To jump or not to jump? I'm really getting the third-year itch these days to upgrade to another computer. It's been nearly 27 months since I bought my current workhorse, which wasn't exactly state- of- the-art at the time of purchase, being a 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4 - a model that originally debuted in September, 2003. Mine was a pristine, evidently very lightly or even unused Apple Certified Refurbished unit, but already old technology at the beginning of the MacIntel era in early 2006.

I deliberately chose to go with one more Power PC Mac before making the Intel transfer, and I haven't regretted my decision. The 17-inch PowerBook has been a rock, completely dependable with zero reliability issues or downtime, and powerful enough to keep me reasonably happy, at least until recently. However, while it runs OS X 10.5 Leopard decently enough that I haven't seriously considered going back to OS 10.4 Tiger, which I easily could since I still have Tiger installed on a separate partition of my hard drive, the aging G4 does struggle a bit with Leopard, and some of the newer software that's been released recently is also taxing its capabilities - Photoshop elements 6 and the Bridge being good cases in point.

Then there's software that won't run on the PowerBook at all, like MacSpeech's Dictate. The proverbial writing on the wall is becoming clearer; it's time to get serious about upgrading to an Intel 'Book.

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