Real Kato Blog: Apple Watch: Time For a New Laptop

My trusty old Pismo laptop is starting to show signs of age.

I would argue that the "Pismo" laptop computer might be the finest laptop Apple has ever made.

When it was introduced in February 2000, it was top-of-the-line in terms of performance, looks, weight, and design. It was rugged and versatile, and utterly dependable. Later PowerBooks proved to be somewhat more fragile; the iBooks, while durable, were functionally limited. The Pismo had it all.

My Pismo, which I've named Maria, still smoothly runs the latest version of Mac OS X. Maria is my living room Internet terminal. That's very convenient for taking notes while watching American Idol, or for looking up football statistics while watching the game. (Hey, I'm not ENTIRELY girly.)

I took Maria with me on my trip to Maryland. That's when I really noticed the problems.

A while ago, I had to replace the battery. That wasn't unexpected, since batteries do wear out after a while. So I bought a high-capacity battery from a vendor on-line. Maria has always had a bit of trouble with the new battery. At first I took it as just a glitch from having a third-party battery, but the problems have been more and more frequent lately.

On my trip to Maryland, Maria refused to run off the battery at all. So I looked at the battery closely, and I noticed that the contacts were damaged. The damage looks irreparable. I can still run off the AC adapter, but not being able to use the battery somewhat limits Maria's usefulness as a portable machine.

I could get a new battery, perhaps. But Maria has been having a little bit of trouble in other areas, too. She sometimes won't wake up from sleep, so I have to do a hard reset. She's a little sluggish when visiting certain web sites. And her hard drive has started to become noisy, which makes me worry that it's about to die.

So, I think it's time to replace her. I think the iBook G4 12" is a good replacement; it's portable and durable, and it does all that I need from a laptop. It's even got enough horsepower to run GarageBand. Including a $100 rebate from Amazon.com, it's a bargain at $899.

But I'm going to wait just a bit, for two reasons. One, there's a rumor that Apple will introduce an "iBook mini" sometime in the near future. That's a tantalizing idea. Two, Mac OS X 10.4 will be coming out soon, and it'll be nice to get that as part of the bundle.

The new laptop will be named Nadia. Stay tuned.

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