I accidentally ran over my PowerBook with my dad's SUV today.

It's not very often that someone gets to say that. But perhaps what's even more surprising is the fact that I'm writing this on that very same PowerBook. Hold a 12" PowerBook G4 and you can just tell it's sturdy. It's thin, but not flimsy, and the aircraft-grade aluminum case makes it feel like a lump of metal, rather than a sophisticated high-tech gadget.

But how durable is it, really? Well, it turns out it's sturdy enough to withstand 1100lb of pressure (assuming that pressure under a wheel is a quarter of the total weight) and survive more or less the same way it was before.
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A copy of the letter I sent to Apple:

September 5th, 2003

Dear Apple,

I have been a very satisfied Mac user for over 10 years. My first computer was a used Mac IIsi that I saved up for and bought when I was 13 (with some help from my parents) , and in the years since, I have had the pleasure of owning several different Macs. Even though your products tend to cost more initially than their PC counter-parts (if there is such thing), I have found the high level of reliability and overall quality to be worth the extra cost.

Having said that, I don't think I ever fully appreciated the level of engineering that goes into your products, until today.

Until, that is, I accidentally ran over my 12" PowerBook G4 with a 4500lb SUV.

And guess which computer I'm using to write this? You guessed it. The very same PowerBook that just several hours earlier withstood over 1100lb of weight. Sure, one corner's slightly crumpled, one USB port causes a freeze when a device is plugged in, and there are some horizontal bands of dead pixels in the LCD. But other than that, my PowerBook is perfectly usable.

Driving over my PowerBook with a car was a stupid and careless thing to do. But, had I settled with a lesser laptop, I would not only have my own stupidity and carelessness to regret, but also the loss of a perfectly good computer. As a starving student and aspiring Open Source developer, it's not very often that I can afford a new computer. But thanks to your wonderful engineers, I still have a functioning laptop.

In fact, I will be carrying my scarred, battle-tested, PowerBook with pride; knowing that it survived the kind of abuse very few of those "other" laptops could hope to survive.

Ryo Chijiiwa
Student, University of Chicago
Project Manager, IlohaMail.org

p.s. I have documented the whole thing on my weblog. Perhaps your engineers would like to see this too: http://blogs.iloha.net/ryochiji/entries/491.shtml