April 5, 2005
Apple’s PowerBook product planners faced a dilemma during the past year: With the G5 processor still too hot for laptops, and no new blockbuster technologies available to add, how could they breathe some vitality into a PowerBook line that’s now more than two years old?
Instead of one big answer, they came up with a slew of small ones. Individually, none will knock your socks off, but collectively, they make the PowerBook lineup both more appealing and more affordable.
What’s New, PowerBook?
Across-the-board enhancements to the PowerBook family include:
• Faster hard drives: All models now come with hard drives that spin at 5,400RPM, up from the 4,200RPM drives in previous Apple laptops (and most Windows portables). This change didn’t make a big difference in our benchmark results (see “PowerBook G4 Benchmarks” below), but it saves a few seconds on some disk-dependent operations, such as launching applications and saving big files.
Hard drive protection: A new technology Apple calls Sudden Motion Sensor instantly parks the drives’ read-write heads—thereby preventing them from slamming into the magnetic platters that hold your data—when it detects accelerated movement that might indicate that you’ve dropped your notebook. Frankly, we didn’t dare test this feature—after all, even if it works, it won’t prevent the other kinds of damage a fall could cause—but it’s nice to know it’s there.
• Scrolling track pad: If you find scrolling a drag when using a track pad, the new PowerBooks’ track pads may offer a better way for you to move around your documents and other windows: just slide two fingers instead of one across the track pad, and the contents of the active window scroll in the direction you moved. It takes some getting used to, but once you do, it could both save you time and spare you some irritation. (If you decide you don’t like this feature, you can turn it off in the Keyboard and Mouse pane in System Preferences.)
Just don’t try using three fingers on the track pad—that does nothing at all. And don’t be surprised if you run into a few glitches in older applications: for example, vertical scrolling works but horizontal scrolling doesn’t in Microsoft Word v.X. On the other hand, in the current version, Word 2004, as well as in Excel v.X and 2004, the new feature worked just fine.
(If you use an older PowerBook or an iBook you can add roughly similar capabilities to your system with any of several third-party utilities, including Shane Celis’s free uControl (, April 2004) and Alex Harper’s $15 SideTrack.
• Latest Bluetooth: Along with AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth remains standard in all new PowerBooks, but the latest models feature support for an updated wireless standard called Bluetooth 2.0+Enhanced Data Rate (EDR). Equipment based on it can exchange data at up to 3 megabits per second, three times the maximum rate of earlier versions (Bluetooth 1.0-1.2). For most purposes you’re not likely to notice the difference in throughput—the real value, according to Bluetooth experts, is that Bluetooth phones and other battery-operated devices should last longer on a charge, because they can shut off their Bluetooth radios sooner, and your system is less likely to get bogged down if you connect multiple Bluetooth devices.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t test these claims, either, because the new features require Bluetooth 2.0+EDR-supported devices, and none are available —Apple is first to market with the new technology. (The new standard is backward-compatible, so the new PowerBooks should work fine with existing Bluetooth phones and peripherals, but with these devices you won’t see any advantage.)
• Better, faster SuperDrives: New PowerBook configurations equipped with SuperDrives can burn DVDs at 8x, twice the rate of the mechanisms Apple used in previous portables.
Buying Advice
If you’re inclined toward a small notebook, and particularly if you don’t need a SuperDrive, consider an iBook instead of the 12-inch PowerBook—you can start with a $999 base model, increase memory and hard drive capacity and add Bluetooth if you want, and come out with something pretty similar to the small PowerBook for several hundred dollars less. But if you want a bigger screen and/or the latest connectivity technologies, the 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks—though still a little pricey—offer elegance and power no other laptop can match.
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