Attention, all viewers who remained steadfastly confident that Apple's next PowerBook revision would be the long-awaited G5-based portable: we hate to say we told you so, but... oh, why lie about it? We love to say we told you so. And we did. Tell you so, that is. Because look, faithful viewer FrozenTundra dished us the press release about Apple's latest PowerBooks (introduced on a Monday instead of a Tuesday just to mess with your head-- don't let anyone tell you otherwise), and the speed bump is minimal at best. No, it didn't make the mighty leap to the G5; heck, it's not even packing a dual-core G4. As far as we can tell from a quick glance at the specs, Apple's latest PowerBooks house the exact same G4s as the previous models, only with the clock speed ratcheted up from 1.5 GHz to 1.67 GHz. From a processor perspective, that improvement is less than enthralling.

And yet, somehow Apple still made this new stack o' PowerBooks a seductive and compelling upgrade in its own right. Sure, the speed-at-any-cost crowd might be left cold, but there are some pretty spiffy changes and additions in the new line-up. Take, for example, the base RAM of 512 MB across the board; that alone is enough to make longtime Mac fans drop to their knees and weep uncontrollably at the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Apple is going to start shipping Macs with enough memory to run Calculator and Address Book at the same time without slowing to a crawl and emitting incessant grinding sounds from the hard drive. Dare to dream, right?

And that's just the tip of the big floaty ice-thing. Personally, we're probably most excited about the new scrolling trackpad, which presents the most elegant interface solution for the whole scroll-wheel concept we've ever heard: "simply touch the trackpad with two fingers instead of one to quickly scroll or pan within the window." That's a stroke of freakin' genius-- and it may hint that Apple will introduce a similarly slick scrolling mouse for its desktop Macs before too long. (Patent application for a "mouse having a rotary dial," anyone?)

Meanwhile, what about this "Sudden Motion Sensor" technology, which supposedly drastically reduces the odds of your hard disk crunching its way to Mass Storage Heaven if you knock your PowerBook around a little? Yep, all PowerBooks now feature "a tri-axis accelerometer to help protect a spinning hard drive if the notebook is accidentally dropped"; apparently as soon as the system detects a massive shift in acceleration, it parks the drive's heads to keep them from plowing furrows into the disk platters. Sure, it might not protect your data if you use your PowerBook as the puck in a pickup game of Financially Reckless Floor Hockey, but it should afford you a little extra protection from accidental thunks and whacks. (Apple claims it has a patent pending on this feature, but we thought we heard that IBM ThinkPads have had something similar for ages. We don't know for sure, though.)

All this, and the new PowerBooks also boast bigger and faster hard drives, Bluetooth 2.0, 8x SuperDrives (in the pricier models), and faster graphics subsystems. The backlit keyboard is now standard in all 15- and 17-inch models... and better yet, it's apparently finally bright enough to see now. (What'll they think of next?) If you're a total featureholic, you're going to want to go for the 17-inch behemoth, because it now comes with dual-link DVI support-- yes, you can plug a freakin' 30-inch Cinema Display into it-- and optical digital audio input and output. Oh, and did we mention the across-the-board price drops of a Benjamin or two?

So sure, you can pout about the continued lack of a PowerBook G5 if you want to, but there's some really solid stuff in this speed bump that, quite frankly, has us seriously considering dropping a couple thou to replace our four-year-old Pismo. After all, given today's product release, it's now unlikelier than ever that a portable G5 will surface before early summer-- and even if it were shipping today, we wouldn't be caught dead shelling out a few grand for a first-generation PowerBook G5; we'd much rather wait for at least the second revision, which ought to fix all those pesky little flaws in the 1.0 release that'll cause some aggravation among early adopters who will most likely wind up with all their hair singed off and second degree burns on their thighs. But, uh, that's just us.

Okay, so remember a couple of weeks ago when Dell CEO Kevin Rollins dissed Apple by attributing the company's comeback to the iPod, which he called a "fad" and a "one-product wonder"? Yup, ol' Kev disparagingly likened the iPod to the Walkman, a flash-in-the-pan product if ever we've seen one-- why, it only took two measly decades for the Walkman fad to fade, and of course once it did, we never heard of that "Sony" company ever again. (On a related note, we'd like to take this opportunity to make a little public service announcement. Attention, whoever sells Kevin Rollins his crack: you're either giving him way too much or not nearly enough. Check the dosage.)

While he never really expressly says so, it's pretty clear in the Silicon.com article we referenced that Kevin's utter dismissal of the iPod (and the Mac mini) stems from his feeling that innovation and design really don't matter. In fact, Mike Dell has almost flat-out said so on occasion, and in a sense they're both right: Dell makes its money by cranking out cheap boxes in insane volumes and pricing the competition right out of the business; innovation costs money and reduces economies of scale, so it only stands in the way of the Wal-Mart approach. But if history is any indication, that strategy won't necessarily work forever.

