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Ten Years of Apple PowerBooks
ckd writes: "The PowerBook Zone has a short interview with Bruce Gee talking about the evolution of the PowerBook design since the first PowerBooks. (Bruce was the PowerBook Product Manager back then.) Hearken back to the days when 20MB was a good-sized drive in a portable machine! Yes, the PowerBook 100 was not the first 'portable Mac' -- but it was the first to bear the name PowerBook." And of all the (handful) of portables I've owned, I have to admit that I've had the fewest problems with and most affection for the PowerBooks (and now an iBook).
My first Mac at work was one of those PowerBook 100s. 8MB of RAM (huge at that time) and a 20MB hard drive. Tiny little black and white screen, sub-notebook size. The only thing that drove me nuts about it was that the trackball was get dirty and stick after awhile. That was back in 1992/1993 or so. Funny thing is that we recently sold off that PowerBook 100 and the thing was still working just fine.
A friend of mine used a PB100 until some month ago, when the hard disk started to fail. But even with such a slow processor, and few memory, it remained "usable" because she didn' make too much software upgrades (e.g., still using Word 4/5).
In fact, old software was less resource-hog, and thus you can have a good apparent performance even with clearly surpassed hardware. This is true mainly for Macintosh, as the operating system was nice and usable even more than ten years ago (no comparison with Win less than 95).
I had a couple of another extremely interesting Powerbooks: Duo 230 and 270c then upgraded to 2300. Very small, less than 2kg, really portable, I miss them even writing from my PB G3/500. Now only Sony is making a Vaio of such size (although the new iBook is sufficiently small).
My 0.02 euro...
Apple did right to kill the clone market since MacOS machines would be plagues by same non-compatibility and bad quality issues as the x86 world is today.
Macs just work and that's it. And if they don't you know who to blame - not the "it's the mobo, no the gfx card, no the ethernet card!" stuff you have with x86.
Open standards always win
That depends on the business you're in. Apple thought they were in the hardware business, so releasing specs would have been plain daft. Would Ferrari do better if they released the exact building specs of their cars? No. There'd be cheaper, identical machines. Had Apple realised they were actually in the software business, and had released the specs, then things would be very different. Not necessarily better tho'. (Apple vs PC would have been a hard fought war.. likely PC would have won.. Apples are nice due to the closed source GUI stuff, closed source compiler tools and so on..)
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I never thought I would be using Apple products this late in the game. It used to be overpriced and sometimes underpowered. It was a pain in the ass most times. But what it did it did well. I loved them, but it was hard to do. The company was run by both jagoffs and hippy jagoffs, and it seemed like all they were good for was creating great technology and never supporting it, backing it or implementing it to any practical degree (if you remember the features added and removed between system 7.1 and say... 8.1 you will know exactly what I am talking about) and everything was too expensive. Though since one of the hats I wore was the art/publishing director for a friend's wee company. I also always had at least one up and running.
Then I was gifted with a 500Mhz Ti PowerBook (long story, yes i am a lucky bastard)
Imagine my surprise that it's 2001 and I actually spending more time on my PowerBook then any of my other boxes, yes including my beloved Mandrake rocketbox which has all my terabytes (sarcasm) of of mp3s (and pr0n).
Out of the box since last May and running OS 9.1 this little gem had single handedly replaced the beige G3 I was running and I get to take it and work home with me. Yeah I wound up replacing some SCSI hardware with firewire, but it wasn't like I had huge raid cabinet running, just the odd scanner and oddball peripheri (anyone interested in a couple of SyQuest 44 and 88s?).
That alone is enough for me to give Apple the big nod. But ever since I installed OS 10.1 I have actually felt giddy about an OS in a way I have not felt since I first installed Red Hat on a whim back in 1995. I am having fun again... it is cool to hack on this little bastard. I really never messed with or concerned myself with BSD before, honestly, but shit it's like talking to a Canadian, it's not all that hard. I installed MySql today on it tonight, you wanna know why? Cause I could. I wanted to mess around with it on the train tomorrow. When was the last time you felt like that? I never feel that way with Linux anymore (it's just a good solid tool now, I take it for granted). I hardly ever boot the Win2K box, (I find it is more "secure" that way) unless I want to play Arcanum or something MS specific. But who needs games when you have grep?
