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Faithful readers will recall our recent somewhat skeptical report about the new Hitachi water-cooled laptops with a visible water tank on the back of the LCD screen. Yes, we're still shaking our heads about that one. But did you know that the PowerBook G3s have a little-known liquid cooling feature?

What happened was that a correspondent who knows about such things emailed us to report that the Hitachis are not the first laptops to employ liquid cooling. When we presented the evidence to colleague Charles Moore, who knows absolutely everything about Apple laptops, he said he doubted the veracity of this little-known engineering tidbit. Not any more.

It is definitely there: underneath the keyboard of the PowerBook G3, embedded within the left side of the large heatsink, is a small coolant-filled tube the thickness of a thin straw, pinched at both ends. Now for heaven's sake, don't go looking for it (yeah, right), and when you ignore this advice and do, don't go poking at it. The thing is maybe 5 inches long and cools via convection, no pumping involved as with the Hitachis. Another correspondent has advises that this may be what is referred to as a "heat pipe," which isn't really unusual at all. But our orginal tip on this describes an actual liquid-filled tube, unlike what you will see at the preceding link.

Haven't heard of those new Hitachi laptops blowing up like an old Mississippi River steamboat, have you? With water cooling already employed, we figure steam-powered hard drives are next.

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