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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."
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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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.
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...
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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.
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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."
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...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.