Now that PowerBook name is history, I feel like writing a couple of words about my PowerBooks.

Morally responsible for my obsession with PowerBooks would be, without any doubt, my friend Bogdan Dumitrache. After he bought his Wall Street (that was the code-name for the first series of G3 PowerBooks), I suddenly lost interest in any other machine built by the human race. In my opinion, those series of PowerBooks—Wall Street, Lombard St. and Pismo—were the hottest, sexiest portable machines ever designed and built. Ever! Nowadays laptop design looks techno-cool, but those machines were way beyond cool: were sexy beasts.

In 1999 I bought my first Powerbook, a 400 MHz G3 – 192 MB RAM machine with the code-name Lombard St. The closest to haute-couture a laptop can get. Kinky, black, rubbery, curvaceous and powerful—I was hooked and blindly in love. Addicted. It was damn fast and the two hot-swappable bays were absolute magic. It had a DVD unit when there were no DVDs on the market here in Romania so and I had to get mine from abroad. I worked on it hundreds of layouts and a full year of 3D and motion graphics design. I carried it around the world, from the high-end video facilities in Milan to Singapore's artificial beaches. Still works today, and works hard sometimes: serves web pages, FTP, SSH and holds a NID system.

I bought my second PowerBook in 2002, a 800 MHz G4 – 1 GB RAM machine code-named Titanium (or TiBook), which I abused ever since in unspeakable ways—and it shows: the paint has flaked, the screen is scratched, it went through hard disk and combo unit crashes and the original battery died of exhaustion after 3 years of work. Carried around and hooked up with weird beamers for client presentations, crunched through 3D renders and 2GB PSD files, thrown in airport scanners, joined wi-fi networks in Starbucks and hotels, got locked in hotel room safe boxes, and, when needed, turned itself into a warm cradle for the cat—it's a tough, relentless, benevolent life-saving hero. Fact is, it has plenty of life in it, still. Doesn't feel old. Yes, Illustrator is a bit sluggish, but that's no wonder, Illustrator is far too bloated if you ask me. This is a machine that works from the morning until very, very late at night and it never gets shut down for the night or for transportation—I only close the lid and put it to sleep.

That's two portables in 8 years, acting as desktop replacements while remaining mobile—a tough job. The toughest, probably.

My point: Apple portables have an incredibly long life. They worth every single cent. And with 2 machines in 8 years as desktop graphic station replacements, they're not affordable—they're a goddamn steal! And regarding the PowerBook (sub–) brand name, it has such a tremendous emotional dimension because it stands for a product that delivered constantly, exceeding expectations.