The new Powerbook line was announced today. Not only did the G5 Powerbook fail to materialize (as most expected but hoped otherwise), but even the second-best Freescale dual-core–or even single-core–G4 chip didn’t show up. Instead, the new Powerbooks out are relatively unremarkable upgrades, up to barely 1.67 GHz over the prior 1.5 GHz. A minor speed bump, at best. One can easily understand now why they didn’t want to mention these at the MacWorld Expo.

There are some other upgrades, as if Apple knew the CPU bump would be disappointing and so wanted to cram in as many small improvements as they could: a larger hard drive (up to 100 GB, over the prior 80 GB, but still spinning at 5400 RPM), an 8x Superdrive (I presume the prior model was 4x), more RAM (though 512 MB should have been standard for a long time now), faster Bluetooth, optical audio I/O, a faster graphics chip, and a hard disk drive drop-protection system which will protect the hard drive from a head crash in case of a sudden jolt or impact. There is also a new trackpad scrolling feature and a brighter keyboard backlight. None of these is exactly enough to blow your socks off, even with the $100 to $200 price drop over before, though all of them combined might be enough to impress some buyers just enough. In fact, the low-end Powerbook is just barely better than the high-end iBook, which is priced $100 lower; if the Powerbook doesn’t surge forward sometime soon, Apple will have to slow down the iBooks just so they don’t start to outshine their older brothers.

The Powerbook is still an excellent machine, but it’s just not all that more spectacular than it was a few days ago. A better deal, but not close to being enough to make me drop at least two and a half grand to replace my current Titanium 800 MHz DVI model–especially when it is apparent that a much faster model, a significant upgrade, is just around the corner. Just how far around that corner is another question: will we have to wait another 8-9 months for the next line to come out, and will it be a G5, a dual-core G4, or yet another minor speed bump. Some model turnarounds have come as early as 6 months after the prior release; others have taken almost a year.

This is the hard part about deciding when to upgrade–you never know when the right time is. I got lucky when I bought my own machine almost three years ago; it is still quite serviceable, and will do very well until the next big jump.

But, dammit, you just want to buy a new one!