PowerBook

The PowerBook (known as Macintosh PowerBook before 1997) is a line of Macintosh laptop computers that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1991 to 2006. During its lifetime, the PowerBook went through several major revisions and redesigns, often being the first to incorporate features that would later become standard in competing laptops. The PowerBook line was targeted at the professional market, and received numerous awards, especially in the second half of its life, such as the 2001 Industrial Design Excellence Awards "Gold" status, and Engadget's 2005 "Laptop of the Year". In 1999, the line was supplemented by the consumer iBook range. The PowerBook and iBook lines were discontinued and replaced by the MacBook Pro and MacBook families respectively by 2006.

History

In September 1989, Apple Inc. released the Macintosh Portable, the first Macintosh computer intended to be easily portable. However, its price ($6500), size, and weight made actual portability difficult. Because of this, the demand for a true portable Macintosh was not met.

PowerBook 5300

The PowerBook 5300 series is the first generation of PowerBook laptops manufactured by Apple Computer to use the PowerPC processor. Released in August 1995, these PowerBooks were notable for being the first to feature hot-swappable expansion modules for a variety of different units such as ZIP drives; PC card slots as standard; and an infrared communication port. In common with most preceding Macintosh portables, SCSI, Serial, and ADB ports were available as standard. An internal expansion slot was also available for installing a variety of modules including Ethernet and video cards to drive a second monitor in mirroring or dual-screen modes.

Although a significant advance over preceding portable Macs, the PowerBook 5300 suffered from a number of design faults and manufacturing problems that have led to it being cited as among the worst Apple products of all time. Amongst other issues, it was one of the first laptops to suffer negative publicity from battery fires, and featured a hot-swappable drive bay with insufficient space for an internal CD-ROM drive.

PowerBook 190

The PowerBook 190 and its companion PowerBook 190cs are laptop computers manufactured by Apple Computer as part of their PowerBook brand, introduced to the market in August 1995. The two models differ only in their screen: The 190 had a 9.5" greyscale display, while the 190cs featured a 10.4" color display. Apple's target sales audience for this model was the college student in need of a no-frills portable computer. In terms of hardware, along with the PowerBook 150, the 190 has much in common with Apple's "professional" laptop of the same period, the PowerBook 5300 series. In exchange for the cheaper price point (approximately US$2200 compared to over US$6000 for the cutting-edge PowerBook 5300ce), the 190 was equipped with a passive matrix LCD rather than a crisper active matrix screen. More significantly, while the 5300s ran PowerPC 603e processors at 100 or 117 MHz, the 190 had only a Motorola 68LC040 clocked at 33 MHz - in fact, the 190s were the last Macintoshes to use a 68k CPU. However, Apple offered a PPC upgrade for the 190, a heavily marketed selling point for all new 68040 Macs at the time. In addition, a rather cramped 500 MB IDE hard drive was standard, and factory models shipped with System 7.5.2. It is the only one of the 100 series PowerBooks that does not use the original 140 case design, thus was the only one to include a 68040 processor, a trackpad rather than the standard trackball, and along with the 150 the only ones to provide for more than 14MB RAM expansion and larger, less-expensive IDE drives. The 190 was the de facto replacement for the PowerBook 500 series, which was completely discontinued with the introduction of the 5300 and the only 68040-based PowerBook Apple offered.