by Eolake Stobblehouse, july 99

A few decades ago there was a black female Olympic runner, whom they called the Black Gazella. Young, slim, black, and the fastest thing around.

That's my new Powerbook, the "Lombard" 400.

Heck, they even have similar frailties. The girl did not hit her stride until they found out that she had long suffered from appendicitis, and cured it. After that nothing could beat her. Similarly the Lombard has problems with USB divices and adapters. They tend to disconnect after sleep mode, and on my machine, if I connect my ISDN adapter via a USB adapter, I tend to disconnect when getting a long stream of data. (The build-in modem works fine, though.)

Of course this will be cured with a software patch soon, hopefully.

I have had a powerbook before, an old 180 monochrome. It was good for writing on, which is what I bought it for, but it was not up to much bigger tasks than that.

In contrast, my new machine is powerful enough to serve fine as both my portable and my main computer, and I use it as both. It is by far the most expensive single item I ever bought, but considering I can now make do with one machine instead of two, the price is fair. (Also consider that a year ago the top machine, slower, heavier, and without DVD drive, cost $2000 more!!)

To be upfront, it has one more little frailty. I don't like that they have put an "fn" key in the lower left corner to activate the function keys. It may have improved the look to get rid of the seperate buttons to control the display brightness, but they could have done it without moving the control key away from its usual place. Also they have put the enter key where the right command key used to be. I miss having both command keys. [note: I soon got a patch for that from helpful readers.]

Apart from those little details, it is simply a beauty. Raw power in a compact and pretty shell, like... I dunno, Natalie Portman?

When I use it closed with a large external monitor and full-size keyboard, it feels just like my old computer, except literally four times faster. For web design and work with images for the web (which needs lower resolution than for print) this machine is more than servicable, it is great. Next year I will start doing video, and for that I will get a G4 multiprocessor machine, but that is a whole 'nother ball game.

By the way, this powerbook supports multiple monitors, so you can extend your desktop over two monitors. And it has enough RAM (8 megs) to show millions of colors on both monitors. This gives me more screen real estate than I have ever had before. Working with pictures or web design really takes up space, what with multiple windows, control palettes, and whatnot. Now I can distribute this over two monitors. When I tried this for the first time it was the coolest thing I had tried in a long time:)

When I use it as a portable (as I do now, this is written in a nice restaurant), it is as fast, very portable, and has one of the best keyboards and one of the best and biggest screens available. Heck, the screen is even bigger than the one on my iMac!

And when I tire of writing, I can just start up my web browser or Acrobat reader and read articles and magazines I have downloaded from the web.

Besides that, I have encoded the bulk of my music-CD collection into MP3 format so I can play it from the powerbook. The build-in speakers are good for such a small package, but if I want "hi-fi" I just plug in the ear-phones from my Diskman. That sounds totally great.

...[half an hour later] I realized that there was something I had not tried, so I just now went out and bought my first DVD movie. After putting in the disk and using 3 minutes to learn the player controls, it works perfectly. Looks great. I am sitting now in a café, and I have not brought the ear phones, so I have not been watching much of the movie, but it is clear that this is a legitimate entertainment option, without any extra hard- or software necessary. The (cheap) ear phones will enhance the sound for sure, but the movie picture looks great on the powerbook's monitor. (It sure looks better than most video on my small TV.)

This all leads up to my central point. While this is not yet something that just everybody can afford, it is true nonetheless that we have here in one small package what more or less amounts to a complete, portable content-creation machine, distribution machine, communications module, and (away-from) home entertainment center.

Talk about your basic science fiction.

I say that we are starting the third millennium in fine style. No matter that mankind is still plaqued by drugs, war, and ignorance, it is true that the longer we go back in history, the worse it was, and from that follows logically that things in general are getting better and better. I think that with our new spiritual understandings budding everywhere, and amazing new technology for working with it and communicating it, things will really take off from here. I can't wait 'til the year 2999, to see how far we are by then. Hopefully half way accross the galaxy.

- Stobblehouse