I finally said goodbye to the 17-inch PowerBook that arrived on my door in April of 2003. It's a wide load and difficult to balance on lap and desk surfaces made for notebooks. Mine has slid onto my cheaply-carpeted (picture worn felt on concrete) office floor, almost always open and powered up. I've found it glowing in the A-frame position more times than I care to recall. I have flown with it close to 50 times I finally said goodbye to the 17-inch PowerBook that arrived on my door in April of 2003. It’s a wide load and difficult to balance on lap and desk surfaces made for notebooks. Mine has slid onto my cheaply-carpeted (picture worn felt on concrete) office floor, almost always open and powered up. I’ve found it glowing in the A-frame position more times than I care to recall. I have flown with it close to 50 times, each time jamming it into a bag that concentrates a heavy load right on the center of the lid, and to add further insult to this, I’m forever kicking my notebook bag under the seat in front of me. I told readers before the PowerBook arrived that I’d cut it no slack, not even the ordinary care that I extend to the plastic PC notebooks I test. I was mean to the PowerBook because I was sick of fragile plastic crap passed off as business notebooks and assumed that toymaker Apple built the same, only prettier.Here’s my assessment of the 17-inch PowerBook’s condition on its way out. I estimate a total of over 3,500 hours of use in 18 months–don’t pity me. The hard drive has no soft errors and the display remains bright, evenly lit and without dead pixels. The chassis is scratched up pretty thoroughly, not surprising because aluminum is soft as metals go. The lid latch is busted and the lid itself rides just a little higher on the right that the left when it’s closed. Still, there’s no concavity on top; I can press hard on the center of the back of the lid without seeing the familiar LCD “mood ring” pattern. It’s clear that none of my abuse has compromised the integrity of the chassis.My PowerBook has never failed to boot or trashed any file I’ve ever put on it. That’s significant because I have cloned the machine from an 800 MHz 15-inch Titanium PowerBook, to a 1 GHz 15-inch Titanium PowerBook, to the 1 GHz 17-inch unit and then to my current 1.5 GHz. I went through several versions of OS X, and I’ve never done a clean install of the OS, despite the fact that I install every fix, OS upgrade and developer seed build the instant they appear. I’ve got backups, so I live dangerously and half-hope to step on a Windows XP or Linux-style landmine so I can feed on the controversy. Not yet. I’ve found OS X to be the BSD Unix I know and love, but with less tolerance for sloppily-written GUI apps than I expect from an OS with a Mach underlayer. I had 1 GB of RAM on my PowerBook but found that running a bunch of interactive apps that fit easily within that space can freeze the PowerBook or bring performance to a crawl. OS X ought to be a prison matron about scheduling and memory–the latest crop of Unixes have mean schedulers. Instead, OS X is something of a wuss, enough so that users have written hacks that use the Unix “nice” command to make the frontmost app run fastest. How very Windows 1.0.To be fair, OS X uses a hell of a lot of chrome (ornamental UI graphics) and I imagine that there is too much of the Quartz Extreme renderer that can’t be downloaded to a graphics card’s GPU. Performance problems are far less of an issue running X Window in root mode, and a headless (no display) OS X Server is a nice smooth ride. The bumpy performance has got to be the GUI, and I’ve said from the start that Apple should let OS X users disable selected GUI features (a la Windows XP) for performance’s sake. That would make remote graphical management a more pleasant experience as well. My next entry is a rundown of the things that irritated me about the 17-inch 1 GHz aluminum PowerBook and which are addressed, or not addressed, in the 1.5 GHz model. Take a breather and tune back in. ——– Technology Industry