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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."
I was at a conference, a week ago, where the presenters were using powerbooks. I think you can tell a lot about a product by how people use it. These things looked really smooth and after all my fits with a WinXP laptop, I desperately want one. Problem is we're a Windoze shop. :p
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Was the key to the strategy glancingly mentioned in the article as "...Sculley started a semiautonomous division to produce a successful portable computer"
It seems that big chunks of autonomy are necessary to developing really high quality products that are significantly different from the main corporate line. IIRC the IBM AS/400 line was the end result of a similar process: almost a separate computer company, it is said.
It would be interesting to test the hypothesis by comparing the failed development of the Apple Portable to the successful development of the Powerbook.
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I have an ancient powerbook 500, running an equally ancient build of debian. Its used as an nfs share and as an ssh frontend to a router's console port. It has an uptime measured in years. Luggable? ..sure, Undying? Oh yes.
Honestly, I still miss the trackballs of the 1xx Powerbooks, as well as the recessed trackballs of the Duos.
They had the best ergonomic experience of any laptop pointing devices ever. The size and mass of the ball, the position of the buttons...Just outstanding.
...They were shown in 1991 at WWDC. I was there.
The presentation was actually very well done, I thought--almost as good as a SteveNote. Back then, without Steve Jobs and his ego, essentially every group (desktop hardware, imaging, system software, etc.) gave a keynote on a different subject. Sculley gave the Monday keynote where he usually talked about the business side. Pretty boring stuff and Sculley wasn't that great a speaker anyway. Hell, even Bill Gates did a better presentation than Sculley (he was also there).
So we got this keynote from some VP of "Portable Computing." He started off talking about the Macintosh Portable and how they had finally identified the market for this device.
Cut to a shot of the space shuttle taking off.
Yup. The Macintosh Portable was the first personal computer in space (and I can hear the HP41c fans sharpening their knives). They showed it floating around the cabin of the shuttle, as light as a feather. They even showed something that everyone had wanted to see since the first Macintosh: A disk being ejected across the room.
Amusing.
The VP then showed off Apple Remote Access. One odd thing about his presentation, though, was that the computer he was using had no video-out. Thus, there was a guy standing behind him with a portable camera zoomed in on the screen. But if you paid attention--and I didn't until somebody mentioned it after the presentation--you could see the the edges around the screen were dark and a Macintosh Portable was sort of a light Macintosh SE grey. So ARA was being demoed on a PowerBook--we just couldn't see the whole thing.
Anyway, they were finally ready to unveil the replacement for the Macintosh Portable. They wheeled this table out onto the stage with a cloth covering a device. The VP whipped off the cloth to show us: A LaserWriter. Various chuckles from the audience. "Well, it's pretty portable..." the VP quipped as he tried to lift the LaserWriter (Apple LaserWriters weighed about 50 pounds). Suddenly, a disembodied voice from the booth called out: "Look in the paper tray." The VP reached into the paper tray and pulled out a PowerBook! And the audience went wild.
Definitely one of the better Apple presentations.
I've seen a lot of people with touchpad only laptops always carry around real mice because the touchpad just isn't suitable for anything more than a few seconds of use, but that really hurts the portability of the laptop. Then you need to carry the mouse with you and hope that you have a flat surface to use it on.
Nipple, snipple. I guess your a little offtopic because PowerBooks don't and never had nipples, but rather touchpads.
I'm typing this on a PowerBook right now. I'm lying on my couch on my back with the PowerBook on my groin area insulated by a blanky (plus its a little cold in my house). I'm using the touchpad now and well over 99% of the time that I use my PowerBook at home. The reason, portability. At work, I take my power cord, my computer, and my 3 button schroolwheel mouse and plug them all in.
I thought I would never say this, but I have gotten used to the one button thing on Macs. Why? Because there are so many click modifiers (shift, control, Command/Apple/or Meta if you prefer), that a second button (usually control) is only one of those, and hitting the control button is no different than hitting a second mouse button. I was helping a friend with a "PC" laptop with two buttons the other day on his touchpad, and I found it difficult to use. I guess I have been successfully brainwashed, but maybe my brain needed washing.
My biggest beef with a touchpad, is not general mousing around, its doing things like DND or selecting text or anything that is working with graphics like painting or drawing.
However, for general use like surfing the web, and doing general point and click things, a touchpad is fine. If I need more control, or am going to be using the mouse extensively, its very worthwhile to grab the mouse out of my bag and use it. Like I said, I rarely use it at home. I have only used it when working with X, because the 3 buttons come in handy there and for playing some silly flash game that was controlled with the mouse.