Well, shave an ape and call it Ballmer-- the kid was right! November 6th has come and gone, and as was widely anticipated, it left shiny new PowerBooks in its wake. That's not the groovy bit, though. The groovy bit, as faithful viewer Michael Brendler kindly pointed out, is that Apple's new top-of-the-line PowerBook indeed boasts an incredibly sexy slot-loading SuperDrive, just as our own six-month-old intern and goddess-in-training apparently predicted, when the general consensus among most rumormongers was that that particular feature just wasn't in the cards this time around. Moreover, Anya was mostly right about the new speeds, as well: she missed the low-end clock speed by a smidge (having predicted 800 MHz instead of the actual 867 MHz), but she was dead-on in guessing that the PowerBook would finally breach that tricky 1 GHz barrier. We're already planning the trip to Vegas; they let babies into casinos, don't they?

What's more, these new PowerBooks also sport some seriously scary graphics guts: how 'bout ATI's Mobility Radeon 9000 GPU? Oh yes, sports fans, this is the big time; the Gigahertz PowerBook has a fairly ridiculous pile of video RAM fully 64 MB high, and Apple claims it can pump out 76 frames per second when Quake 3 Arena is running at 1024x768 with 24-bit color. Just imagine the portable frags possible with this kind of circuitry. Oh, and it's, um, probably pretty good for... 3D science-type renderings of... say, did we mention the Quake frame rates?

Okay, fine, so the new PowerBooks don't have built-in BlueTooth, they don't have FireWire 2, they don't do laundry (at least, not well), and for some reason the hard drives are all 4200 RPM. But really, there isn't much to complain about with this release, and indeed most Mac fans appear to be mopping up drool at a prodigious pace. And by the way, the prices are nothing short of amazing, given all you get. An entry-level PowerBook is now just $2299, and it's 67 MHz faster than the previous high-end $3199 model for sale just days ago. Meanwhile, the new Big Kahuna of the PowerBook line rings in at $2999, which qualifies as a bona fide steal considering how much this sucker can do.

We expect video-type folks will be falling all over themselves to chuck three grand at Apple in exchange for a 5.4 pound video editing and DVD production station for the road. Seriously, armed with one of these puppies you could shoot footage on location, edit it in the field, burn dailies to DVD, and hand off the disks all before heading back to the hotel and using all your extra free time to get plastered via lots of teeny bottles from the minibar. Hollywood's gonna go nuts. Want another dose of perspective on the SuperDrive PowerBook's price? Consider that when the SuperDrive debuted less than two years ago, the only way to get one was to lay out $3499 for a 733 MHz Power Mac. Now, for $500 less, you can get a SuperDrive in a 1 GHz PowerBook instead.

And if Anya can count cards as well as she can predict PowerBook specs, with a little luck, we'll soon have the funds to buy a couple of these new PowerBooks ourselves. Never hit on 17!