Matt Legend Gemmell

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A few times over the past week, when using my Powerbook, the screen started flickering whenever the lid was opened to more than 90° from the keyboard. On Thursday afternoon, after it having worked fine all morning, I booted the machine to find that the backlight had finally died.

The machine is way out of warranty (my AppleCare for it ran out a year ago), and it’s getting exceedingly long in the tooth; it’s the original PowerBook G4 titanium, with 512Mb RAM and a 500Mhz G4. Xcode grinds a bit when compiling things, and it can barely run Garageband acceptably. Thus, I decided, this latest occurrence was A Sign.

PowerBook *myNewPB = [[PowerBook alloc] initWithProcessor:G4
                                               screenSize:15"
                                               clockSpeed:1.67Ghz
                                                   memory:1Gb
                                                 hardDisk:100Gb
                                             graphicsCard:128MbDualDVI
                                                 keyboard:backlit
                                               superDrive:YES
                                        scrollingTrackpad:YES
                                                  airPort:Extreme
                                                bluetooth:2.0+EDR
                                                appleCare:YES];

[myNewPB addToOrder:[[iSight alloc] init]];
[myNewPB addToOrder:[[WacomTablet alloc] initWithType:Graphire3
                                                 size:A6]];

[myNewPB setDiscount:NSHigherEducationalDiscount];
// Takes it down to just under £1,900 for the whole order, including VAT.

NSLog(@"%@", [myNewPB shipDate]);
// On or before Friday 25th Feb 2005

Now we play the waiting game.

3 Comments

Kevin Ballard
19 February 2005 @ 11pm

Oh wow, I’m jealous. I’m still grinding along with a 17″ 1Ghz G4 AlBook, which is currently running at half RAM (512MB) since AppleCare told me my third-party RAM chip was defective (although it was in AppleCare for a HD replacement, not for any RAM-induced problems). Man do I want a faster machine. 1Ghz just doesn’t go as far as it used to. Also, the graphics card on this thing sucks - GeForce 4 MX. It doesn’t even support pixel shaders, so CoreVideo won’t run right on this thing.

Dave
22 February 2005 @ 11pm

Just got a new PowerBook a few months ago - the keyboard backlighting is a cool idea but only really works if you’re somewhere that’s pitch black… and you need the fastest HD you can get - mine has a 4800 rpm HD and it really slows everything down… looks like you specced it just right :-)

Kevin LaCoste
12 March 2005 @ 7am

I have the 1st generation white iBook plodding along at 500 Mhz here. That’s with a G3 inside…

Woe is me and my poor iBook!