Au Revoir

No, I’m not still brooding about sending my wife and son away again (or, more to the point, I am still brooding about sending Margaret away, but I wasn’t thinking about it until you reminded me just now, thank you very much).

Instead, I’m wincing about having to leave my iBook in the tender care of the local Apple Store. I could have kept running it from the power adapter indefinitely, but I knew I’d have to bring it in sometime. Since this is the Holiday Overconsumption Season, the interval between now and mid-January (perhaps even longer, if Steve makes an exciting announcement such as “Intel iBooks available!”) will see a steady pack of would-be buyers and desperate service-seekers jamming Apple retail outlets; I figured that today was my best bet to get careful, patient attention from an Apple employee.

They confirmed what you and I already suspected: that either the DC connector or the power controller has gone bad. If it’s only the DC connector, we’re out of there relatively inexpensively. If it’s the power controller, well, it could be worse: It could be the power controller and the screen, one hinge, and the optical drive.

In the meantime, my ol’ trusty TiBook has stepped off the bench and is filling in for its younger, more robust compatriot. It doesn’t recognize my hard drive at work, though it does recognize my home back-up drive. Its own optical drive seems moody or dysfunctional. It has a slower processor and half as much RAM, and I haven’t upgraded its OS or added the Pages application in which I did most of my word processing for the past year. And I’m not even going to try to install World of Warcraft on this unit; sorry, Joi, but I’ll join in as soon as I can.

But I’ll tell you — those three extra inches of screen size sure look great. The Microsofties who showed that the biggest productivity boost you can give your system is more screen area were definitely onto something. I’m looking at 15″ PowerBooks with lust in my heart.

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