January 31, 2005
Apple Updates PowerBook G4 Line
Apple keeps the new products coming although this latest barrage is bound to disappoint some people. The company unveiled an updated Powerbook G4 line with slightly faster CPU speeds, memory upgrade, and several niche improvements. This however is not the Powerbook G5 line everyone was hoping for. An executive on the last financial conference was quoted to say the G5 notebook is a very difficult "thermal challenge."The low end 12-inch Powerbook G4 is now 1.5 ghz and the high-end 17-inch comes in at 1.67 ghz. 512 megabytes of RAM is standard as is a new trackpad that lets you scroll through documents with two fingers. Apple also now includes a "Sudden Motion Sensor", which parks the hard-drive heads if you drop your notebook. This helps protect against data loss. IBM had this for their Thinkpad notebooks for over a year. The hard-drives have also been upgraded to 5400 RPM and the SuperDrive DVD re-writeable runs at 8X speed.
The big question is if this update means we won't see a G5 Powerbook anytime soon. My guess is it is at least 6 months away due to the heat problems, which require a die shrink or re-design. Go IBM go, help Apple out why don't you.
