Mine’s ordered. His Jobsness says they will have four hours of battery life, which is close to the same as what the old ones get. The new Lithium Ion Polymer batteries should last about five times as long as the old Lithium Ion batteries in the PowerBook G4 (in overall life of the battery, not the time a single charge can be used.)

The DVD drive downgrade is supposedly because of the height reduction in the system, and will be upgradable later. Fine with me.

A lot of people are speculating that the Intel iBook will be renamed the “MacBook.” This would make some sense, as the notebook line would have a coherent name. But Apple is pretty married to the “i” line. If they were going to change that, why keep the iMac the iMac? What I think they are going to do is retain the iBook name, and call their new Intel Pro desktop system “Mac.” This makes sense to me; iMac -> iBook / Mac -> MacBook. This also leaves room in the lineup for a mid-grade notebook to be called the “MacBook.” Perhaps a replacement for the 12″ PowerBook?

Edit: Looks like I was (mostly) right.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Apple, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.