The Five Most Important Apple Laptops - A Contrarian View
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
Last Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the unveiling of the original Macintosh Portable, the machine that started this whole thing off.
The ancestor of the PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, the 16 lb. Mac Portable, introduced in 1989, was a less than stellar market success, doubtless because it was absurdly expensive at $6,500 ($7,300 with the optional hard drive), and weighed nearly as much as the 17 lb. CPU/monitor unit of the original compact desktop Macs.
Internally, the Mac Portable had a 16 MHz Motorola 6800 0 processor chip and a whopping 1 MB of RAM, expandable to 9 MB but unfortunately it in an oddball RAM module format.
The Mac Portable monitor screen was a very decent active matrix, 640 X 400, grayscale LCD, and there was also a video output port for running an external monitor. The battery it was a lead-acid unit, with a yet-to-be-matched five-to-10 hour charge life.
Included were an ADB port for keyboard and mouse, DIN-8 serial ports for printer an modem connections, and a DB-25 SCSI connector.
In February. 1991, Apple added a backlight to the 9.8” 1-bit 640x400 pixel active matrix screen, increased the standard RAM to 2 MB or 4 MB, changed the RAM ceiling to 8 MB, and replaced the expensive SRAM chips with less-expensive pseudo-SRAM, although the pseudo-SRAM and backlighting reduced battery life.
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The fascinating thing is that Apple was able to address the Portable’s weight and bulk shortcomings in an amazingly brief two years, replacing it with the five-pound Sony-built PowerBook 100, and the slightly larger and heftier PowerBooks 140, and 170 in October 1991, which really got things rolling.
Anyway, MacWorld magazine’s Benj Edwards this week posted his picks for the “Five Most Important Mac Laptops,” and with all due respect to Benj and full acknowledgment that making these kinds of lists is a subjective exercise, I have to disagree with some of his choices.
Now, it is very tough to pick the most important five machines from Apple’s extremely rich and eventful 20 years in the portable computer business (see full list at the end of this article). The last time I took a crack at it here, I had trouble limiting myself to just 13. However even with the arbitrary five computer restriction, I have to beg to disagree, not so much with the models Benj included, but more with what he decided to leave out If there were only going to be five.
The ‘Books on Benj’s list are: the MacBook Pro, iBook (original 1999 clamshell model), Power Book 520, the Titanium PowerBook G4, and the PowerBook 100.
Actually, three of these appeared in my 2008 13 Most Significant list, although nuanced slightly differently in some cases. I included the entire PowerBook 500 series, rather than limiting it to just the 520, and I specified the 15 inch MacBook Pro.
This exercise is also a moving target, and even a year and a bit later, I would probably revise my own choices slightly.
The one that I have yhe most problems with is the 2001 PowerBook G4. I understand why Benj included it. it was the first metal-skinned laptop that Apple unleashed. But in my opinion it was too flawed in terms of reliability (this improved gradually throughout its relatively long model run, and had been cleaned up to a considerable degree by the time the last iteration was introduced in the fall of 2002, but the problems with the early ones left a bad taste. A friend of mine who repairs and refurbishes Apple portables tells me that my gut impression is correct here. He has a boneyard full of TiBooks that are just too far gone to bother repairing.
So what would I suggest as a substitute? No hesitation on this one: absolutely the 2000 PowerBook G3 FireWire, AKA Pismo, which I still consider to be the best laptop Apple ever made. One fascinating thing is that the Pismo actually introduced, under the hood as it were, much of the engineering that was used in the TiBook — a UMA motherboard, “New World “ software architecture ROM, and built-in FireWire. In terms of motherboard architecture, the most substantial differences are that the Ti had a G4 CPU rather than a G3, and that it was soldered directly to the logic board rather than living on a removable processor daughtercard as it was in the Pismo. Indeed, you can solder a G4 chip into the Pismo’s daughtercard, and the old black machine will for all intents and purposes match the first and lower-end second-generation TiBook’s performance, and do so a lot more reliably.
I still have a G4 upgraded Pismo in daily service as my utility and road machine more than nine years after it was built in the spring of 2000, and it’s a remarkably good performer running Mac OS X. Tiger 10.4 .11. The Pismo’s removable device expansion bay made it easy to upgrade the machine’s optical drive to 8x dual-layer Superdrive status. My wife also still uses a G4 upgraded Pismo as her daily driver, and we expect to continue using these machines for another several years.
