No PowerBook Can Hold Me

For over a decade my primary development machine have been a PowerBook. Between home, office, meetings, presentations and conferences it really helps to have everything with me, all the time. No mental energy required.

However, I have been distinctly unimpressed by the current generation. They're slow, their screens offer comparatively low resolution and Apple's in-house trackpad pales to Synaptics' (static electricity renders it unuseable for five seconds at a time on a continuing basis).

I could muddle through all of that, except laptop drives max out at 120GB, and unlike the Pismo days of yore, the current generation of PowerBooks only accept one drive (I would gladly sacrifice my "super drive" for another hard drive).

It may sound wacky, but I need to be able to boot between at least four versions of Mac OS X on a regular basis:

• The last major previous OS version (today, that would be 10.3) for the older stuff I'm still bringing forward.
• The normal, current version of the OS (10.4.2 today).
• A backup of the current version (I apply Software Update fearlessly knowing when it screws up -- and it does on a regular basis -- salvation is a quick reboot away).
• The next upcoming version.

Each of these boot partitions really need to be at least 20GB large in order to tolerate full installs of iLife, iWork, Virtual PC, Adobe apps, and developer tools.

The showstopper is that my current working set is 60GB large. If you do the math, you'll see even the largest notebook hard drive available today is some 25 formatted gigabytes shy of what I need. Right now I'm managing with an external bus-powered FireWire hard drive, but it's a pain.

I may have to face the fact that my days of living off a PowerBook are over, perhaps for good. If so, I'll probably go with big-honkin' desktop machines and one small cheapie iBook for presentations and conferences. I fear the Macintel in the mail is the first step down that slippery slope.

Friday, September 23, 2005
12:48 AM