Apple PowerBook - the laptops that started it all
25 years old turned Macintosh PowerBook - a series of first Apple laptops, which later evolved into almost perfect MacBook Pro with a touchbar . Banderolka recalls Apple’s first “true laptops”, which won popular love, provided crazy profits and 40% market share.
These devices from 1991 can still be found on the shelves of online auctions: the company has been making its products for centuries. At the beginning, almost no one believed in the PowerBook, it was released almost by accident, but suddenly laptops achieved tremendous popularity and, after a decade, gained cult status. In 2006, PC World called the representative of the PowerBook series “one of the ten best PCs of all time,” and in 2005, Mobile PC magazine decided that the PowerBook 100 was the best gadget ever on the market. TIME had a similar opinion in 2010.
All these flattering epithets of the PowerBook was not so easy. The series changed the world of laptops, just like the iPhone changed the world of mobile phones. Without it, our modern devices could look completely different. It was the first laptop with a keyboard near the screen, leaving an empty space in front of where the wrists could rest. He had a control element that served as a mouse next to two buttons: it had to be rotated to get to the right place on the screen. Buttons standing in the center, it was convenient to use and right-handers and left-handers. For the first time, to work with a professional computer, it was not necessary to pump up muscles - the device weighed a little more than two kilograms. For comparison: a modern MacBook Pro weighs 1.8 kilograms, while competitors, and Apple itself, portable computers at that time weighed 3-7 kg.
')
The guy collects the Powerbook 100, and it works great!
The appearance of a breakthrough PowerBook in 1991, few expected. Apple was not doing well: the company was losing its leadership position in Toshiba and Compaq. Macintosh Portable, from which, as they are now writing, the “era of portable poppies” began, appeared two years ago (in 1989) and was rapidly losing relevance with its 7 kilograms of iron inside for $ 6,500. At that time, competitors had quite acceptable 3 kg with a tail, these laptops could already be taken with them without unnecessary strain, and the “apple” product looked more like a desktop computer, and only desperate brave men dared to carry it.
Late 80s - early 90s: Compaq SLT / 286, Macintosh Portable and Toshiba T1200.
The end of the 80s - the beginning of the 90s - the dawn of laptop computers, their time is still ahead. The word “laptop” itself appeared in 1988 with the filing of PC Magazine, which for the first time in an article about NEC UltraLite called portable devices “laptop” (that is, their screen size could be compared with an A4 sheet). The first popular laptop appeared in the same 1988th. It was a Cambridge Z88. He was able to work with tables and texts, conduct a sample of databases, supported third-party programs. Only 6 years have passed since the appearance of the first portable computer at all - Nasa showed it in 1982 as a device for astronauts participating in the Space Shuttle program. This ancestor had inside 340 KB of RAM and a processor with a clock frequency of 8 MHz.
Video from the beginning of the 90s about the fact that computers in the 2000s can be worn on themselves - on the neck, on the shoulder or around the waist.
By the early 1990s, laptops were rapidly gaining popularity. To gain a foothold in the growing market, Apple needed to make a device that would cost several hundred dollars less and at the same time weighed a kilogram less than the Toshiba and Compaq machines. To solve the problem in the fall of 1990 a special division was created in the company. Engineers and designers began to work in conditions of a very limited budget and had to submit a completely new car in just a year - easier, thinner, more powerful. For help, they turned to Sony, which plunged into the project, canceling many of its other designs for the first PowerBook.
Divisions of the two companies in Japan and California were to create a prototype and set up production. Their engineers received a basic scheme, including appearance, architecture, a list of chips and other components. Sony had almost no experience in creating personal computers, but for 13 months, taking the Macintosh Portable as the basis, the Japanese made the smallest and lightest machine from Apple.
For the first time they tried to approach the appearance of computers from the side of actual design and fashion trends. According to Apple Branner, industrial design director at Apple, “the idea was to carry the PowerBook was as easy as a regular book.” The color of the device was to immediately highlight it among competitors on the store shelf. Therefore, for example, they refused white color: it looks good among office equipment in the office, but it is too badly combined with a stylish black jacket. As a result, we stopped at the characteristic granite color of the case.
