Hallelujah, they weren't just messing with us: our new PowerBook did, in fact, arrive last Wednesday, safe and sound; we were so pleased that we gave the UPS lady a big honkin' slice of chocolate chip banana bread fresh from the oven. We're producing this very episode on it right now, in fact (the PowerBook, not the banana bread), and after our limited experience with the thing so far, we're giving it a big thumbs-up with a cherry on top and a side order of cheesy fries. Sure, there's a bunch of little annoyances we're going to have to learn to work around and/or live with-- the space bar isn't as sensitive as it should be, the trackpad button is way too stiff, the clickable trackpad fails to register clicks every once in a while, for some reason double-clicking and dragging using the trackpad no longer allows us to select multiple words, etc.-- but overall, the screen is vast and gorgeous, the keyboard is the comfiest we can ever remember using, it's way quieter than the Pismo was, everything is insanely fast, and for some reason, most of the time this G4 running at 1.67 GHz is about a zillion degrees cooler than that 400 MHz G3; our thighs are barely breaking a sweat. Go figure.

But there's one more thing we're going to have to get used to, and that's the sheer size of the thing. We traded up for more screen real estate, but for some reason, we didn't expect that moving from a 14-inch Pismo to a 15-inch AlBook would deal us such a noticeable increase in width. Oh, the system's thin, sure, and relatively light, but it has a footprint easily mistaken for the big honkin' pedal impressions of a yeti with a pituitary problem. Obviously we'll adjust to it in time, but seeing as we've always been partial to Apple's teensiest laptops (the 12-inchers, the 2400, the old Duos, that sort of thing), right now this 15-incher feels like a boat by comparison. Using a 17-incher for the first time must feel like having an Imperial Star Destroyer perched jauntily in one's lap.

But what if Apple were to introduce a new portable product even smaller than the 12-inch PowerBook? The PowerPage reported last week that the company is working on a "new palmtop Mac" and (evidently unswayed by having been subpoenaed in that whole Asteroid brouhaha) cites "sources who claim to have seen one" when it describes the product as a "mini laptop." Reportedly it runs a "stripped-down flavor of Mac OS X" and finally capitalizes on the Inkwell handwriting recognition technology that's been a feature of X since Jaguar-- a feature better known by its alias, "What the Hell Is This Doing In Here?"

As the PowerPage points out, a super-teensy mini laptop with stylus-based handwriting input sounds a whole lot like the old Newton eMate 300. (The eMate, incidentally, was the one aspect of the entire Newton project that Steve Jobs actually liked, which may explain why the original iBook's design was basically an eMate on Miracle-Gro.) Is there a viable market for a debigulated semiBook that's almost a Mac? It's tough to say with no real details available, but reportedly the prototypes are "getting a lot of great feedback," and we personally can see the allure of a reduced-functionality, pocket-sized miniBook that we can take anywhere just to get some writing done-- because we sure as broccoli aren't going to be in the habit of dragging this big honkin' thing all over creation.

In the meantime, though, since we're not nearly as mobile as we once were, having 15 inches of widescreeny goodness across which our cursor can roam more than makes up for the temporary feeling of being dwarfed by our own laptop. Freedom! FREEEEEDOOOOOMM!!!