS X boot area and the virtual hard drive file for Virtual PC 7. This arrangement works well, although moving the virtual HD didn’t help Virtual PC’s performance much. How did Apple bring back the battery life that so endeared this product line to me? It had a lot of help from Motorola. The machine uses a PowerPC 7447A CPU, which gives Apple’s engineers more latitude to scale down the processor’s power usage to match lower demand. For the first time in my experience, Energy Saver’s “Automatic” really is the best place to leave it.The 1.5 GHz PowerBooks also drop the Level 3 cache. Do I notice it? Yes, sometimes. Video apps suffer a bit, and one app that really seems to get hurt is Virtual PC 7. My impression is that the higher clock speed and the loss of Level 3 cache just about cancel each other out. The 1.5 GHz machine isn’t noticeably faster. But getting rid of the L3 cache cut the power draw, an effect that you can see on the 1 GHz models by loading Apple’s CHUD hardware diagnostics. This adds a processor icon to System Preferences that allows you to turn the caches on and off. Disabling L3 has a rapid effect on the estimated battery life. The display on my 1.5 GHz unit is still nice, but it’s not jaw-dropping perfect like the original. There is noticeable fall-off in the backlight at all four margins of the display. At the top of my unit’s display, there are two obvious half-circle areas of light loss. They both reach down to about 2/3rds of the height of the system’s menu bar, with the spot on the left falling roughly between the Finder’s View and History menus. The dark area on the right is the same distance from the display’s edge. This doesn’t affect the usability of any of the software I use–the chrome on Photoshop and Final Cut Pro offset content to fit inside the affected areas. But if I bought an LCD television with these properties, I might bring it back.It’s not a show-stopper in this case. My expectations of notebook screens are lower, despite the high standards set by previous Apple products. So the 17-inch PowerBook’s dark spots don’t bother me until, as now, I find them so I can bitch about them.And that sums it up. It’s not performance that stands out here, but the return of the Centrino-beating battery life that I considered a vital characteristic of PowerBooks. What’s the next stop? I’m sure Apple has already decided this one. Motorola and IBM are duking it out, IBM pushing the low-heat PowerPC used in the iMac G5, while Motorola is teasing with an as-yet-unseen dual core 32-bit CPU. If I had to vote, I think I’d prefer two 32-bit cores to one 64-bit processor. That would deliver more of a performance jump, and the ability to disable one of the cores would raise power management to a new level.My gut tells me that something’s going to happen to the PowerBook soon. It’s due. I hope it’s not a yawn-inspiring Dell/HP/blah-blah-blah-style bump to 1.8 GHz. But no matter what puts the next genereation of PowerBook back on the lust object list, this 17-inch PowerBook on which I’m typing is welcome here for the next 18 months, provided it can stand it. ——– Technology Industry