The world's first 17-inch notebook

The next big thing from Apple: The new 17-inch PowerBook G4. Featuring the largest, most spectacular display ever to grace a portable, miraculously engineered into a 1-inch-thin notebook that’s ultralight (just 6.8 pounds), ultradesirable ”€ and starts at $3299.

Megawide 17-inch display
It’s the first thing you’ll notice about the world’s first notebook computer with a 17-inch display, the largest ever in a notebook. When open, it’s vast. This PowerBook’s breathtaking display offers the same viewing area as a 19-inch CRT monitor. You’ll love the amount of information you can see on the screen at one time. It supports a resolution of 1440-by-900 pixels ”€ an eye-popping 1.3 million pixels appearing on the screen simultaneously, with room aplenty for your menus, toolbars and palettes.

Futuristic backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor
Another first from Apple featured on the new 17-inch PowerBook G4: a unique fiber optic backlit keyboard with laser-etched keys that’s right out of the future. A light sensor automatically adjusts the keyboard and screen brightness based on the available ambient light. In low light, for example, the PowerBook G4 automatically lowers its display backlight and turns on the backlit keyboard. Then light-emitting fiber optic strands located under the keyboard come to life and illuminate the backlit keyboard so you can continue to work, unaffected by the change in ambient light.

The legendary SuperDrive
Your PowerBook G4 with SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) comes loaded with iDVD software, and can be used to burn DVDs which can be played in most consumer DVD players. The SuperDrive also lets you use iTunes to burn your own music CDs, and the Disc Burner feature in Mac OS X to burn data CDs. The SuperDrive reads DVD titles at 6x, and writes to 4.7-gigabyte DVD-R discs at 1x.

Fast FireWire 800
With more than 30 times the bandwidth of the popular USB peripheral standard, FireWire 400 has become the gold standard for high-speed data transfer. And now Apple has upped the ante yet again, effectively doubling data throughput with FireWire 800 . The new 17-inch PowerBook G4 has two FireWire ports ”€ one for the hundreds of FireWire 400 peripherals already available, and the other for the coming generation of FireWire 800 peripherals.

54Mbps AirPort Extreme ”€ up to 5 times faster
The new 17-inch PowerBook G4 features the hot new 802.11g AirPort Extreme technology ”€ at 54Mbps, the fastest wireless connection available on a Mac. The 17-inch PowerBook G4 comes with AirPort Extreme installed. And since AirPort Extreme is backward-compatible with 802.11b networks ”€ and with thousands of wireless “hot spots” in hotels, airport lounges, coffee shops and bookstores around the world ”€ you’ll be able to use your PowerBook G4 to get online from practically anywhere.

Sync with Bluetooth
Bluetooth is built-in to the new 17-inch PowerBook G4 model. Like AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth connects digital devices wirelessly. Operating within a much shorter range than AirPort, it enables high-speed wireless data transfers between a rapidly growing list of Bluetooth-savvy products. Using iSync, for instance, you can use Bluetooth to synchronize your personal information between your PowerBook, your mobile phone and your Palm OS-based handheld. And Bluetooth lets you take advantage of GPRS connectivity to check your email from anywhere ”€ a benefit that comes in handy on those occasions when a 802.11 wireless hotspot isn’t available.

Leading-edge industrial design
You’ll love the high-resolution 17.1-inch TFT XGA active-matrix display with brilliant 1440-by-900-pixel resolution. And you’ll marvel at the way we’ve fitted this supersharp display into such a remarkably small frame ”€ just 15.4 inches wide, 10.2 inches deep, 1.0 inches thin and weighing a mere 6.4 pounds. Housed in a lightweight and durable aluminum alloy enclosure, the new 17-inch PowerBook G4 is resistant to stains and scratches. It also features an all-new, drop-dead gorgeous design ”€ perfectly smooth on all surfaces, with no doors, protruding latches or levers to break, no external buttons to accidentally press, and no sharp edges to catch on your clothing.

High-speed architecture
The 1GHz processor on the 17-inch PowerBook G4 gives a tremendous performance boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput. The 17-inch PowerBook G4 features 256K backside level 2 cache and 1MB of L3 cache. Accessing data from main memory is significantly faster than accessing data from the hard drive, but L3 cache ”€ which boosts processor function by providing phenomenally fast access to data and application software code ”€ gives this PowerBook G4 an even faster level of memory. The 17-inch PowerBook G4 comes with 512MB of DDR SDRAM. And that’s expandable to 1GB of RAM ”€ allowing you to run several RAM-hungry applications simultaneously, or to store an entire graphics project in main memory for fast image manipulations.

Lightning-fast graphics
The new 17-inch PowerBook G4 ships with the NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go graphics processor with 64MB of DDR SDRAM. Kicking 3D graphics performance into overdrive with hardware transform and lighting (T&L) and an advanced ultra efficient memory architecture (Lightspeed Memory Architecture II), the NVIDIA GeForce4 delivers a dynamic, visually rich, real-time 3D graphics experience.

Choose from three ultrafast models: small, medium or epic
Starting from just $1799, the new PowerBook gives you supercomputing power in a choice of three ultrafast portables. They range from a 12-inch model ”€ the smallest, most affordable PowerBook G4 ever ”€ to the 15-inch Titanium beauty, and the world’s first 17-inch notebook computer. So you can be as effective on the road as you are at your desk ”€ accomplishing everything from rendering huge image files to crunching digital video ”€ faster than ever before.