Well, shave an ape and call it Ballmer-- the kid was right! November 6th has come and gone, and as was widely anticipated, it left shiny new PowerBooks in its wake. That's not the groovy bit, though. The groovy bit, as faithful viewer Michael Brendler kindly pointed out, is that Apple's new top-of-the-line PowerBook indeed boasts an incredibly sexy slot-loading SuperDrive, just as our own six-month-old intern and goddess-in-training apparently predicted, when the general consensus among most rumormongers was that that particular feature just wasn't in the cards this time around. Moreover, Anya was mostly right about the new speeds, as well: she missed the low-end clock speed by a smidge (having predicted 800 MHz instead of the actual 867 MHz), but she was dead-on in guessing that the PowerBook would finally breach that tricky 1 GHz barrier. We're already planning the trip to Vegas; they let babies into casinos, don't they?

What's more, these new PowerBooks also sport some seriously scary graphics guts: how 'bout ATI's Mobility Radeon 9000 GPU? Oh yes, sports fans, this is the big time; the Gigahertz PowerBook has a fairly ridiculous pile of video RAM fully 64 MB high, and Apple claims it can pump out 76 frames per second when Quake 3 Arena is running at 1024x768 with 24-bit color. Just imagine the portable frags possible with this kind of circuitry. Oh, and it's, um, probably pretty good for... 3D science-type renderings of... say, did we mention the Quake frame rates?

Okay, fine, so the new PowerBooks don't have built-in BlueTooth, they don't have FireWire 2, they don't do laundry (at least, not well), and for some reason the hard drives are all 4200 RPM. But really, there isn't much to complain about with this release, and indeed most Mac fans appear to be mopping up drool at a prodigious pace. And by the way, the prices are nothing short of amazing, given all you get. An entry-level PowerBook is now just $2299, and it's 67 MHz faster than the previous high-end $3199 model for sale just days ago. Meanwhile, the new Big Kahuna of the PowerBook line rings in at $2999, which qualifies as a bona fide steal considering how much this sucker can do.

We expect video-type folks will be falling all over themselves to chuck three grand at Apple in exchange for a 5.4 pound video editing and DVD production station for the road. Seriously, armed with one of these puppies you could shoot footage on location, edit it in the field, burn dailies to DVD, and hand off the disks all before heading back to the hotel and using all your extra free time to get plastered via lots of teeny bottles from the minibar. Hollywood's gonna go nuts. Want another dose of perspective on the SuperDrive PowerBook's price? Consider that when the SuperDrive debuted less than two years ago, the only way to get one was to lay out $3499 for a 733 MHz Power Mac. Now, for $500 less, you can get a SuperDrive in a 1 GHz PowerBook instead.

And if Anya can count cards as well as she can predict PowerBook specs, with a little luck, we'll soon have the funds to buy a couple of these new PowerBooks ourselves. Never hit on 17!

Meanwhile, there was far less debate over what fate had in store for the humble iBook, and pretty much everything that people expected came true: speeds were bumped up an extra hundred megahertz, the graphics subsystem was updated to the Mobility Radeon 7500 that used to be in the PowerBook line (thus bringing Quartz Extreme capability to Apple's consumer portables), and most importantly, two hundred clams were shaved right off the price tags. (Great... now we're going to be carrying a visual of "shaved clams" in our heads all day. Sigh.)

The faster chips and better video are definitely welcome upgrades, but truth be told, the real story here is in the price cuts. The iBook was already a terrific deal, but the latest price drop brings it squarely across what economists (speaking in the technical terms of their trade) refer to as the "If I Pass This Deal Up I'm Going To Have To Club Myself Silly With A Summer Squash" threshold. That threshold, of course, varies depending on the product being sold: for a can of chunk tuna in spring water it's nineteen cents; for a big-screen projection TV it's about $700; for a nice summer squash itself, it's maybe a dime. And for a snazzy-looking laptop with unparalleled ease of use, we're told that $999 is definitely over the line into IIPTDUIGTHTCMSWASS territory.

Seriously, think about it-- Apple now has a sub-$1000 consumer portable, just in time for the holiday spending frenzy. Oh, sure, other manufacturers have $999 consumer Wintel notebooks for sale, but Apple's offering differs in the fundamentally important respect that it doesn't suck. Accordingly, we suspect that Apple's iBook unit sales for the quarter are going to spike sharply following the price drop, assuming the rest of the world hasn't suddenly been rendered blind, limbless, and incapable of swiping a major credit card through that little reader dealie.

What this really means, of course, is that if you were recently in the market for a new iBook and passed it up because of its price, you no longer have any excuse; after all, we're betting there are at least one or two disturbed people out there who are rich enough to pay you a cool thou for any of a number of extraneous organs, fingers, or what have you. Just because eBay pulled the plug on sales of body parts doesn't mean you can't find a buyer some other way. It's time to get resourceful, people-- either that, or time to reach for the summer squash. And we all know how painful that can be.

Of course, today Microsoft plans to upstage Apple's latest round of portable product updates and price drops by launching a new portable innovation of its own: the Tablet PC. For now, we'll spare you the predictable rant about how we really loved the Tablet PC the first time we saw it (back when it was called the Newton), and instead we'll force ourselves to focus on just one teensy little aspect of Redmond's "Look, Ma, We're Innovating" desperate cry for attention. Deal?

Okay, here goes: faithful viewer Scott Bradford was dutifully educating himself about the Top 10 Benefits of Tablet PC and was struck by something interesting about Microsoft's Number 10, "Get High Levels of Protection for Critical Data." No, it wasn't the surreal notion that Tablet PC's inheritance of "all of the protection features of Windows XP Professional" is touted as if it's somehow a good thing-- "Gee, my spiffy new Tablet PC is 100% compatible with the same viruses and security holes that make my desktop PC a veritable fount of entertainment value!" It was, instead, discovering Microsoft's one true innovation in the Tablet PC spec: "a single CTRL+ALT+DEL hardware button."

At last, customers need no longer overexert themselves by employing three whole fingers during system crashes! Microsoft's implementation of a single hardware button that emulates all three keystrokes represents a whopping 67% improvement in ease of use. It's a shame that it took the company this long to come up with the idea, since it would have been immensely helpful to its customer base before the advent of Windows XP, back when crashes were a rather more frequent aspect of the Windows user experience. Microsoft could have added its groundbreaking single CTRL+ALT+DEL button to its line of keyboards and saved the world countless man-hours of effort expended while rebooting, thus freeing up enough time and energy for mankind to implement a foolproof plan to end world hunger while simultaneously discovering cures for all known diseases.

Oh, well... still, better late than never, right? We hereby propose that the age-old "three-finger salute" be officially and appropriately renamed the "one-finger salute." In fact, we're doing our own one-finger salute to Microsoft right now. Guess which finger?