One of the most valuable design solutions and an important advantage of the PowerBook was the built-in trackball, for which the Branner team was also responsible. At that time, laptops needed to be bought separately with additional manipulator devices - this required additional expenses and reduced mobility, requiring a separate place in the bags under the mouse with a heavy ball inside. Laptops looked even more ridiculous, yet equipped with this simple feature. They had a trackball in strange places: for example, Compaq placed it on the back of the monitor in order to move the pointer the user had to grab the display. Apple chose the simplest (but for some reason not the most obvious) solution by placing a pointer in front of the keyboard, in the middle of a large palm rest. Logical and convenient.
Apple was going to launch three first-generation powerbooks at once: a cheap PowerBook 100 and more expensive PowerBook 140, PowerBook 170 (with integrated floppy drives).
The youngest model in the series, the Apple PowerBook 100, was introduced in October 1991 at COMDEX. It had a nine-inch black and white display with a definition of 640x400 (84 ppi), a hard disk of 20-40 MB, an old Motorola Motorola 68HC000 16MHz processor and 2 MB of RAM. The screen is a passive matrix (by the way, very muddy and dark).
The main advantage of the laptop, of course, was the price - $ 2,500 (or $ 4,500 in 2016). By today's standards, the cost of a laptop seems transcendental, but in 1991 the novelty was the cheapest on the market.
The device did not have a built-in drive; without it, it was possible to make the PowerBook thinner and lighter. The PC weighed only 2.3 kg, was 28 cm deep, 22 cm high and 4.6 cm thick. The new PowerBook has turned out about one and a half times the size of a medium-sized book.
The device could play a sound (8-bit mono), was able to work with a modem, documents, graphics. It was possible to run Photoshop 1.0, chat on IRC. In some ways, he was even better than the last iPhone. For example, he had a mini headphone jack. :)
The younger model of the series supported the SCSI Disk mode. It could be connected with a special cable to the desktop "Macintosh" and used as an external disk of 20-40 MB. It was also possible to directly rewrite software, documents, databases. The models 140 and 170 did not have such a function, the data on them had to be transferred through external media.
The "guts" of the budget PowerBook 100 and top PowerBook 170.
Only one million dollars was spent on marketing the new PowerBook (for comparison: on Macintosh Classic, presented a year earlier, $ 25 million was allocated). Everyone thought that the product would not achieve much success, and at first they planned to sell no more than 200 thousand powerbooks of all modifications.
Basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appeared in the PowerBook 100 ad. With the growth of 218 cm, he sadly sat in the economy class of the aircraft, clamped on all sides. But the guy on his lap lay a powerbook on which he typed, and "at least his hands were comfortable."
Advertising of the first powerbook was shown “sightingly” at the most expensive time on American TV.
PC Week magazine then compared the PowerBook 100 with its predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. It turned out that it takes 5.3 seconds to open an MS Word file for a new device, and 2.5 seconds to save it. This is 0.1-0.2 seconds faster than before. The local lead-acid battery also lived for a long time by the standards of 1991: 3 hours and 45 minutes in normal operation. And most importantly, the model was three and a half times lighter than the Macintosh Portable, and almost in no way inferior to her!
In the very first year, Apple sold new devices worth a billion dollars. The first 100 thousand powerbooks bought up in three months. However, users soon began to neglect the model 100 and more and more actively bought models 140 and 170, because they immediately had a floppy disk drive, and by the younger model it had to be bought for $ 279. As a result, Apple even had to lower the price of the PowerBook 100 at the end of sales - to an indecent $ 1,000. Now this model is known, of course, much better than its older brothers.
At the end of the fiscal year, in September 1992, Apple announced the highest earnings since its inception. Thanks to the PowerBook, the company earned $ 7.1 billion. New items captured 40% of the market, pushing Toshiba and Compaq back. Top models had to wait for 6 months.
Another PowerBook ad.
The PowerBook 100 received a lot of awards for its “unique and effective” design: from the American Society of Industrial Designers (IDSA), the Association of American Producers, from the world's largest Hannover industrial exhibition in 1992, and others.
The competitors immediately began to copy the ideas embodied in the product - the trackball, keyboard layout, dimensions, price model - all the moves were recorded and spread. Just look at the IBM ThinkPad 300 that was released a year later (but conceptually outdated) in order to understand the device from which modern laptops grew.
The PowerBook 100 remained the most compact computer at Apple for ten years (up to the release of the Titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001), and the most popular portable computer was the PowerBook 150. This comrade appeared on the shelves in 1994 and became very popular among students and office workers . It had as many as 4 MB of RAM, 80, 120 or 250 MB hard drive, one serial port and a Motorola processor with a frequency of 33 MHz. Now, of course, any iPhone works several thousand times faster. But in those days, such characteristics in a device weighing 3 kilograms seemed very impressive.