Check it out: faithful viewer Brett Burnside dished us a BusinessWeek article that draws an interesting analogy between the computer market and the history of the automotive industry. Whereas Ford's all-black, all-the-same, mass-market Model Ts used to rule the roost, eventually consumers "began to take cars' basic functions for granted" and "started seeking a little pizzazz in their vehicles." Before long, cars that catered to consumers' sense of style overtook Ford's automotive equivalent of the Beige Box-- and apparently "a similar shift is looming in the home computer market." After all, people don't buy all their tech strictly by price and spec sheets, or else the iPod would probably be dead last in sales instead of way out in front. So who's to say that consumers won't soon become a little more discriminating and opt for the slick Mac mini instead of whatever bolted-together monstrosity that Dell's pushing for a hundred bucks less?

Incidentally, analyst Rob Enderle's almost incessant cluelessness about all things Apple probably comes from wearing the same blinders that Dell's bigwigs have clamped onto their heads. Faithful viewer David Silberman just pointed out that Enderle recently said the following about Windows XP: "I don't love it, but it does what I need it to do, which is all I really ask for in a tool." Now that's a ringing endorsement, hmmmm? (Obligatory Enderle insult: as far as tools go, it takes one to know one.) So Rob and Kevin and Mike Dell still see computers and operating systems as "tools," which is why they think they should be cheap and commoditized as long as they're marginally effective. Mac users, on the other hand, have long known that it's far more rewarding to use a computer that we do love, and that love stems from design, innovation, attention to detail, and yes, style. Enderle must understand that on some absurdly primitive level, because if computers really are just "tools" to him, he wouldn't be using a Ferrari-branded laptop that goes "vroom, vroom."

Granted, most of this is totally moot in the business market, which is where Dell really makes its money anyway, so the company's not exactly about to wither away and die just because it might lose a few share points to Apple in the consumer market over the long haul. But we do look forward to the day when consumers at large stop thinking of computers solely as "tools" and start attaching a little more importance to how a PC can actually make them smile. Because that'll be the day when Apple's market share really starts to climb.

Oh for cryin' out loud, must there always be some sort of dagger in our psyche? It's been a full year since we first heard about some visigoth with a hacksaw who ripped the innards out of a Power Mac G5, cut extra holes in its aluminum case, and stuffed it full of green-glowing Wintel guts-- and despite knowing that the story was partially a hoax (only a Power Mac's enclosure got butchered, not a working Power Mac itself), we'd only just recovered from the horrifying mental image. And gee, just in time to be viscerally appalled by the senseless desecration of a Mac mini! Oh, the humanity... and oh, what a serious lack of class.

It's like this: faithful viewer David Poves alerted us to a blog post by one Kevin Rose of G4TechTV's The Screen Savers, in which he details the process by which he took a fully functional Mac mini and effected some grisly brute-force platform reassignment surgery. He popped open the mini, unscrewed and removed its original motherboard, slapped in a pre-release teensy Wintel motherboard made by VIA, hacked holes in the mini's enclosure to make room for the new motherboard's ports, stapled everything back together, and voilà: he's now got one of the most blindingly evil downgrades in the history of mod-dom.

See, it's not bad enough that Kevin took a beautifully designed, totally integrated, digital lifestyle-enhancing Mac and turned it into a pile of hacked-together x86-based junk, nor was he content with just letting his Frankensteinian "mini PC" wear the Mac's enclosure like Leatherface wearing the skinned face of one of his victims; the real kick in the teeth is that his conversion was disturbingly incomplete. For example, he kindasorta left out a CD-ROM drive, because fitting one in there "would be impossible... due to size restrictions." (Never mind that Apple made it work; guess that VIA motherboard isn't quite so teensy after all.) Instead of trying to retain even the slightest vestige of the Mac mini's original elegance, he just left the optical drive out entirely and recommends using an external drive in its place-- which largely negates the whole purpose of cramming a computer into a space as small as the mini in the first place, but hey, we said this whole thing was senseless, didn't we?

Furthermore, Kevin notes that there wasn't even enough space in the Mac mini's case for the VIA motherboard's processor heat sink, so he went with the obvious solution: he "used a metal handsaw to cut a 3/4-inch chunk from the side" of the thing. So how did he compensate for the processor's reduced cooling? Simple: he didn't. While he recommends "adding an additional fan to the inside lid to increase airflow," he didn't bother actually doing it or anything, so for all we know, his "mini PC" would burn itself out after ten minutes of operation. Not that we'd deny it the merciful release that death would bring, of course, but the fact remains that all Kevin did was take a perfectly happy Mac mini and butcher it to the point where 1) it would no longer run Mac OS X or iLife, 2) it could no longer read or write CDs, and 3) it might not actually run for long at all before it self-immolated due to either insufficient processor cooling or utter shame. (Take your pick.)

Reportedly the atrocity actually appeared on the air last week; while we're all for scoping out gory tumor resections on the All-Gross Surgery Channel, we give thanks to the gods of channel-surfing who mercifully spared us the sight of a mini being destroyed for a woefully incomplete conversion that wasn't even elegant by Wintel standards. We're sure that Kevin Rose is a perfectly nice guy and everything, but we can only imagine the tidal wave of bad karma that he's visited upon himself by perpetrating this abomination. What's he going to do for an encore, hollow out Michelangelo's David and fill it full of Twinkie cream?