My workhorse laptop, a 1GHz, 15" Titanium Powerbook , was FUBAR beginning to have “issues.” Whenever I would do the following, it would shut down without warning:
- Unplug the AC before unplugging the power to the laptop
- Unplug the power when the machine was asleep
- Change resolutions
- Plug the DVI-VGA adaptor in (which changes the resolution, natch)
- Let the battery discharge to less than 30 minutes left
- Look funny at the screen
All of these symptoms mean one thing: a trip to the local Apple store .
For the last six months or so, I’ve been looking to upgrade my laptop, but the spotty behavior of the main axe was the proverbial straw. The Powerbook line just got a feature bump , so common reasoning says that the next revision is either going to be another speed bump or a complete overhaul. That’s probably three to six months out, and I’m betting if it’s 3 months, it will be another speed bump, but if it’s 6 months, it will probably be a processor switch. Smart money says G5, but a rabbit could be pulled out and the Powerbook could make an early move to the Intel side of the house. Prognostication aside, this last feature bump was enough for me to decide waiting was not the course of action for me.
In the store, I argued with myself for several minutes between the 15” and the 17” Powerbook. The available in-store models looked like this:
15” | 17” |
|---|---|
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The 17” ended up winning out – despite its’ gargantuan proportions – because of the extra screen real-estate and extra 20GB disk space. I immediately ordered 2GB of RAM which will be here tomorrow, so the Apple-supplied RAM load was irrelevant. The slower hard drive isn’t as much of a concern to me because when I do any editing, that will be on an external drive.
I bought it on a Thursday with the intention of bringing it to the show I was leaving for the next day, but when I got it home, I realized that it wouldn’t fit in my old backpack . Luckily, I’d been speccing out backpacks recently because of some upcoming plans to buy a new Canon 20d camera body and lenses. The Kata HB-207 arrived today and I just finished loading all of the gear into it. I’ll have to re-jigger things a bit when I do end up buying the new camera stuff, but for right now it looks solid.
One thing I have to say is that this backpack is HUGE. It most definitely will not fit under an airline seat, so it looks like the luggage bin will be my new friend. Aside from the sheer size, it’s incredibly comfortable and the folks at Kata have clearly engineered this thing for the working shooter.