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This year marks the 10th anniversary of The Road Warrior. It's amazing how time flies, and there's a great deal of profundity in mid 19th-Century journalist and Le Figaro editor Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr's French language aphorism - "Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose" ("the more it changes, the more it's the same thing"). For example, in 1998 I was shopping somewhat casually for a new laptop, and in 2008 I'm also casually shopping for a new laptop, or in the present Apple-approved vernacular, "notebook."

In my second-ever The Road Warrior column, I reviewed the potential candidates for my next PowerBook moving up from the PowerBook 5200 I was then using. Reading back the column nearly 10 years later, I'm interested to note that I was right about the Lombard's debut (it arrived at the Worldwide Developer's Conference in 1999), but wrong about another speed bump for the WallStreet PDQ, whose spec. remained the same from the PDQ revamp in September, 1998 until the end of production. I eventually did buy a 233 MHz PDQ PowerBook, which I suppose is an example of what Karr was referencing, since I still have it and it still works fine.