I recently received my new PowerBook, having waited until the rumoured speed bump took place. I'm pretty proud of myself for overcoming my usual need for immediate gratification, and actually waiting.

What I ended up with is a 15" SuperDrive model, without the SuperDrive but with 128mb of video memory. This probably sounds a bit strange, but I wanted the 1.67MHz G4 processor which only comes with the SuperDrive model. My iBook, incidentally, has gone to my wife, who's an obsessive digital photographer.

Performance is generally outstanding on this unit. If you're interested, Macintouch has posted a nice performance chart with this model included.

The nicest feature, as I expected, is the widescreen (1280x854) display (which is supported quite nicely by World of Warcraft). One feature which I didn't quite expect to enjoy so much, however, is the "two-finger-scrolling":

I actually use this all of the time now. For those with pre-2005 PowerBooks (and, in fact, iBooks), it seems that there's a hack to enable this (which I haven't tried yet on the iBook).

I'm less enthusiastic about the other new PowerBook 2005 feature, the Sudden Motion Sensor (also known as the Mobile Motion Module), which parks the heads on your hard drive if it senses a "change in axis position and accelerated movement". I'm fairly certain that it negatively affects WoW performance, and I've turned it off. I'm not sure if it's actually a problem with the way the sensor is designed though, or just an artifact of running WoW on a notebook computer balanced on my lap with...ummm...some enthusiasm.

On the serious side, I've started work moving one of our Pocket PC apps to the Macintosh. Learning Cocoa and Objective-C along the way. I'd consider this work to be a logical evolution of the Pocket PC app (rather than a port, that is). And no, I'm not going to say which one at this point :-)