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).

Comments

friendly memories of my powerbook

[darkonc]

The mac was the original Plug and Play box. I started with a PB140 which I later sold and replaced with a 165... The 165 served me well. I carried it almost everywhere and essentially beat it to death in the space of about 3 years. I'm impressed that it survived the beatings that I subjected it to.

Taking about 3 seconds to go from sleep mode to active was one of the best features... That's part of the reason why I carried it everywhere. It was my 6 pound palm pilot. It was my address book my notepad and my communication system.

After the powerbook died, I ended up with windows laptops that I got from work. They were nowhere near as carefree to use as my powerbook Even with a processor 10 times as fast, it still took more than 5 times as long to come out of sleep mode (presuming that it even survived being put to sleep, but that's another story). In the time it took my (1999) thinkpad to wake up, I could wake my (1993) powerbook, take a quick note, and put it back to sleep. It's usability wasn't really replicated for me until I got a Palm Pilot (interestingly enough -- also a 68000 family processor).

My powerbook was also very stable... The only recurring problem I had was putting it to sleep with Microsoft word in the foreground (Microsoft strikes again). I quickly learned to simply not do that.

A shelf-full of 'Books

[C A S S I E L]

Since laptops depreciate in value so quickly, there's no point in selling them on. Accordingly, I have a shelf of old PowerBooks. I first bought a PB140 early in 1992 (for around $4000 here in the UK), primarily as a realtime MIDI processing engine for electronic composition. There was a known problem with the serial port hardware rendering the MIDI support buggy, but I was assured that Apple were "working on a fix."

Apple never delivered this fix (partly because Apple Corps. forced them to drop MIDI driver development), but by this time it became known that the PowerBook 100 would work fine for MIDI (different hardware design), and could also be fitted with a second serial port, making it the most MIDI-capable PowerBook around.

(Let us pause to remember the Outbound Portable, a third-party Mac laptop with a Mac Plus ROM and a funny rolling trackbar, predating the Apple machines by at least a year. At one stage Outbound were very interested in tackling the professional music market because their machine could do MIDI and the 140/170 could not; but the company folded soon after.)

I spent a while doing electronic music gigs with the PB100 and PB140 running in parallel, Opcode having fudged round the MIDI problems in the 140. I even had the 140 upgraded with a 170 processor board for higher speed. (I never wanted a 170; too many people were screaming at Apple over broken pixels in the active-matrix screen.)

It was a while before I moved on, buying a 520 Blackbird sometime around 1997 - my MIDI processing needs were growing, and I needed that 68040 performance! Greyscale was cool, too. Having to tighten the display hinges every six months was a small price to pay. But by this time, more and more Mac software required colour, and neither my SE/30 nor any of my three PowerBooks delivered it, so early in 2000 I bought a 540c for around $200, and I still use it for legacy MIDI applications (mostly those with copy-protection which can't be moved).

I was finally forced into the PowerPC world by a need to do realtime audio synthesis for the Frankfurt Ballett; at this stage the TiBook G4 had just come out, so I went straight to eBay and nailed a Pismo G3, deciding to let other Apple customers beta-test the TiBook hardware. I use the Pismo and 540c in tandem; the 100, 140 and 520 are mostly gathering dust but also serve as backup machines. The batteries in the 100 and 140 are dead; those in the 520 and 540c are dying.

Of course, the PPC PowerBook is pretty much part of the uniform for electronic sound and media performance. Our Frankfurt team has one each (a Wallstreet, a Lombard and a Pismo), and a recent arts/software conference at the Royal Opera House looked like an Apple product placement: a 50-50 mix of G3's and G4's. Almost all electronic music gigs will have a G3 or G4 onstage somewhere (listen out for those reboot chimes during the set...); Wallstreets are popular because they have serial ports, which still beat USB for MIDI applications.

I still have a soft spot for the 140. Ergonomically it comes out pretty much on top: the ruby-mount trackball beats any touchpad, and the machine itself is built like a tank: it was happy being strapped into a flightcase with piano wire for live gigs. But the Pismo (with an external Logitech Marble Mouse) is cool as well, especially since MacOS 9.1 is remarkably free from clutter and feature-creep compared to System 7.

My next PowerBook will probably be a second-hand G5 (the transparent one that glows in the dark).

Re:open-schmopen

[bowb]

That's what standards are for, such as CHRP and PPCP.