The PowerBook 150 was with a two-color display, with a greenish tint, with a passive 4-bit matrix and a resolution of 640x480. They say Apple could have made it better, but decided to save money. Nevertheless, there are many PowerBook 150 laptops that work to this day, and they have absolutely no problems with the screen. Rather, the problem is the same: almost nothing can be seen on it, and working with a laptop will not work, because it accepts information only on 1.44 "-diskettes.
Under the keyboard, in place of the current touchpad, there was another sign of its time - the same trackball ball with a pair of mouse buttons. The PowerBook 150 was Apple's latest device with this control method. At that time, the company just had the PowerBook 500 and the PowerBook 190 with the world's first trackpads, but the users didn’t really try out these new products, the company was not sure that they would take root, and it was expensive to make these “flat trackballs”.
The PowerBook 150 was notable for its affordability and low price ($ 1,450 - $ 1,600), however, the less popularity passed already in 1996. Toshiba's powerful devices were involved in the race, the price of Apple laptops dropped to $ 900, and in the 2000s these cars could be bought for nothing, almost at the price of plastic. Now powerbooks are only rising in price: people buy them because of nostalgia, to organize an exhibition at the office in order to replenish a collection of rare things.
On Ebay, a well-preserved PowerBook 150 gives $ 500 or more . It turns out, by the way, a very real investment, albeit partly risky. Americans are actively using this method of investing money and quickly buying up old-school equipment. According to them, the model will definitely not be cheaper, given the cult status of all Apple products.
The historic PowerBook series suffered a Jobs return and lived for more than 15 years. The baton in 2006, she took the MacBook. The design of the models on the MacBook followed the same concepts, but instead of PowerPC chips, there were Intel x86 processors inside. By that time many competitors had already switched to them, but this did not prevent the first MacBook from becoming the best-selling Apple laptop in America again.
Get a PowerBook 150 and leave it to the grandchildren to help him Bandera . Any sellers with Ebay deliver to our warehouse in Berlin or Delaware (and in most cases such delivery will cost less than to Russia). We securely pack all customer purchases, collect prefabricated parcels from several orders and from different stores, and then send them to your home. Your rare laptop with a parcel will arrive in one piece!
These devices from 1991 can still be found on the shelves of online auctions: the company has been making its products for centuries. At the beginning, almost no one believed in the PowerBook, it was released almost by accident, but suddenly laptops achieved tremendous popularity and, after a decade, gained cult status. In 2006, PC World called the representative of the PowerBook series “one of the ten best PCs of all time,” and in 2005, Mobile PC magazine decided that the PowerBook 100 was the best gadget ever on the market. TIME had a similar opinion in 2010.
All these flattering epithets of the PowerBook was not so easy. The series changed the world of laptops, just like the iPhone changed the world of mobile phones. Without it, our modern devices could look completely different. It was the first laptop with a keyboard near the screen, leaving an empty space in front of where the wrists could rest. He had a control element that served as a mouse next to two buttons: it had to be rotated to get to the right place on the screen. Buttons standing in the center, it was convenient to use and right-handers and left-handers. For the first time, to work with a professional computer, it was not necessary to pump up muscles - the device weighed a little more than two kilograms. For comparison: a modern MacBook Pro weighs 1.8 kilograms, while competitors, and Apple itself, portable computers at that time weighed 3-7 kg.
')
The guy collects the Powerbook 100, and it works great!
Prehistoric period
The appearance of a breakthrough PowerBook in 1991, few expected. Apple was not doing well: the company was losing its leadership position in Toshiba and Compaq. Macintosh Portable, from which, as they are now writing, the “era of portable poppies” began, appeared two years ago (in 1989) and was rapidly losing relevance with its 7 kilograms of iron inside for $ 6,500. At that time, competitors had quite acceptable 3 kg with a tail, these laptops could already be taken with them without unnecessary strain, and the “apple” product looked more like a desktop computer, and only desperate brave men dared to carry it.
Late 80s - early 90s: Compaq SLT / 286, Macintosh Portable and Toshiba T1200.
