flexible plastic pipes + metal frame = super cool seating

The change from the much loved PowerBook, that many of us mobile Mac heads have lived with and loved for many years now, to 'MacBook Pro' has been making lots of noise in the Apple community in the last few weeks. Stumbling across the news that Apple would be naming their notebooks to 'MacBook Pro' as I was scouring the rumor site the night before the 2006 Macworld Keynote I immediately dismissed the name as an intentional leak by apple, to keep the real name a secret for just a few hours more. MacBook Pro just seems so week, and out of place. The last time I remember feeling like this was back when the iPod was released. "It's a chunky MP3 player with a huge wheel on it." I thought to myself, quickly followed by "I guess Apple really is going to die".

"We're kind of done with Power" is not something you would naturally hear coming out of our favorite Power Loving CEOs mouth. Many think that it is a reference to ditching PowerPC CPUs, and it seems to make sense until you think back to the 68K powered PowerBook 100. Power was not a reference to the CPU inside, like Steve led us to believe, more of a stattement about the user, and probably why we like it so much.

What ever Steve/Apple had in their minds when choosing the name MacBook Pro like the iPod, it may catch on after time, and it might not seem so bad after putting it all in perspective. We have five PPC Mac Product lines, PowerMac, PowerBook, iMac, iBook and Mac mini. And we have iMac and MacBook Pro Intel Macs. So from that we can fill in the blanks:

PowerMac = Mac Pro?

PowerBook = MacBook Pro

iMac = iMac
iBook = iMacBook?

Mac mini = Mac mini?

Maybe we're not in for as much of a change as people had first thought. I'm sure Steve chose not to keep 'Power' partly because of the CPU change but also because fitting a 'Mac' into 'PowerBook' would have given us 'PowerMacBook'. Though maybe 'PowerMac book' would have been more appropriate.

Like the name or not, next time you are thinking you could do better than Steve at choosing a new brand for Apple products, just remember you didn't just sell your company to Disney for US$7 Billion.

The General