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).

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.

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