Apple couldn't compete with the clone makers who were releasing cheaper and superior hardware -- that's why the clones were killed.

Apple may have made the right business decision at the time; they were in bad shape and might not have survived. It's a pity though, I know I'd be using a PPC machine today (with a licensed copy of MacOS), instead of an Athlon machine, if they hadn't been killed.

And to think...

[Voidhobo]

...that I drooled over the PB 100 when it first came out... funny. I still drool at the PBs, and I just might laugh at that in another ten years.

I just don't understand why they were called PowerBooks back when they still ran with m68k processors and not the 601 etc. PowerPC processors...

This is worth a look-see for sure... pre-PB Macportables. Who'd've thought...

Many PowerBooks, happy birthday!

[i1984]

Apple's PowerBooks have been (for the most part) excellent computers from day one. They've typically been sturdy, generally comparable in speed to desktop Mac's of the same era, have great screens, are reliable, and have forced few tradeoffs versus desktops. These days they're hardly more expensive than desktop Macs, once you consider the cost of the built in LCD, and leave few reasons (other than slots) to buy a desktop Mac. Now with the new iBooks they're even affordable!

That's not to say there weren't problems. I was working as a service technician when the 5300 series machines were released. We literally had people bringing the computers to us in bags to keep all the parts together...it really was ugly. More people swore to me that they'd never buy another Mac again because of their experience with PowerBook 5300 than because of anything else Apple ever did -- except for maybe some of the Performas...

The first time I used wireless ethernet was on a PowerBook back in 1995 or 1996. The device had an enormous Motorola 68040 processor in it, the same processor as in the PowerBook it was connected to.

Here are my nominations for notable PowerBooks:

Best Screens: PowerBook 170 (incredible 1-bit active matrix display -- yeah, only 1-bit but it was still incredible.) PowerBook G4 for its ultrathin widescreen.

Best Performance: PowerBook G4, PowerBook G3 series, and PowerBook 3400c/240. The G4 and G3 paralleled performance of the reigning Mac desktops when they were released. The 3400 had a fast processor, but also had fast video for the first time in a PowerBook.

Best Size: iBook, Duo series. The first of the Duo series weighed just 4.2 pounds back in 1994(?).

Best Battery: PowerBook 170. You could turn off the backlight and run the thing literally all day.

Most Versatile: PowerBook G3 series. They had expansion bays, PC card slots with CardBus, SCSI, serial, infrared, stereo sound in/out, VGA out, analog video out, serial, built in microphone, ADB, ethernet, upgradeable processor, two RAM slots, built in modem, optional DVD, and even third party PCI expansion chassis. Later models switched to FireWire and USB over SCSI serial and ADB.

Worst PowerBook Ever: 5300 series. Parts (including the entire screen) would snap off randomly, numerous other hardware defects, slow, prone to crashing, no ethernet, spartan set of features, and expensive at any price! I think thousands of them were finally just ground up -- they were sent back to Apple and never reappeared.

Heaviest PowerBook: Macintosh Portable. Yeah, I know it's not a PowerBook, but it was so heavy I have to include it somewhere. It used enormous lead acid batteries! It also had funky rhombal shaped 3MB memory upgrade cards.

Best PowerBook ever: ??? suggestions ???

I've owned at least the following PowerBooks over the years: 140, (three) 170s, (three) Duo 210, Duo 2300, (two) 165c,(two) 180c, 520c, (two) G3 Wallstreet, 3400/240, iBook 2001 -- but I could be forgetting a few. The 170s and G3s were my favorites.

It's been a fascinating ten years.

The new device

[PatSmarty]

I know this is a little offtopic, but other big news are: Today, Apple will bring out a new device that is not a Mac and that it calls "ground-braking". Every Mac Newssite is talking about it: MacOSRumors, Go2Mac, MacEdition, MacNN.

I would be very interested what Slashdot readers' guesses would be what it is.

Outbound Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

The Powerbook wasn't the first Mac OS laptop to feature an incredible design. Take a look at this machine

Well, most of the time.

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

I'm reading plenty of people bashing the 5300, and rightfully so. But, IMHO, Apple also blew it with the initial release of the 1400.

