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."

Comments

The Story condensed

[Anonymous Coward]

PowerBook was born while on Safari. The child enjoyed sitting on Pa Apple's laptop, and had a run in with a Tiger at age X. Surviving a SCSI childhood in the mean streets of Motorola, PowerBook grew up to play with Firewire.

Just gotta say it

[ackthpt]

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

I think PowerBooks are pretty nice

[ReformedExCon]

I just wish they'd use a better screen. Comparing Mac laptops to Windows laptops is like night and day, literally. The Mac laptops have such dim screens compared to the laptops that are available for Windows.

I suppose it keeps the cost down, but if there is one area that really ought not be skimped on (especially for machines meant to be used by graphic designers), the LCD monitor is it, in my opinion.

Re:I think PowerBooks are pretty nice

[ocp]

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.

Re:I think PowerBooks are pretty nice

[Mattintosh]

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.

Autonomy Necessary for Creativity?

[rewinn]

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.

what a wordsmith

[JeffSh]

"After 1992 and until the disastrous 5300, Apple was the leading notebook maker."

Man this guy is really good at confusing things. He sounds like a political writer. It would have been easier to say "For 2 years, 1993 and 1994, until the Apple Powerbook 5300 was released, Apple was the leading seller of portable computers"

2 years? 2 years. Seriously. I had to do research to find that the powerbook 5300 was released in 1995. Taken at face value, without knowing what the 5300 is, someone could interpret Apple's position to actually have been "dominant", where it wasn't.

Gosh. 1992. Man. The internet was barely even around! that's like stonage.

Re:ah the original powerbook

[gatzke]

Found a link to that classic luggable Compaq, from back in the day when real men used laptops.

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/compaq /

It was smaller

[legomaniaboy]

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.

Re:It was smaller

[Mad Merlin]

The nipple is leaps and bounds better than a touchpad in actual use. I didn't use it at first, instead using the touchpad, but I find the nipple is just so much more accurate, and it doesn't require you to move your fingers from the keyboard like the touchpad does.

Furthermore, for extended mousing, there's nowhere for your wrist to rest when using the touchpad. I found this major flaw pretty quickly and started using my thumb on the touchpad, but the nipple just works much better.

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.

Like another posted already said, the nipple never gets in the way of typing, the touchpad on the other hand did. Often times you'd be typing and the palm of your hand would slip onto the touchpad and you'd highlight all of the text you've typed and before you can stop yourself, you'll hit another key, thus erasing it all, cursing, and hitting undo. It doesn't happen anymore, as I've trained myself to rest my palms further away from the touchpad, but it's very annoying at first.

For me, a laptop without a nipple would be rather worthless.

Re:It was smaller

[hackstraw]

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.

Trackball Position?

[evilviper]

The most striking difference between the PowerBooks and the PC portables was the presence of a built-in trackball and its position on the case. Other manufacturers included trackballs (or other pointing devices), but they were often placed in awkward positions.

I'll call BS on that!

I'll admit it is somewhat a matter of personal preference, but I liked having a trackball on the right-side of the unit much more than in the center of the unit. Being near the edge of the unit allows you to bend your hand around it, making it almost feel like a normal thumb-operated trackball.

The center-mounted trackball necessitated the same terrible hand contortions you're familiar with due to notebook touchpads. I can certainly imagine it was a real pain for left-handed users, but you can't always make everything ambidexterous, and comfortable.

I'd pay thousands of dollars if I could get a modern notebook with a fairly normal keyboard and side-mounted trackball, like I had on my old 20MHz Compaq notebook.

Sometimes progress, isn't... :-(

Re:Trackball Position?

[torpedobird]

...unless you were left handed

luggable and immortal too

[lightyear4]

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.

Re:For the sake of the discussion...

[Graymalkin]

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.

First Apple Portable--Not the Powerbook!!

[SierraPete]

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."

I Remember When These First Came Out...

[R3d M3rcury]

...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.