Laptops and stickers

I really hope John Gruber is right about this at least:

Daring Fireball: Full Metal Jacket


Better yet, compare and contrast to the exterior of your typical PC laptop: two-tone plastic, gratuitously beveled corner edges, dozens of silly extra buttons surrounding the keyboard, and so forth. The difference is that PC hardware appears not to be designed so much as decorated. There are exceptions — IBM’s ThinkPads and Sony’s Vaios are generally pretty good-looking machines. But I don’t think they look as good as PowerBooks or iBooks, and one reason is that although they’re simple, they’re not simple enough.

Epitomizing the PC industry’s lack of respect for their own case aesthetics are those ubiquitous little stamp-sized decals peppered over their laptops’ palm-rest areas. One for Windows, one for Intel (or AMD), sometimes a couple more for components like the graphics card. They’re garish and turn the surface of one’s laptop into a Nascar-style promotion board. Sure, you can peel them off, but judging from the laptops I see in coffee shops and airports, very few people actually do. Presumably these decals are part of the licensing deals struck between the laptop makers and Microsoft, Intel, et al., but why not just say no? We’ll buy your CPUs; we’ll license your operating system; but we’re not going to put your ugly fucking stickers on our computers. Apple is slated to soon start using the same Intel x86 guts as other laptop manufacturers, but I’ll eat my hat if they start boogering up their cases with “Intel Inside” decals.

I am in the market for a new powerbook. I own the original G4 laptop (titanium shell) which is getting pretty old, battered, and sad that it is so much slower than all the other laptops in the neighborhood (I'm not sitting in front of it, but I think it's 400 mghz, I know it only has 10 gigs of hd space, and 384 megs of ram, both paltry numbers). The CD slot got banged up and dented in by some young cousins in San Francisco area one Christmas, and while the DVD/CD drive still mostly works, it is unsightly. I was close to deciding to budget for one, but then Apple announced the whole Intel transition thing.

I still might get the last PowerPC powerbook, especially if the price drops. Should I put it on my Amazon wish list? (Ha)

Tags: Apple, /Macintosh, /powerbook