Now I won’t gainsay that there are probably lots of folks out there who have had satisfactory or even excellent service from their TiBooks, especially later models. I just don’t happen to know any. Everyone I know who ever had a TiBook had problems with it, some of them serious, and I don’t personally know anyone still using one. On the other hand, the old Pismos just go on and on.
To my way of thinking, anvil-like reliability trumps form factor paradigm-busting, so on my list of top five, the Pismo would be in and the TiBook out.
My other major point of dissonance with Benj’s picks is the PowerBook 100. Again, I can appreciate why he chose it; it launched the familiar basic laptop form factor that is still with us today, although if “first” was the primary criterion it would have to be the Mac Portable. But why just the 100? It was the lowest number in the PowerBook 100 series, but introduced simultaneously with the 140 and 170, so has to share the laurels for being first modern form factor PowerBook. On my 13 most significant list, I did include a 100 series representative, but chose rather the PowerBook 180c, which was the first really successful color screen Mac laptop. The earlier 165c was not really satisfactory, with screen color rendering that can only be described as “murky” and very brief runtime on battery power of often an hour or less. The PowerBook 180’s NiCad battery provided somewhere between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours of use, and its 68030/33 MHz Motorola processor with FPU gave it serious computing power in the context of the time. It supported a maximum 14 MB of RAM, and could drive an external color monitor through its video-out port.
Then there’s the PowerBook 500 series. I have mixed feelings about this one. It definitely merited inclusion in my 13 most significant ‘Books, but I’m not so sure about its legitimacy in a Five Most Important list. In its favor are that it was the first Mac portable with a trackpad, has stereo speakers, could be had with optional built-in Ethernet, and introduced the removable device expansion bay, which facilitated support for PCMCIA card expansion via the somewhat cumbersome kludge of an expansion bay cage. It was also arguably the first Mac laptop that could function as an “only” computer — a desktop replacement — and was very well-liked by owners and pretty dependable. One of my offspring had a PowerBook 520. A contrarian argument is that while the trackpad was a revolutionary innovation, expansion bays are gone, alas, for nearly ten years now.
For me, I think the MacBook Air probably deserves the spot in the top five most important, and I’m not even a particular MacBook Air fan. The Air broke a lot more new ground, and more dramatically so than the 500s ever did, being the thinnest, lightest Mac notebook ever, the first with a 1.8” hard drive or an optional solid state NAND flash drive, the first with a multi-touch TrackPad, and essentially a prototype unibody. The Air’s aluminum housing is a stamping and not carved using water jets from a single bilet of aluminum like the actual unibody MacBooks are, but it was the first ‘Book with a monocoque housing, and IMHO on a less-positive note but still very significant, the first without an easily swappable battery. Based on that constellation of innovations, the Air beats the PowerBook 500 by a wide margin.
On the MacBook Pro, last year I observed that the 15” model was the most significant, since it was the first-ever Mac (not just notebook) to ship with an Intel processor, and later the first Mac ‘Book ever to be equipped with a LED display backlight. the first to come with SATA hard drives, a built-in iSight camera, and Apple’s Mag-Safe AC power adapter connector. Unhappily, the early Core Duo MacBook Pros suffered from excessive hear generation, and the last two iterations shipped with faulty NVIDIA graphics processor units that fail so predictably that Apple has been obliged to implement an extended service replacement program aside from normal warranty and/or AppleCare coverage,
It was that issue which dissuaded mr from buying a remaindered old c=school MacBook Pro when the new unibodies debuted last October, Even with the 2 year additional extended service policy, there’s no guarantee that the replacement logic boards will not fail like the original ones were prone to do.
At the time I included the 15” MacBook Pro in my 13 Most Significant list, the unibody models had not yet been introduced, and I would want now to include them in my top five most important. My conviction is growing that the unibody MacBooks could become the ‘Books of the decade similarly to how the PowerBook Pismo was the ‘Book of the last decade, even though it arrived on the cusp of this one (technically, 2000 should be considered the last year of the 20th Century, and not the first of the 21st, since there is no Year Zero), but that’s another discussion. Hopefully the unibodies will prove robustly reliable enough to live up to my hopeful anticipation.
At this point I want to give the unibody machines (my personal fave being the 13” Pro) primacy among the MacBook Pro family, with honorable mention going to the 13” unibody MacBook as well.
