Call it "sour grapes gone obsessive," if you will, but ever since we, your friendly AtAT staff, finally came to terms with the cold, hard truth that we will never own a Titanium PowerBook G4 (well, at least not until Apple has released six or seven successors to the current model), we've been engaging in a mild degree of relief when certain "imperfections" come to light. Don't get us wrong; we love the new PowerBook, and we want it to sell millions of units. But hearing about its little flaws helps us rationalize our otherwise lamentable titanium-free state.

It started with little things, like the single FireWire port; our Pismo has two, so we're obviously much better off. (Never mind that we own exactly zero FireWire devices in the first place-- one, if you count the camcorder.) And no expansion bay? Heck, we can swap out our Pismo's DVD-ROM drive with a Zip drive, a CD-RW drive, or even a second battery. (Never mind that we don't own any of those things, either.) And then came the truly scary news: the Mac Observer reports that if you pop a DVD into the drive of a PowerBook G4 and then tilt it "90 degrees to the right," horrible grinding sounds emanate from the unit, apparently from the spinning disk coming into contact with part of the casing. Well, that's a deal-killer if ever we heard one, because right now, we can watch Apocalypse Now as it's meant to be seen-- with our Pismo turned on its side. Yes, we daresay we can screen our entire DVD collection sideways with impunity. Thank goodness we didn't go titanium!

But actually, even the no-watching-movies-sideways limitation of the PowerBook G4 pales in comparison to the latest quirk to catch our attention. Few things freak us out as badly as sudden, unexpected discharges of static electricity. Sure, when we were kids, it was lots of fun shuffling our feets across the shag rug and zapping unsuspecting siblings and house pets. (Okay, we didn't really do that to the house pets, because that would be cruel. But the siblings, on the other hand, got smacked down on a regular basis.) These days, however, with crucial computer equipment humming around us on all sides, an accidental zap sends us into palpitations as we wonder what piece of expensive circuitry we've probably just fried. So far we've been lucky, at least in terms of actual physical damage, but we're paranoid enough that every cracking shock against the case of one of our Macs takes a year or two off our lives.

Which means that we probably wouldn't live to see next year if we owned a PowerBook G4. According to a report over at The iBook & PowerBook Page, the new unit's titanium casing apparently attracts static electricity like a lightning rod. Worse yet, the shocks are neither infrequent nor harmless; while the article's author doesn't report any permanent physical damage, he does note that when he accidentally zaps his PowerBook "near the keyboard," the whole system crashes hard, requiring a forced restart. Now, we know we'd find that experience more than a little harrowing, and at every post-zap reboot we'd have our hearts in our mouths waiting to see if the system would come back up, or if we now owned a 5.3-pound titanium paperweight.

So, we've got one more reason to delude ourselves into thinking we're happier with our Pismo than we could ever be with a PowerBook G4. For those of you "unlucky" enough to have Apple's latest model, however, apparently the static problem abates significantly if you don't wear shoes. We're serious. Just think of it as one more small step in the Steve Jobs World Domination Master Plan: keeping the faithful barefoot. Just you wait-- the new iMacs are probably going to crash every twenty minutes unless the user is wearing a black turtleneck...