Slashdot Mirror
How the PowerBook was Born
Sabah Arif writes "Apple had no presence in the portables market prior to 1992. Its attempt at creating a laptop Macintosh, the Macintosh Portable, weighed almost 15 lbs and failed to sell. On the personal behest of John Sculley, Apple contracted with Sony to create Asahi, a smaller Portable. Apple developed two high end models in company. After 1992 and until the disastrous 5300, Apple was the leading notebook maker."
...also affectionately referred to as the luggable
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
The latest 15" and 17" Powerbooks supposedly use a brighter screen and are offered in higher resolutions than previous models.
My current issue with Powerbooks is that they are still hobbled with a very slow front side bus, about a third that of a Pentium-M, with a much smaller cache to boot, 512k vs 1 or 2megs. I don't know how fast the bus on the Turion64 is, but I think those might be faster still.
See, the original PowerBook was smaller than the competing portables. It set the standard for what a good notebook is. People liked the size and weight. Now most people are buying these big computers again. It's stupid! I'd much rather have my 12 inch iBook. If you want a big computer with more power, get a desktop for less that would have much better specs. One of the new G5 iMacs would be an excellent choice! It's dumb how so many companies are un-protablizing their notebooks. Come on, get back to what a notebook computers should really be like, because bigger isn't always better.
Powerbooks adjust the brightness of the screen to the available light in the user's environment. The screen can be quite dim in a poorly lit room, which results in less fatigue and less stress on your eyes when you look somewhere else besides the screen (your eyes do not need to adjust back and forth to the different lighting levels).
At least for me, brighter is not better. I have both types of laptops at home (private and work), and once you get used to the automatic dimming of the powerbook, the windows one feels like working with a desk lamp lighting directly onto your face.
The Powerbook 5300 was the first model of Powerbook released with a PowerPC processor. Up until then the Powerbooks had used 68k chips that Classic Macs used (Macs before the PowerMac line). They were very powerful laptops but also pretty expensive, the fully loaded 5300ce 32/1.1GB model sold for $6,800. There's a lot of factors that contributed to the "disaster" moniker. The first was that a number of units shipped were simply DOA and had to be swapped out. There were also problems with the case and mouse button, problems shared with the Powerbook 190 which was the 5300's 68k powered sibling.
There were also qute a few problems with the 5300's Li-ion batteries. Due to Sony's manufacturing error the batteries would short and there were a couple reports of them actually catching on fire. Switching the Li-ion batteries out for NiMH ones solved the problem but seriously reduced the 5300's battery life. This was coupled with power supplies that couldn't power all of the expansion bays was quite a mess.
Performance wise the 5300 was very unimpressive. It used a 603e PowerPC chip but they didn't bother sticking an L2 cache on the machine. The clock speed wuld have been alright with a decent sized L2 cache but as it stood the machine was dog slow in most apps.
The Powerbook 5300 was responsible for many of the Apple build quality memes of the mid-90s.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Asahi being the Powerbook 100. It came out in October, 1991. I remember many people having Powerbooks (100,140,170) at that time.
So Apple had part of 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, and even a lot of 1995 because the 5300 didn't come out until August and people didn't realize the PB5300 sucked immediately.
That's enough time that the way the writer described it is reasonable. It's about 1/3rd of the total time that laptops have even existed.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I know I'm immediately showing my age here, but Apple's first portable computer was not the Powerbook. It was the Apple //c (circa 1983), complete with an 80 column LCD monitor, a battery pack. Reference at http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/appleiic/
.
Popular? No. It was too expensive, the LCD screen was poor, battery life was awful, and regular visits with a chiropractor for the battery pack were not out the question. But it was the first Apple "laptop."
Starting next week, all passwords will be entered in Morse code
That has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the target market of the Macintosh.
See this link for more information, but the basic gist of it is this:
- Sun and PC (read: "Windows") don't gamma-correct anything going to the display. The average graphics card/driver end up with a gamma factor of about 2.0 or 2.1, though.
- The Mac has a standard correction factor of 1.8 due to hardware and display driver output. The reasoning for this is that it supposedly gives better color accuracy for print output. Being a complete know-nothing about graphics, I can't vouch for this.
- SGI's are similar to the Mac, but use a different correction factor. (The link says 2.4. I'll take their word for it.)
The result is that the screen on a Mac looks darker when uncorrected.
Either that, or you're just looking at someone's screen in power-save mode. Auto-dim is how Apple achieves those "amazing" battery life numbers. Remember, kids, Powerbooks are made in the same factories as Vaios and Inspirons. They're just made to Apple's spec instead of Sony's or Dell's.