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.