Apple Unviels New Powerbooks

By Scott McNulty

Well they've finally done it, my powerbook is out of date. Thanks, Apple.

Still available in 3 tasty flavors, 12 inch, 15 inch, and 17 inch, the newly revved
Powerbooks include the normal processor upgrades, they now are available in 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 and 1.67GHz PowerPC G4. 512 RAM is standard across the board as is
AirPort Extreme and
enhanced Bluetooth 2.0.

The most interesting new features are:

  • A trackpad equipped with new scrolling technology.  If you want to scroll all you have to do is  drag
    two fingers over the trackpad to scroll vertically and horizontally or pan around any active window, of course this
    is modifiable via system preferences
  • Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor, which is much like IBM's technology, senses when your Powerbook is suddenly falling
    and prepares the harddrive by spinning it down to avoid damage.

You can also opt for the new, speedy, 8x Superdrive to burn those 'home movies' of yours.

The 12 inch Powerbooks sports a  NVIDIA GeForce FX
Go5200  and the 15 inch and 17 inch both  have the 
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700though you'll need to pony up the cash for the 17 incher if you want  128MB of DDR SDRAM standard (the 15 inch ships with the 64MB version, but you can upgrade as a BTO).

Overall, a solid upgrade if you ask me, and now with my Powerbook looking absolutely acient I might have to pick myself up one or two (and trade them with my friends).

Thanks to Michael Dunn for tipping us off.

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