Aesthetics aside, as it is a matter of personal taste, the new notebooks make a very compelling argument for being one of Apple's best notebook lines.
In recent years, they are some of the most upgradeable machines. Memory appears to be able to go up to 6 or 8 GB down the road, and as long as 2.5" drives and SATA interface are viable, you can breathe new life into the machine with a much larger drive or SSD.
This continual revisionism about the 12" Powerbook is just fascinating. I used to own one. They were great machines. They were, however, just dressed up iBooks in an aluminum enclosure with the a better ability to drive displays.
In the last revisions, the 12" could not drive very large displays like the 15", it lacked a backlit keyboard, lacked Firewire 800 & a card slot, it was still crippled by having one of the dimms soldered to the board, and the graphics split the difference between the iBook and Powerbook.
With the new macbook, you can upgrade the memory and disk drive at the same pace as the macbook pro, you can drive the exact same external displays, you have the possibility to run the same processor and gain a backlit keyboard. You do lose the firewire and some graphics power though.
The form of the 12" Powerbook was great. The function of the new macbook though is something I think trumps the 12"'s form.
! MacBooks look cleaner without it to.
