So it’s official. I will be without a Mac OS machine for the foreseeable future. I don’t see much point in replacing the motherboard on the two year old TiBook when it will cost nearly as much as replacing the machine altogether. I have a Sony Windows XP laptop that I will have to make due with in the interim, and I hope to be able to afford a new Mac in the next few weeks at some point. It’s really a shame that they soldered the video chipset onto the mobo like they did, it makes something that should be a couple of hundred dollar part, at the most, a critical point of failure for the entire machine. The only saving grace is that I have been using the Windows laptop for work extensively the last few months, and that I lost no data from the TiBook, which is essentially an external firewire drive now. I think that I will be purchasing a 17 inch Powerbook when I do replace it. Despite it’s largish size, I think it is a much better fit for me than the 12 inch, I use my laptop primarily as a desktop replacement, rarely on my lap, or on planes. I’m not really travelling for work at all. There is a part of me that got burned with the first generation TiBook, its crappy slot loading drive, low video memory, and lack of an internal cd burner, that wants me to wait for the second generation 17 inch before making a purchase. The difficulty with that is that there is really no way to tell when that will be released. I don’t want to wait for MacWorld this summer, or even until WWDC, for another Powerbook. If you have the scoop on this, I’d love to hear about it.