The Apple PowerBook G4 has had a few upgrades since the last PowerBook we tested a few months earlier. Yes, it has a faster processor but the standout feature has to be the 17in display that gives you the same viewing area as a 19in CRT. FireWire 800 is also new. The PowerBook still only weighs 3.1kg which is quite remarkable considering this notebook's overall size.
The PowerBook exterior is all grey-silver. It looks reserved but modern and stylish at the same time. The PowerBook also features a huge 80GB hard disk, 512MB of RAM, which can be expanded to 2GB, and a 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics accelerator and comes with a one-inch thick slot-loading Super Drive (DVD-R/CD-RW).
As far as connectors go it has pretty much everything. You will find a DVI port -- which is a rarity except on Apple notebooks -- as well as FireWire 400 and 800, S-Video, and two USB ports. For connecting devices take your pick from Gigabit Ethernet, Modem, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The Powerbook was shipped with Mac OS X v10.3 Panther which ran very smoothly on this notebook.
Unfortunately we didn't benchmark the PowerBook simply because there aren't any decent cross-platform benchmarks. We have used Photoshop in the past but it only really measures the relative CPU performance in that program. Apple notebooks tend to perform much better than Wintel notebooks in this test, but then it's only one test.
If you want the results of the real test -- the envy factor -- of all the notebooks we tested this is the only one people at the Labs were fighting over. It's the Rolls Royce of notebooks, and if it gets a G5 processor there will be no catching it.
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