Possible upcoming updates to Powerbook

First, the buyer's guide is not the Holy Grail - it's not always anywhere near accurate, but is just a 'guide' based on past update frequency.

Secondly, Apple never sets advance release dates for products (the iMac G5 is sort of an exception) - it usually shrouds products in secrecy and then announces products at some major event (or quietly on the Apple Online Store sometimes for incremental upgrades) then starts shipping them a month (or a few months) later.

As such, even though the Powerbooks may be due for an upgrade, there's no saying when this will be - and chances are it won't be soon. Given that it would be an incremental upgrade, not an upgrade to G5, they will probably be announced relatively quietly - but still, probably not anytime soon.

Based on conjecture (which is far from reliable) it is possible that updates to Powerbooks may incorporate G4s with 'freescale' dual core CPUs and might result in, as you say, a minor speed bump. Don't think the hard drive is going to go up, but the graphics card may move to a Radeon Mobility 9800, which is an improvement (albeit, incremental) over the 9700 currently available.

Basically, my advice (like many others here) would be to buy now and not look back. There's no point in waiting for some ghost of an update when there's no telling when it will arrive. I pity all those who've been hanging out to upgrade to G5 Powerbooks since last year - they will have to continue to wait for quite a while...

And finally, perhaps it's not such a good idea to post a thread entitled 'Possible Powerbook updates soon' on this forum, especially given the nature of your query, as it gives rise to false hopes in some and fans the flames of rampant (and sometimes ludicrous) speculation. 🙂

Scooty Puff Jr. said:

Yeah, I'm aware of Apple's understandable practice of keeping everything secret until the last minute, I just wondered if there was some sort of expo thing coming up soon that I wasn't aware of.

If the ATI 9800 is only a minor improvement then I can live with the current chip, and I've read all about the no-G5-anytime-soon news.

The one thing that would really bug me is if there's a new G4 with a decent FSB in the works, as that's the one aspect of the Powerbook line that's really behind the times, and a dual-core G4 would be a logical, even necessary, place to intruduce it.

I guess I'm just paranoid about this since the last time I bought a notebook I got a mobile Pentium 4. A couple weeks later the Pentium M models came out.



Sorry, next time I'll include both "Powerbook" and "G5" in the title. Maybe "video iPod" or "Apple tablet" as well to get them really worked up.
🙂

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Go ahead and buy one now. The most likely scenario has Apple quietly upgrading the processor to maybe 1.6 or 1.7 sometime late Fall.
If Apple was going to increase the FSB speed, they would have done it already - it's the one thing most people gripe about on the G4. I think I read that 167 was the max FSB speed on this processor. Is that correct?