I finally succumbed to tempation and have ordered a 15" 1.25Ghz Aluminum PowerBook, which comes with all the cool goodies. I bought it from us1camera.com, at a very good price.

Months of lusting after MB's 550mhz TiBook led me to start shopping for a good deal on eBay for a latest-generation 1.0Ghz TiBook, but I got very frustrated with what I considered a pattern of too-high bidding for these outdated (but still beautiful) machines. I mean, some of them were going for money that would buy a brand new 1Ghz AlBook.

I briefly pondered buying the 1.0Ghz machine from the Apple Store, but realized that I'd have to do a number of expensive upgrades immediately to make it truly useable. After upgrades, the price didn't sound so great. Then I found a great deal on the 1.25Ghz model at us1camera.com, via pricegrabber.com. The price there was around what I'd pay for an upgraded 1Ghz model, so I bit.

The question now is, what to do with my 900mhz iBook? It's a great machine - it runs cool, is very compact, and is relatively indestructable. I'm considering taking it to my new job (more on that in an upcoming post) to use as my main development machine. It would be really cool to use OS X as my day-to-day development platform. We'll see...

Update

After four days of checking the order status at us1camera.com, and not seeing the status change from "your order is being processed", I called them. I learned that the PowerBooks were backordered 7-10 days, and was offered the chance to cancel. I didn't cancel right away, but shopped around until I could find another similar deal from a company that had the machines in stock. I ended up ordering from CTI International who had a bottom-line price of about $60 more -- and they had the PowerBook in stock, ready to ship.