However, even at that, with the way things go with technology these days and how fast they update things, it will always come into play. Of course, the MacBook would be "compatible" with any new OS that rolls out for a good time out. I bought this G4 I'm typing on right now knowing that, well, confident that it would last me for at least 5 years, save natural disaster or something. I would imagine-pure speculation-that Leopard would crawl on a G3. Though by observation, again, Tiger runs a little slow on G3s right now unless you boost it with more RAM, and even at that (like I did with my iMac G3, had 1 GB of RAM in there), it doesn't help much.
While all the second-hand “TiBooks” I see on eBay look like they’ve been through a war-since their silver color was just easily-chipped paint-the aluminum just wears its scars with pride.They say that the only worry people have right now is Apple abandoning the G3 chips which also wouldn't be good for "business" since there are still a lot of G3 users out there (like schools, like myself, etc.). Breaks your heart, doesn’t it? We don’t mind too much if a machine gets a bit knocked up after it’s lived with us for a few years, but for those first few weeks most of us cosset and coo over it like it’s a newborn baby, and are just about as upset if any harm befalls it.Īnd actually, this new material, aluminum, was much more resilient than the titanium shell of the previous PowerBook G4. I know you’ll join me in an empathetic gasp of horror when I tell you that just a few days later he pulled it from his bag only to discover that the big three-pronged UK plug had gouged a big thick track in the pristine lid.
If I remember correctly, on the first day they were in the shops, he went down, slapped his credit card on the counter, and walked out with possibly the most desirable Mac that Apple had ever made-I was so jealous that he could do that. I had just started working at MacUser magazine in London when they finally shipped, much later in 2003, and my colleague and friend Kenny Hemphill succumbed. It looked stunning, and was just so tremendously powerful.
Above all, though, that aluminum shell-the first time Apple had used this material, which, for a decade or more since, its Macs have been hewn from-spoke of power, of fluency, of ability.Īnd oh my, I wanted one. It felt chunky and dense, and the iBook-inspired soft, round edges gave it a friendliness as well. Although not directly comparable, the fact that the first 12-inch PowerBook G4 had an 867MHz processor while the entry-level Power Mac G4 announced at the same time seemed to be only slightly faster at 1GHz meant that this was when laptops stopped looking like underpowered runts next to desktops.Īnd there was something just hugely cute about the little package all that G4 power was stuffed into. Before it was announced in January 2003, anyone buying a laptop realistically had to decide between capability and portability, but with the 12-inch PowerBook G4, you felt for the first time like you could have both: a powerful machine easily able to be your main Mac, in a tiny, chuck-it-in-a-bag frame. It wasn’t a machine without compromise, as our review at the time made clear, but it felt like it was. The 12-inch PowerBook G4 was such a machine. At its best, Apple has the ability to make stuff that reaches right around the rational, pragmatic part of your brain to grab your amygdala and squeeze it till the juice runs out.