So what is it with Apple and laptops? Over the past few years, it seems that when new products get introduced by the good folks in Cupertino, it's the portables that suffer the longest delays and the bumpiest debuts. Think about it: beige G3s were available immediately after Steve Jobs' big media event introduction in November of 1997. The blue and white G3s, while a little tough to find right at the beginning, were readily available a matter of days after the world first glimpsed their unorthodox multi-handled curves. (At least, we saw several boxes of them at our local Microcenter not long after the unveiling.) Even the iMac, which was widely expected to be extremely constrained when it finally became officially available last August, was pretty easy to find if you were willing to dig a little-- the AtAT staff purchased three on behalf of friends and family on the day they came out. But now look at the portables; last year we had the Great PowerBook Drought of 1998, and now the bronze PowerBook G3s seem to be following suit.

In fact, if you think about it, both the original "Wall Street" PowerBook G3 Series and the new "101" bronze versions were introduced much, much later than the entire Mac community expected-- and once they were introduced they suffered from intense availability problems. Strange, no? This latest debacle has retailers up in arms, since many of them haven't received a single bronze unit yet, despite Apple's announced ship date of May 20th. To make the tension even worse, what few PowerBooks that do exist seem to be going out to Apple Store customers instead of into the retail channel, arguably contrary to Apple's earlier assurances that the Apple Store wouldn't get preferential treatment when it came to shipment of product. An MSNBC article discusses the drought in general, while a PowerBook Zone piece focuses in on the apparent Apple Store policy reversal.

So what is it about PowerBooks that makes them so incredibly tough to release and get into the channel? Availability of the LCD panels? Additional quality control necessary for systems that are going to get lugged all over the planet? Something in the water? Whatever it is, soon we'll find out if the phenomenon only affects PowerBooks, or if it extends to all Apple-branded portables; Steve Jobs is expected to unveil the "P1" consumer laptop at next month's Macworld Expo, so we'll get to watch yet another portable product launch. Here's hoping that availability problems stay away... especially since the AtAT staff really wants one of those things ASAP.