So about that PowerBook G5 that Cap'n Steve hopes to foist upon us all before the end of next year: are you one of the many obsessive fans who didn't get a wink of sleep last night because you couldn't stop worrying about how Apple could possibly get around the cooling problem? After all, the G5 processor in its current incarnation kicks out enough heat to vulcanize a whole Goodyear plant; it only appears in the newest Power Macs, which have been expressly designed with mesh panels and four thermal zones and nine fans and squads of tiny genetically-altered penguins who live inside and raid your freezer at night for ice to build little igloos around the processor core. That's a lot of cooling technology to try to squeeze into a PowerBook. (The penguins, in particular, have a really strong union and demand reasonable amounts of head room.)

That's why, AppleInsider claims, Apple is said to be "experimenting with liquid cooling systems" in prototypes of next year's 1/1,100th-of-a-supercomputer-to-go; little pipes will send liquid past the processor to carry radiated heat to the outside of the enclosure. And if, like ours, your skeptical minds just filled with images of PowerBooks springing leaks and needing to be scolded like puppies off the paper, rest assured that IBM has reportedly had liquid-cooled ThinkPads available since the "late '90s," so apparently it can be done safely without keeping the laptop in diapers at all times. (Thank goodness; our Huggies budget has been stretched to the limit.)

Indeed, the tie-in with IBM's laptops is interesting, since Apple and IBM have collaborated on notebook design in the past-- on the oh-so-popular PowerBook 2400. And since IBM makes the polar-ice-cap-meltin' chip that's in such dire need of heavy cooling in the first place, why, the whole concept of an IBM-cooled, IBM-powered PowerBook isn't necessarily all that far afield. But whereas the 2400 was popular precisely because it was teeny-tiny (the keys on the keyboard were so gosh-darned cute!), AppleInsider states that the PowerBook G5 might be limited to a 17-inch model at first, because all that cooling apparatus takes up a fair amount of space. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, since people who need G5-class performance in a portable would likely spring for the Big Mama version anyway.

And niftiest of all, depending on how Apple implements the liquid cooling system (and what liquid it chooses to use), this could open the door for any of a number of useful and attractive secondary PowerBook G5 abilities. Anybody can make a laptop that'll fetch your email and run your spreadsheets, but only the PowerBook G5 can steam-press your slacks before that important business meeting! Or perhaps you'd prefer it to dispense a piping-hot cup of nutritious miso soup? Or spray scalding Tabasco sauce into the faces of your enemies? Why, the possibilities are endless!