[chucker]

So I guess it's my turn to "bite the bullet", but I'm not quite there yet.

As you may have seen from various recent posts of mine, I was hoping for Apple to upgrade the 12-inch PowerBook (beyond the silly hard drive 60 to 80 GB change and the standard SuperDrive) or, preferably replace it with a widescreen model. Ain't happening, I guess. Not that I'm too surprised.

That means, though, that I don't have any decent small-form-factor laptop options from Apple at all, and by decent I mean a resolution higher than 1024x768 as well as a CPU faster than 1.5 GHz. Even the current top-end 1.67 GHz isn't too great of an offering, but maybe I really can't blame this on Apple, only on Freescale. Wouldn't be the first time for them to screw up (and thus screw Apple over) big time.

What else is there, then? The 15-inch PowerBook. It finally has a better resolution, just one notch lower as my 20-inch Dell 2005FPW (1440x960 rather than 1680x1050 -- interesting that they stuck to their 15:10 weirdness), it comes with a very decent standard setup including a DL DVD burner, a backlit and good-quality (for laptops, at least) keyboard and over five hours battery life, and its CPU is, well, "alright" I suppose at 1.67. Nothing to drool at but not complaint-worthy either (and again, not necessarily Apple's fault at all).

The problem? Its price tag. A $1999 US item isn't something you buy every day, and it should require some serious thinking.

And think I did. And I came to the conclusion: I spent 2000 Euros on this iBook I'm typing on now, over three years ago. Chances are, the PowerBook will serve me well for another three years, hopefully even more. Every person I've asked who has an old-revision Aluminum PowerBook 15 totally loves it. It seems, despite the steep price, a decent bang for the buck. However, I don't want to repeat a few mistakes I've made with my iBook.

- My iBook's keyboard has become very greasy. It's something with my fingers, now granted I don't wash 20 times a day so it's probably just unavoidable sloppiness on that part. But it gets worse; there's lots of hair stuck in my keyboard as well, and while I can and do pick most of that out every few months, that gets kinda tedious too. There's that thing you can buy to protect the keyboard (iSkin or something?). Is it worth the price? My fiancée says she's used something like that on her keyboard at work before and totally hated, hated, hated it. It slowed down her typing, it made her hit the wrong keys, and in the long run, required deeper and deeper pressing. It didn't really help the problem (though naturally the keyboard itself was kept clean), only made it more of an annoyance. Is this product better?

- Guess I'll have to get another iLap; the medium-sized version this time. So that's another $59 US right there. It adds up...

- How seamless will the AirPort work with my Netgear router? WGR-612 v6, if I'm not mistaken. Latest stable firmware; beta firmwares don't appear to install properly.

- Is the scrolling trackpad as useful as advertised? I've seen conflicting reports on this. I hate that uControl isn't updated for Tiger, and no, I don't want the sides scrolling that I can get with that other shareware program whose name I can't think of right now. The fn+tap scrolling in uControl up until Panther was great. The two-finger scrolling sounds just as great if not better.

- I can, without risk and without hacks, use this in lid-closed mode, right? Does this also mean that even with the lid open, I can turn the internal display off and use an external, bigger display? I can't seem to do that in any capacity whatsoever using my iBook. (I am going to assume that a miniDVI-DVI adapter is included. How about miniDVI-VGA? MiniDVI-S-Video/Composite?)

- Am I missing something else glaringly obvious?