Last night, I went off to NH and finally took the plunge.  I bought a 12" Powerbook at the Apple Store there.  I was waffling when I got there, and found out that my chosen Powerbook configuration was not in stock...  but that they did have the previous generation, which is like this generation, but with a smaller hard drive (only 60G) and slower processor (1.33GHz instead of 1.5).  For $200 cheaper.  This still had me waffling, until they pointed out they also had the demo model of the previous generation.  For an additional $200 discount.

So I bought, what else could I do?

It turns out that 256M is woefully inadequate for a Macintosh computer.  But I knew that already, and have plans to upgrade to 1.25G already underway.

Naming the thing is going to be interesting.  I usually use sci fi starship names, avoiding extremely mainstream ones like Enterprise and Galactica...  I've had Roanoke (one of the EA destroyers from B5), Serenity, Heart-of-Gold, Bistromath, Morningstar and Synchronicity (two ships I captained in various role-playing games)...  I'm thinking of naming it after the ship that is the centerpiece of the sci-fi tabletop game I'm thinking of running.

But that would be a spoiler.