Meeting the miniBook

There have been a number of reports that the 12" PowerBook is now available at the Apple Store. I meant to call today to confirm that the Lenox Square store has them, but at midafternoon, my cell phone rang. It was a friend standing in front of the miniBook display at Lenox.

The friend has gone through 2 TiBooks, a 500-mhz and a 1-Ghz, and was pretty impressed by the mini. My understanding is that the Build-to-Order models (with the SuperDrive, extra memory, and/or the larger hard drive) will take a while to filter into the pipeline.

When I was checking out prices at the Apple Store onlince, I spec'ed a SuperDrive model with base RAM and hard drive, since I remembered that Apple has traditionally made the upgrades a pricey option. At some point, they've changed that. The upgrade from a 40-gig to a 60-gig hard drive is a $50 option, for instance. Switching a 128-meg DIMM for a 512-meg, bringing the miniBook to 640 megs, is a $150 option, while Crucial wants $203 for the 512 DIMM.

So, tomorrow, I'm headed off to the Apple Store to get my claws on the new keyboard, see how hot the little sucker runs, and see when I could get a build-to-order model through the Apple Store. I'll be taking along my digicam, so I'll post some pictures tomorrow night.

On a related note, I found a miniBook photo gallery linked from MacSurfer.