The PowerBook presenterades den 9 januari, 2001, på Macworld Expo i San Francisco. It's the smaller and lighter than any of the G3 PowerBooks that preceded it, measuring just 1" thick and weighing in at 5.3 pounds. Construction is titanium and carbon fiber, making for a very tough, very light computer.

In the field, its battery yields up to 5 hours of use. The DVD drive is built into the G4, not a drive bay module like recent PowerBooks had.

The "mega-wide" display shows 1152x768 pixels, which is enough to display two full pages, and measures about 12.6" wide and 8.4" high.