I’ve never made a secret of not liking the ‘MacBook Pro’ name. PowerBook just had a better ring to it. It said ‘This is a powerful machine, in book form’. And the ‘Power’ part never had anything to do with the PowerPC: they were called PowerBooks even when motorola m68k chips still made them spin.

So now that I have one, how am I going to get around this? The answer is quite simple. You see, the G3, G4 and G5 don’t really exist. They’re just marketing-friendly names for the PowerPC 750, 74xx and 970 respectively. The G standing for ‘Generation’ and the number having an obvious use in that classification.

So I want you to meet Portia, my Macintosh PowerBook G6:

Portia

She has a 2.0GHz G6 (Also known as Intel Core Duo) processor, with 2 gigs of memory and an 80 gig hard drive. And so far she’s been wonderful.