First on the 12″ PowerBook:(Subscription required)
The 12-inch PowerBook is one sweet little laptop. Sheathed in an aluminum case, it has the feel of a finely made camera. And it’s the smallest notebook I’ve tested that sports a full range of features, including one I’ve never seen on a compact laptop. Yet it’s significantly less expensive than some comparable Windows laptops.
This PowerBook is slightly smaller than Apple’s low-end laptop, the iBook, but is powered by the more potent G4 processor that drives the larger PowerBooks. Apple has omitted a few standard PowerBook features — including a special memory cache that speeds things up — to protect sales of the older PowerBooks. But in my tests, the little PowerBook felt speedy and sure on every task I threw at it.
Safari’s main goal was to be speedier than the Mac version of IE, and it is. In my tests of five popular Web sites, Safari beat the Microsoft browser in rendering a page every time, sometimes by seconds, other times by huge margins.