The 2005 Powerbooks have an accelerometer chip to take measurements of the laptops’ motion (e.g. during falls, etc.)

Bubblegym 0.1

This is a tilt-sensitive game which uses the accelerometer in the new Powerbooks!

via Joel’s blog

The real purpose of said chip is:

Apple’s PowerBook laptops now have a little accelerometer inside that’s used to protect the hard drive if you drop it (it notices the sudden speed increase and parks the drive heads).

However, is it just me, or can that chip also be a safety precaution for Apple – so that people can’t just claim warranties left and right. Sorta like the black boxes of aircrafts… to determine wether it was “mechanical problems” or “pilot error” hehehehe.

But then again, you can disable it if you wanted to:

$ pmset -g Active Profiles: Battery Power 1* AC Power 3 Currently in use: acwake 0 … ams 1 $ sudo pmset -a ams 0 $ pmset -g … ams 0

So I guess it’s a cool safe thing to have after all!