This wee little PowerBook along with OS 10.1 really kicks my ass. Now I find myself doing the unthinkable and looking into G4 towers, but I think I am going to wait for the G5 since Apple seems to be pumping out new models every six to eight months. Get one of them DVD burners and transfer all my pr0n (I mean MP3s) off the drives.
How is it that the consumer continues to buy PCs ? I mean, when the US auto industry produced crap products it didn't take us long to switch to the superior Japanese product. And now the US auto manufactures have raised their game to compete.
So what is it that makes PCs so different ? I used to think it was the software, but Word and IE are available for Macs. There must be some other reason. I cannot for the life of me work out what that reason is.
The world would be a better place if we switched to macs (or even Linux at least that doesn't crash every five minutes like Windoze!)
I agree that apple should have open sourced the platform but the biggger success for them would have come if they had licensed (open source wasnt much of a movement in the mid 80's) the OS and ported it to the iBM - Apple even did this as a project (called Star Trek in fact) with IBM long before the disaster known as Taligent-Pink. Bill Gates himself begged the Apple Board to license the OS and open it up (yeah its hard to believe but true) and they ignored him and everyone else, and the final nail in the open source of mac hardware was made by none other than Jean Louis Gasse (he of Be fame).
this is all information in the many apple histories, the fact is that by the time apple could have grown by licensing the company had become a madhouse.
I have loved macs for years and wouold love a powerbook - i fondly remember my black monster ihad for work some 2 years ago - they have always made great gear.
Oh and the bit about MS and QDos is wrong - its an innacurate and aprocyphal bit of information that has made its way around the web for years - MS bought out a company called Seattle Computer Products (it was really a one man band) when IBM contracted them to provide a DOS - they paid $50,000 for it and employed the guy as well - they didn't buy exclusive rights - they bought the company thus they had all rights as anyone who buys a company does-MS has done enought factual things wong without making stuff up.
If you really want to find out the truth about this and much of the other incorrect crap on the web read a book or 2 - i may suggest Fire in the Valley as a start www.fireinthevalley.com - considered the best history of Silicon Valley
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Had Apple realised they were actually in the software business...
Guess what? Apple isn't in the hardware or software business. They are in the business of making computers, which means the whole deal: CPU, cases, operating system, applications, etc. In order to make all of the parts work nicely together, you have to have a very strict interface between all of the components. The PC world has a fairly loose interface between all components and look at all the problems that arise... buggy drivers, operating systems that don't take advantage of new hardware features, etc. If Apple were to open up their specs to the clone makers you would get the same types of problems: crappy hardware or buggy drivers bring down the rest of the system, sleep mode doesn't work half the time. If Apple's hardware was more "open" then we would still be using serial ports and configuring COM/IRQ settings for every device (but not more than two!) that we hooked up to it. Thanks to the Apple and their "whole computer" philosophy, we now have USB and tons of USB devices which are truly plug-and-play.
One of the biggest benefits of Apple computers is that everything fits together perfectly and provides a very functional computer. All system configuration is in one place, sleep mode works perfectly, wireless ethernet is built-in, etc.
Using a Mac (at least one of the more recent ones) is like owning a BMW rather than a home-made frankenstein car. With the frankenstein car the engine(CPU), body(computer), and dashboard(OS) are all created by different companies and none of them fit very well with the other. The engine has extra features that aren't used or enabled by the rest of the car. The dashboard has buttons that don't do anything because that feature isn't supported by the engine yet. Meanwhile, the whole frankenstein car looks like crap compared to the BMW because everything is cobbled together with whatever parts they had lying around.