Saturday’s Apple: PowerBook 12-inch as Netbook

A few months ago I borrowed a colleague’s PowerBook 12-inch and I’ve used it on and off as my mobile computer since then. The idea was to figure out if it was a viable alternative to the netbooks springing up all over the place, including the Acer Aspire One I wrote about some time back.

I know that I wasn’t alone when I after the MacBook Air was introduced felt a bit disappointed that it wasn’t smaller. Sure it’s incredibly thin and gorgeous to look at but I would have wanted 12-inch or perhaps even 10-inch size. To make it that thin just seemed like a bit of a waste when the footprint is still 13.3 inches.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my MacBook Aluminum and I’m happy with pretty much every aspect of it but if it could have been a bit smaller that’d make me even more happy. That said, will there be an Apple netbook announced or released at Macworld Expo in a few weeks? I seriously doubt it.

And I had a PowerBook 12-inch many years ago and for a long time it was my main computer, doing everything from presentations, letters, graphics, web design and more on it. It’s beautifully designed and its still, to me, one of the most desirable Apple products ever.

But back to the point, how is it as a netbook?

As it turns out it’s pretty good as a netbook. Compared to the MacBook Air it’s thick and heavy and compared to the PC netbooks it’s even bigger and heaver. So it’s not something you just casually throw in your bag and take with you anywhere as you might do with the Acer Aspire One or Asus eeePC. And the MacBook Air has bigger screen (the 12-inch only has 1024×768 pixels) and it’s obviously faster since the PowerBook is a G4, in my case a 1.5Ghz G4 processor with 1.25GB RAM and 60GB hard drive.

So then the question is what do you need to do with a netbook? Basically I think the idea is you store your applications and information online in various web sites, so local processor and storage space isn’t that important. And the PowerBook has more than enough of both of these. I type this in WriteRoom, I will edit the picture for this post in PixelMator, and I will store both text and picture in BackPack when I’m finished. There it will stay until i am going to post it in WordPress. For backup of the PowerBook I have JungleDisk running and I also use DropBox for most online file storage. Then of course I have my email in GMail, read my RSS feeds with Google Reader, work on Shufflegazine using BaseCamp, keep my contacts in HighRise, do Twittter with Twitteriffic and Twhirl, keep some documents in Google Docs, keep up with my schedule in Google Calendar, manage my to do list with Remember The Milk, and more.

Perhaps I’m a bit extreme, I don’t know, but living in the cloud works very well for me and the PowerBook 12-inch works very well as a netbook. I had to buy a new battery because the old on held a charge for only about 10 minutes. Now it runs about three hours on a charge, if i turn down screen brightness and a few other things. Now I hope my colleague will let me borrow his PowerBook for a bit longer, but eventually I’ll end up buying my own one just because I like this computer so darn much.

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