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Patina – a pleasing surface sheen on something that develops with age or frequent handling. After two years of daily use, a vast number of emails, an uncountable number of keystrokes, a dozen product brochures and one new website, my G4 Powerbook has retired. So what was it like living and working with one of the sleekest machines on the planet? Was it a tempestuous spiteful relationship, or a marriage made in heaven? How did the laptop stand up to extended use, which included being transported on a daily basis in a tankbag on my Honda VFR800? There are a couple of scratches on the top of the lid, near the front edge, where the platinum paint has acquired a sheen from the wear of fingers pressing the open latch. There is a dent in the surface from something I dropped on it months and months ago, a few more scratches, even the crisp white Apple logo is looking worn. The clip that keeps the lid shut still firmly keeps the lid in the closed position. The external edges of the hinges on the back have lost their paint but the flap that covers the ports located on the rear is still in place.

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The weak point has been the base. The front left corner doesn’t clip in to position properly which has caused some problems with the battery falling out if the machine is nudged just so. This caused a major problem with files being corrupted by the sudden lack of power – fortunately the brilliant Disk Warrior sorted what Norton couldn’t and amazingly no data was lost.

The screen has been very good, though the display is not as sharp as modern ones. There are faint regular horizontal and vertical lines on the surface of the screen – the outline of the keys from the keyboard. The track pad has a shiny centre, the wrist rests have obvious signs of wear and a small pad on the right has all but disappeared from constant abrasion with my right hand.

The keyboard is one of the best I have every used on any computer and I prefer it to the aluminium style keys on my new machine. Occasionally on the old keyboard even my blunt well-bitten fingertips would catch under a key and lift it off the mountings. They would easily clip back into place with no long term damage. Although the keys show classic signs of use, the letters are still highly visible, still white against an almost black background.

For some reason the laptop acquired an electronic “twitch”. Something, possibly the read write heads, goes “ch-chh” more or less every second, almost like a little digital heart beat, always constant, never stressed. I don’t know why this happens, but it doesn’t seem to have affected the performance of the machine.

The 60Gb disk, seemingly unfillable, wasn’t big enough to handle video editing using Final Cut Express, but the external Firewire disk drives from LaCie did just fine. Integration with the whacky world of Microsoft proved…OK. Using Outlook under System 9 email ticked along just fine when connected to the corporate email servers. But when I upgraded to OSX email lost its smoothness. Outlook hasn’t been, and from what I can gather won’t be, developed for OSX and Entourage just doesn’t cut the mustard. I don’t know why Microsoft adopts such an odd approach to the Mac platform, other than a rather cynical view that perhaps, if they make connectivity between Macs and PCs tricky enough folk will give up and go buy a Wintel box. No chance.

On the conference circuit, Powerpoint didn’t crash once. The large 15” screen gave me some bragging rights, some even thought it was the 17” monster. On the other hand most conference podiums are barely big enough for a standard laptop plus printed speaker notes and sometimes it was a bit of a hassle getting both the Apple laptop and notes onto the same space.

So, 2 years of solid reliable service and a demonstrable track record of productivity. Not bad for a laptop. So why did I upgrade to a new machine? It was triggered by a wobble with email. Not sure what happened, but I lost all Sent mail from my desktop. Now that I am self-employed and rely on my laptop for income, I felt that this was a warning. I also required a DVD burner, which my previous laptop didn’t have. My old laptop is used as a backup for work and as a wireless print server in my WIFI’d house. I stream BBC Radio 4 to it.

The new 1.25Mhx machine is astonishingly fast. It opens Word from scratch in about the same time my previous machine would open a document from the dock. I love the keyboard that illuminates, not that I’ll need that facility but for the time being no Wintel machine can do this. The Expose facility is just sublime. But the new style laptops are not quite as cool looking as the original TiBooks, they somehow seem more bulky and more platsicky. Maybe in 2 years time I’ll write another retrospective on this machine, so new it still has the “new computer” smell. And there isn’t a scratch on it yet.