"MacBook"? "MacBook"?
So it's official. The PowerBook G4 is on the way out. Make way for the MacBook Pro.
[For the moment, I'll leave aside my disappointment at the lack of a built-in two-button mouse, which kind of throws a monkey wrench in my plan to switch to an Apple notebook and run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X.]
The "MacBook Pro"? It's hard to believe that Apple under Steve Jobs would actually name a product that. I can't even begin to imagine the brand equity they've built up in "PowerBook" (and will now lose), but that's not my real concern. At least to this English speaker, "PowerBook" is a wonderful wordmark, one that rolls off the tongue and sounds perfect as it does. "MacBook" is lame. It sounds like something a Chinese knockoff factory would call its PowerBook clone, a clumsy hunk of titanium-colored plastic running a cracked copy of OS X on Intel.