The one selection upon which Benj Edwards and I are in accord with little qualification required is the clamshell iBook — the first “consumer” Mac laptop, and one of the most unique laptop computer designs ever with its colorful. two-toned livery and voluptuous case contours that also helped make it very strong. The clamshell iBook was the first laptop on the planet to ship built-in Airport 802.11b Wi-Fi support, the only Mac “Book to ever come with a carry handle. Not everyone liked the styling., but it certainly wasn’t boring, and still looks contemporary 10 years on. Other iBook distinctions included no doors covering the I/O ports (a motif that became universal on Apple laptops, but was departed from with with the MacBook Air), and its latchless spring loaded lid which presaged the unibodies’ more sophisticated magnetic closure latchless lids.
So in summary, my picks for the fIve Most Important Mac Laptops Ever are, in alphabetical order:
iBook (1999-2001 clamshell)
MacBook Air
MacBook Pro (especially unibody)
PowerBook 100 Series (ultimate being the PowerBook 180c)
PowerBook G3 20000 FireWire (Pismo)
Feel free to agree or disagree with my choices. There are plenty of alternatives on the following list.
Here are the candidates:
Mac Portable
PowerBook 100
PowerBook 100 series
140, 145, 145b, 150, 160, 165, 165c, 170, 180, 180c
PowerBook Duo (68030)
210, 230, 250, 270c.
PowerBook Duo (68LC040)
280, 280 C
PowerBook Duo (PowerPC)
2300 C
PowerBook 500 Series
520, 520c, 540, 540c, 550c
PowerBook 5300 series
5300, 5300cs, 5300c, 5300ce
PowerBook 190 Series
190, 190c
PowerBook 1400 series
1400cs, 1400c, (117 MHz, 133 MHz, 166 MHz)
PowerBook 3400 Series
3400c (180 MHz, 200 MHz, 240 MHz)
PowerBook 2400c (180 MHz, 240 MHz)
PowerBook G3 3500
PowerBook G3 Series
MainStreet 233 MHz (no cache)
WallStreet 250 MHz, 292 MHz (83 MHz system bus)
PDQ 233 MHz (512k cache), 266 MHz, 300 MHz (66 MHz system bus)
PowerBook G3 Series Bronze
Lombard 333 MHz, 400 MHz
iBook (clamshell)
300 MHz, SE 366 MHz, 366 MHz, SE 466 MHz
PowerBook a G3 Series FireWire
Pismo 400 MHz, 500 MHz
iBook G3 (dual USB)
500 MHz
iBook G3 (dual USB 12” and 14”)
600 MHz, 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz
PowerBook G4 Titanium
Mercury 400 MHz, 500 MHz; Onyx 550 MHz, 667 MHz; Ivory (DVI) 667 MHz, 800 MHz; GHz 867 MHz, 1 GHz
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 12”
867 MHz, 1 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1.5 GHz
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 17”
1 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1.5 GHz, 1.67 GHz
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 15”
1 GHz, 1.25 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1.5 GHz, 1,67 GHz
iBook and G4 (dual USB 12”)
900 MHz, 1 GHz, 1.2 GHz, 1.33 Ghz
iBook G4 (dual USB 14”)
933 MHz, 1 GHz, 1.2 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1.42 Ghz
MacBook Pro 15”
Core Duo 1.83 GHz 2.0 GHz, Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 2.16 Ghz, Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz, 2.33 Ghz ,Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa 2.2 GHz, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Penryn 2.4 GHz, 2.6 GHz
MacBook Pro 17”
Core Duo 2.16 GHz, Core 2 Duo 2.33 Ghz, Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa 2.4 GHz. Core 2 Duo Penryn 25. GHz ,2.6 GHz
MacBook
Core Duo 1.83 GHz 2.0 GHz, Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz, 2.0 Ghz, Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa 2.0 GHz, 2.2 GHz, Core 2 Duo Penryn 2.1 GHz, 2.4 GHz, 2.13 GHz
MacBook Air
Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz, 1.86 GHz
MacBook Pro UniiBody 13”
Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz, 2.4 GHz, 2.53 GHz
MacBook Pro UniiBody 15”
Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 2.53 GHz, 2.66 GHz, 2.8 GHz, 3.06 GHz
MacBook Pro UniiBody 17”
Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 2.53 GHz, 2.8 GHz. 3.06 GHz
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