The end of the 80s - the beginning of the 90s - the dawn of laptop computers, their time is still ahead. The word “laptop” itself appeared in 1988 with the filing of PC Magazine, which for the first time in an article about NEC UltraLite called portable devices “laptop” (that is, their screen size could be compared with an A4 sheet). The first popular laptop appeared in the same 1988th. It was a Cambridge Z88. He was able to work with tables and texts, conduct a sample of databases, supported third-party programs. Only 6 years have passed since the appearance of the first portable computer at all - Nasa showed it in 1982 as a device for astronauts participating in the Space Shuttle program. This ancestor had inside 340 KB of RAM and a processor with a clock frequency of 8 MHz.
In 1988, PC Magazine for the first time called a computer device a “laptop,” comparing it with an A4 sheet.
Video from the beginning of the 90s about the fact that computers in the 2000s can be worn on themselves - on the neck, on the shoulder or around the waist.
Together - we are force!
By the early 1990s, laptops were rapidly gaining popularity. To gain a foothold in the growing market, Apple needed to make a device that would cost several hundred dollars less and at the same time weighed a kilogram less than the Toshiba and Compaq machines. To solve the problem in the fall of 1990 a special division was created in the company. Engineers and designers began to work in conditions of a very limited budget and had to submit a completely new car in just a year - easier, thinner, more powerful. For help, they turned to Sony, which plunged into the project, canceling many of its other designs for the first PowerBook.
Divisions of the two companies in Japan and California were to create a prototype and set up production. Their engineers received a basic scheme, including appearance, architecture, a list of chips and other components. Sony had almost no experience in creating personal computers, but for 13 months, taking the Macintosh Portable as the basis, the Japanese made the smallest and lightest machine from Apple.
A bit larger book
For the first time they tried to approach the appearance of computers from the side of actual design and fashion trends. According to Apple Branner, industrial design director at Apple, “the idea was to carry the PowerBook was as easy as a regular book.” The color of the device was to immediately highlight it among competitors on the store shelf. Therefore, for example, they refused white color: it looks good among office equipment in the office, but it is too badly combined with a stylish black jacket. As a result, we stopped at the characteristic granite color of the case.
“The device that you carry with you is sure to report something about you. It's like your personal accessory, like a wallet or briefcase. ” Robert brunner
One of the most valuable design solutions and an important advantage of the PowerBook was the built-in trackball, for which the Branner team was also responsible. At that time, laptops needed to be bought separately with additional manipulator devices - this required additional expenses and reduced mobility, requiring a separate place in the bags under the mouse with a heavy ball inside. Laptops looked even more ridiculous, yet equipped with this simple feature. They had a trackball in strange places: for example, Compaq placed it on the back of the monitor in order to move the pointer the user had to grab the display. Apple chose the simplest (but for some reason not the most obvious) solution by placing a pointer in front of the keyboard, in the middle of a large palm rest. Logical and convenient.
New hero
Apple was going to launch three first-generation powerbooks at once: a cheap PowerBook 100 and more expensive PowerBook 140, PowerBook 170 (with integrated floppy drives).
The youngest model in the series, the Apple PowerBook 100, was introduced in October 1991 at COMDEX. It had a nine-inch black and white display with a definition of 640x400 (84 ppi), a hard disk of 20-40 MB, an old Motorola Motorola 68HC000 16MHz processor and 2 MB of RAM. The screen is a passive matrix (by the way, very muddy and dark).
The main advantage of the laptop, of course, was the price - $ 2,500 (or $ 4,500 in 2016). By today's standards, the cost of a laptop seems transcendental, but in 1991 the novelty was the cheapest on the market.
The device did not have a built-in drive; without it, it was possible to make the PowerBook thinner and lighter. The PC weighed only 2.3 kg, was 28 cm deep, 22 cm high and 4.6 cm thick. The new PowerBook has turned out about one and a half times the size of a medium-sized book.
The device could play a sound (8-bit mono), was able to work with a modem, documents, graphics. It was possible to run Photoshop 1.0, chat on IRC. In some ways, he was even better than the last iPhone. For example, he had a mini headphone jack. :)
The younger model of the series supported the SCSI Disk mode. It could be connected with a special cable to the desktop "Macintosh" and used as an external disk of 20-40 MB. It was also possible to directly rewrite software, documents, databases. The models 140 and 170 did not have such a function, the data on them had to be transferred through external media.
The "guts" of the budget PowerBook 100 and top PowerBook 170.Resounding success
Only one million dollars was spent on marketing the new PowerBook (for comparison: on Macintosh Classic, presented a year earlier, $ 25 million was allocated). Everyone thought that the product would not achieve much success, and at first they planned to sell no more than 200 thousand powerbooks of all modifications.
Basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appeared in the PowerBook 100 ad. With the growth of 218 cm, he sadly sat in the economy class of the aircraft, clamped on all sides. But the guy on his lap lay a powerbook on which he typed, and "at least his hands were comfortable."
Advertising of the first powerbook was shown “sightingly” at the most expensive time on American TV.
PC Week magazine then compared the PowerBook 100 with its predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. It turned out that it takes 5.3 seconds to open an MS Word file for a new device, and 2.5 seconds to save it. This is 0.1-0.2 seconds faster than before. The local lead-acid battery also lived for a long time by the standards of 1991: 3 hours and 45 minutes in normal operation. And most importantly, the model was three and a half times lighter than the Macintosh Portable, and almost in no way inferior to her!
In the very first year, Apple sold new devices worth a billion dollars. The first 100 thousand powerbooks bought up in three months. However, users soon began to neglect the model 100 and more and more actively bought models 140 and 170, because they immediately had a floppy disk drive, and by the younger model it had to be bought for $ 279. As a result, Apple even had to lower the price of the PowerBook 100 at the end of sales - to an indecent $ 1,000. Now this model is known, of course, much better than its older brothers.
At the end of the fiscal year, in September 1992, Apple announced the highest earnings since its inception. Thanks to the PowerBook, the company earned $ 7.1 billion. New items captured 40% of the market, pushing Toshiba and Compaq back. Top models had to wait for 6 months.
Another PowerBook ad.
For 25 years, technology has gone far into space: the first PowerBook took 1 year to solve the same computational problem, which takes 5 seconds for the new MacBook Pro.
Senior comrades, sons and grandchildren
The PowerBook 100 received a lot of awards for its “unique and effective” design: from the American Society of Industrial Designers (IDSA), the Association of American Producers, from the world's largest Hannover industrial exhibition in 1992, and others.
The competitors immediately began to copy the ideas embodied in the product - the trackball, keyboard layout, dimensions, price model - all the moves were recorded and spread. Just look at the IBM ThinkPad 300 that was released a year later (but conceptually outdated) in order to understand the device from which modern laptops grew.
The PowerBook 100 remained the most compact computer at Apple for ten years (up to the release of the Titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001), and the most popular portable computer was the PowerBook 150. This comrade appeared on the shelves in 1994 and became very popular among students and office workers . It had as many as 4 MB of RAM, 80, 120 or 250 MB hard drive, one serial port and a Motorola processor with a frequency of 33 MHz. Now, of course, any iPhone works several thousand times faster. But in those days, such characteristics in a device weighing 3 kilograms seemed very impressive.
The PowerBook 150 was with a two-color display, with a greenish tint, with a passive 4-bit matrix and a resolution of 640x480. They say Apple could have made it better, but decided to save money. Nevertheless, there are many PowerBook 150 laptops that work to this day, and they have absolutely no problems with the screen. Rather, the problem is the same: almost nothing can be seen on it, and working with a laptop will not work, because it accepts information only on 1.44 "-diskettes.
Under the keyboard, in place of the current touchpad, there was another sign of its time - the same trackball ball with a pair of mouse buttons. The PowerBook 150 was Apple's latest device with this control method. At that time, the company just had the PowerBook 500 and the PowerBook 190 with the world's first trackpads, but the users didn’t really try out these new products, the company was not sure that they would take root, and it was expensive to make these “flat trackballs”.
On Ebay, a well-preserved PowerBook 150 gives $ 500 or more . It turns out, by the way, a very real investment, albeit partly risky. Americans are actively using this method of investing money and quickly buying up old-school equipment. According to them, the model will definitely not be cheaper, given the cult status of all Apple products.
The historic PowerBook series suffered a Jobs return and lived for more than 15 years. The baton in 2006, she took the MacBook. The design of the models on the MacBook followed the same concepts, but instead of PowerPC chips, there were Intel x86 processors inside. By that time many competitors had already switched to them, but this did not prevent the first MacBook from becoming the best-selling Apple laptop in America again.
Get a PowerBook 150 and leave it to the grandchildren to help him Bandera . Any sellers with Ebay deliver to our warehouse in Berlin or Delaware (and in most cases such delivery will cost less than to Russia). We securely pack all customer purchases, collect prefabricated parcels from several orders and from different stores, and then send them to your home. Your rare laptop with a parcel will arrive in one piece!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/400649/
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