Los Angeles Times writer Jim Heid finds that “the PowerBook G4 is an eminently roadworthy, exceptionally versatile portable computer.” He said that he grabbed video from a MiniDV-format camcorder and edited it at 30,000 feet.
“I connected the PowerBook to a 12-foot projection screen and delivered presentations to a crowd of 500,” Heid wrote. “I ran audio and Web-design software. I watched DVD movies and played MP3 tracks. And I surfed the Web, swapped e-mail and wrote this column.”
Heid, who is also a contributing editor to Macworld magazine, said in his Times column that the PowerBook G4 is a “sublime computer, and mobile professionals will find few challenges it can’t meet.”
“Will it attract Windows users?” he asked. “Perhaps, but the challenge Apple faces on that front was illustrated by a brief exchange I had with a fellow airline passenger. As he admired the G4, I told him it was Apple’s newest PowerBook. He paused for a moment and asked, ‘Does Dell sell those?'”
Meanwhile, Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus said in a column for The Houston Chronicle that the Titanium PowerBook would certainly tempt Wintel users.
“While each generation of PowerBook portable Macs has been better and faster than the one before it, this time Apple has made a quantum leap forward,” LeVitus wrote. “The new PowerBook G4 is a unique notebook computer even Windows users will lust for … A mere one-inch thick, it’s the most beautiful PowerBook Apple has ever produced.”
He said that his Windows-using colleague, columnist Dwight Silverman, echoed his enthusiasm: “Apple has put together one of the best-made notebooks I’ve seen in a long, long time.”
LeVitus has been taking his new PowerBook everywhere he’s gone in recent days — to restaurants, to the gym, to the doctor.
“I’ve never had people come up and drool on my computer before,” he wrote. “They say they’ve never seen a notebook quite like this.”