Titanium Rises To The Challenge

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January 11, 2001 (2:03 PM EST)

By Marty Cortinas,

A colleague recently did something unthinkable: He toted his Sony Vaio to Macworld Expo.

The colleague was Glenn Fleishman, who with Jeff Carlson authored the fabulous "Real World Adobe GoLive" book series. (Warning: I am a little biased; I'm listed as an editor on the books.) Glenn is a Web professional, so it probably shouldn't have surprised me that he was using a Windows portable. Web folks, after all, have to be familiar with multiple browsers on multiple platforms to do their jobs right.

Still, I had to defend the PowerBook. When Glenn said the Vaio was less of a burden to tote around than a PowerBook, I pointed out that the latest PowerBook doesn't weigh too much. It could even fit into the small book bag I was carrying.

We had this conversation as we made our way to the hall where Steve Jobs was going to give his keynote address. About an hour later, as Jobs unveiled "one more thing," I got the eerie feeling that he had tapped into our conversation.

That one more thing was a new slim, lightweight PowerBook in a titanium case. It measures about an inch high, weighs five pounds, and runs on a 500-MHz G4 processor. It also sports a 15-inch LCD screen. Naturally, it is aimed directly at the Vaio crowd. Jobs took great pains to compare the two machines.

The new PowerBook holds it own, and then some. Although it costs about $50 more and is one pound heavier than the Vaio, the PowerBook is thinner, has a much larger screen, and includes a DVD drive.

The new portable caused such a stir that it's likely a lot of people missed Jobs' other interesting news. For example, he admitted that Apple missed the boat when it came to CD-RW, but he vowed to make amends with a new line of desktop machines. The top-of-the-line Macintosh will include a special "SuperDrive" that will not only burn CDs, but DVDs as well.

The SuperDrive machines will also come with new iDVD authoring software. It works along the lines of iMovie, allowing amateurs to crank out professional-looking DVD packages. iDVD also offers a remarkable encoding speed of 2X, which means a two-hour segment will take four hours to encode. Other software encoders are much slower, around 25X, Jobs said.

Oh yeah, he also announced a final shipping date for Mac OS X. It's March 24. But you might be too busy drooling over your new PowerBook to remember that.