When the 1400 first hit the streets I was working selling Macs, and many shoppers had lost faith in Apple products after the 5300 and the release of the monstrosity that was MacOS 7.5 ("An error of Type 11 has just occurred. Please reboot, scream, and curl up under your desk in the fetal position"). The place I worked in sold both WinTel and Mac products, and the Mac area was and still is a major portion of the store and does brisk business. But it made being a "Fruit Head" that much harder when you had a new version of the OS that sucked, and laptops that were rumored to catch fire (though I never actually saw that one had burst into flames, I do remember seeing one seriously melted on the bottom of the case).

Yes, the 1400 looked great, it was light (compared to the 5300) and it had a newer 603e chip. But there was short supply, and they shipped with comparatively little as far as hardware and software. I mean, lets face it, even back then shipping a laptop with only 8 megabytes of RAM was a mistake. Also, I don't think it was wise of Apple to have one model which shipped without the level 2 cache (1400cs). What I saw happening was people simply buying the lesser expensive model (I don't remember the exact MSRP but it was sub US$2000) not understanding what an L2 Cache would do for them as far as performance, and then getting fed up with it and returning it for a WinTel model. As a matter of fact, there was a major sale made in which a large Vulture Capitalist firm had purchased 60 or so 1400cs's from some on line vendor, found them to be painfully slow and crashed often (MacOS 7.5.3, I believe... also painful) and returned the lot. They then came into our store and bought all we had of a WinTel model.

Apple lost quite a bit of the mobile computing market with the 5300 series, sure, and it has come a long way. But I don't think the 1400 series helped.

[additional: Yes yes yes, I know it was upgradable and I know it could even be upped to a G3 :-) But while it was new, all that wasn't exactly advertised by Apple and most consumers didn't know all that.]

Powerbook staple- amazingly useful Location Manger

[call -151]

I must say I am amazed that the unbelievably useful "Location Manager" which has been around for years on MacOS hasn't been more widely adopted in other operating systems. For those not familiar with LM, it is a way of changing wholesale system preferences (notably TCP/IP) so you have have your "home" location, "office" , "travelling", "Stanford DHCP", whatever, so wherever you are, it quickly puts the appropriately-remembered IP info into use. Maybe it is buried in Windows somewhere, but I know too many people who use Windows who type in their IP address, DNS servers, etc by hand when they are visiting another building or whatnot for it to be in common use. Under Linux, there is some facility under netcfg to remember different locations but it is primitive compared to what has been in MacOS since 7.something. And the OS X implementation "Network" system info panel is a nice evolution of the location manager. I've been using LM on Powerbooks since my Duo 230 (which was a long time ago) and can't imagine life without it- I think I got up to more than 35 locations on my original Powerbook G3.

and most of them . . .

[hawk]

are still running. Can you get one? No. Most of us thaat own them put them in the "cold, dead fingers" category.

Occasionally I still pull it out. Iteven still has a couple of files I need (Including the recipe for the best stout I've ever tasted [and the same goes for the judges at that contest :)]). It's reliable, it's fixable, and it runs forever. If only I could get the power socket to stay soldered into the board, I'd use it more often . . .

hawk

It's worth noting...

[oranjdisc]

According to the latest sales figures from Apple (released in their quarterly financial results last week) notebook sales now represent close to 40% of their hardware sales. Think about that -- 40% -- that's a BIG chunk compared to what it was just a few years ago. There are lots of laptops out there, but only one PowerBook -- I can't count how many times I see people with old, beat up PowerBooks in cafes, parks, etc. People love those machines, and with good reason. I recently picked up a dual-usb iBook, and couldn't be more pleased. It's one hell of a fun machine. I loaded up 10.1, PHP, MySQL, and use it as a test / play machine for my web development work. And when I'm not using it, my wife is playing M.A.M.E. Ahhh.... the bliss. :)

Re:open-schmopen

[MaxVlast]

There was a lot more to it. Apple expected that the clone makers would bolster the low end (where Apple had had trouble for years.) Instead, the clones occupied the space that Apple intended to keep for itself, and hardware sales suffered. Remember -- Apple is a hardware company. It has cool software, but that's there to see the hardware.

And, IMO, the only clone maker that was successful (Power Computing) produced the most uninteresting, lackluster product possible. It's products were the most generic possible approach to Macintosh hardware, and the price benefit was minimal. There were some cool clones (the Daystar 4 processor job and the Radius VideoVision workstation come to mind), but they were expensive, and not enough to carry day.

If I was getting a low end Mac, I'd rather have an iMac or a new iBook than a beige steel box with a generic PC monitor sitting on top (as used by the Power Computing boxes).