According to rumors summarized by The Register, Apple may be readying new 15" and 17" PowerBooks:
PowerPage claims the new model sports a 1.25GHz G4 processor and support for 800Mbps 1394, aka FireWire 800. The new 15in PowerBook presents all its ports on the right-hand side of the machine. In looks, says PowerPage’s source, the new model looks like a scaled-down 17in model — it even features the latter’s illuminated keyboard. […]
PowerBooks are really due for an update — they were last released in January and it’s been 225 days since then (the average time between PowerBook updates is 146 days). Of course, some people have been saying “any day now” since Apple slashed PowerBook prices back in June. Still, a PowerBook would be really tempting and a fresh release might be enough to push be towards one.
15″ and 17″ be damned! The 12″ is so portable and powerful and sexy and small! I’m really happy with it.
And, Alex, you were wondering about the learning curve on a mac system. I’ve had mine for a month and a half and have been using it for most of my computing (I bring it to work and do work on it), and everything seems completely natural and has seemed that way for a while. (Whereas it’s been a month since I put Debian on my desktop and besides knowing a handful of more commands, I’m as clueless as I was before.)
I’ve decided that the failure of Windows is not in trying to be pretty and user friendly, but in failing to do it well. OS X is pretty intuitive and pretty and yet, I have my two terminals open basically all the time to ssh and use emacs for writing java.
I’ll second Adrian’s observation. Of course, I’ve got X11, ethereal, OpenOffice, XAbiWord, gnuutils, etc. loaded on mine, so it’s kinda like a *nix box with some weird Mac-like OS on top of it; but it’s a nice operating system nontheless.
My only real complaints have only to do with the machine that I’m running it on (a 300MHz G3 Wallstreet Powerbook) – it’s a bit slow and has no USB (so I’m stuck with uni-button mice).
I would SO dig a 12″ PB for exactly Adrian’s resoning. Who the ehll wants to carry a 17″ behemoth around all the time. Heck, 12″ is even a bit large for my ideal hack-top: I used a Toshiba Libretto one summer at a job and reaaaaally had to strain to give it back. :)