PowerBook Buyer's Guide

Outbound 2030E

This rare notebook was Outbound's entrepreneurial response to the ill-designed Mac Portable. Outbound made an actual lightweight, notebook-sized, fully configured Mac when Apple couldn't, and stayed in the business, because their machine was a lot more powerful than the first PowerBooks.

The computer was sold factory-direct, at MacWorld, and was featured in the MacConnection mail order catalog.

Outbound got around copyright issues by buying used Mac Plus chassis and pulling out the ROM, then installing it with a much more powerful CPU. (System ran 6x faster than a Mac Classic.) As far as the software is concerned it's an _actual_ Mac, not some backward-engineered kludge. It's compatible with current '030 applications.

When the more powerful Powerbooks came out, Outbound's limited distribution started to hurt. The company went out of business in 1993.

Rating

At the time: B-

General

  • 68030 33MHz w/68881 FPU
  • Separate serial printer & modem ports, plus ADB
  • Standard 25-pin SCSI connector - no special adapter needed
  • Built-in 1.4m floppy drive
  • 14MB RAM
  • 120MB Hard Drive
  • Built-in trackbar pointing device
  • Included AC Adapter
  • Compatible with both System 6.x and 7.x"

Ports

  • ADB
  • 1 serial
  • 25-pin SCSI
  • internal modem

Display

  • Passive-matrix black and white
  • 9.5"
  • 640x480 resolution

Weight

  • 6.25 pounds

 



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