By Walt Mossberg Apple has done it again. This time, the gem of a machine is the latest high-end Macintosh laptop, the Titanium PowerBook G4. There's also a very capable DVD drive, which grabs the disk and sucks it in, like a CD player in a car. The screen is perhaps the finest I've ever seen in a laptop, a huge 15.2 inches, measured diagonally, with rich, vivid color and crystal-clear text. There are ports for USB devices, for even faster FireWire devices and for Ethernet networking.
Battery life is much better than average.
Apple claims up to five hours. Based on my tests, you should be able to get around four hours, using energy-saving controls. And the price is pretty good. But these dry facts and figures don't begin to explain the appeal of this new PowerBook. What sets it apart are its looks and, especially, its dimensions.