Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Changing Powerbooks

My Powerbook is now 2 years old. It stills runs perfectly, and the battery still provides 2+ hours of charge (with heavy use; almost 3:00 if editing text only and if I’m really careful with battery usage).

So I don’t have reason to change to a new one just now. Anyway, I asked around (Nuno and Pedro) what features would make them switch to a new one right now. Based on their opinion, and my own personal interests, I decided to write the reasons that will make me buy a new powerbook. It will save me time and prevent impulse buying-kind-of-stuff.

So, right now, the feature I lack the most in my current PB is internal Bluetooth. Simple as that. I always plug the damn dongle every time I sit down somewhere, either because AddressBook is still the best way to send SMS messages, or because I need GPRS connectivity. So the new one must have Bluetooth, but that alone is not enough to switch.

The other thing I miss the most is more disk space. I have a 40Gb disk, 99% filled all the time. I’ll have to check possible upgrades to the disk drive.

But the things that will make me change are: a G5 PB or a DualCore G4 PB. That’s it. I would prefer the Dual G4 for the cool factor, but a single G5 is probably better.

Also good thinks to have in the future PB’s: integrated iSight (it’s possible, check out the Vaio solution), PCI Extreme (don’t confuse with PCI-X) for the graphics adapter, and Superdrive (Photo DVD’s for the family).