A PowerBook Retrospective, Part 2 – From 68K to PowerPC

(For part 1 of this series, click here)
Rolling on from the success of the first batch of PowerBooks, Apple released not only new models, such as the PowerBook 180c (the first to have an active matrix colour display), but also a whole new line of sub-notebooks, the Duos, in 1992. These were more than simply scaled-down PowerBooks. Plugged into any one of a range of devices called Docks the Duo instantly became the heart of a desktop computer system. The Dock connected the Duo to the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, as well as any network connections or printers. In effect, the Duo delivered what Apple called the best of both worlds: the mobility of a laptop coupled with the versatility of a desktop. In its most perfect form, the Duo would mechanically be pulled into the desktop computer-sized Duo Dock like a tape cassette into a video recorder, and be ejected in the same, very satisfying way. While a wonder to look at and fun to use, the Duos did not sell especially well, most probably because a complete system worked out to be rather expensive. Many Duo owners simply used them as lightweight alternatives to the regular PowerBooks, either instead of, or as well as, a desktop Mac.

Stealth PowerBooks: the legendary PowerBook 500
Released at about the same time as the first PowerPC desktop computers, the PowerBook 500 series was intended to do nothing more than fill in the year or so between the last of the generation of models in the PowerBook 100 series and the first of the PowerPC PowerBooks. As such, its design didn’t need to have any of the flexibility of most other Apple computers since the machine wasn’t the start of an ongoing series of designs. This gave the engineers much more freedom to experiment than usual, and the result was one of the most iconic Macs ever made.

Fashioned in a darker shade of grey than previous PowerBooks, and featuring a design almost completely devoid or right angles, these computers were quickly dubbed “Blackbirds” after the stealthy spy planes then in service with the US Air Force. The 500s were the first Macs to benefit from computer-aided design, a process that allowed the use of curves where previous Macs had straight edges and corners. Drawing these curves on paper is one thing, but translating them into a three-dimensional model that can be used in the manufacturing stage of the process is something else. Apple’s gradual mastery of CAD in the context of designing computers didn’t seem much at the time, but in hindsight, having these skills and being able to design and build machines like the G3 iMac was obviously a key factor behind its resurgence during the late 1990s.

The PowerBook 5300 fiasco
Even as Apple was cramming high-performance Motorola 68040 processors into the PowerBooks 500s and the later Duos, the engineers knew that the future lay with a new processor, the PowerPC. This was just as profound a change as the ongoing one taking the Mac from PowerPC to Intel, and in some ways was caused for the same basic reasons: development of the 68K processors wasn’t keep pace with the competition. Windows PCs running Intel processors were steadily overtaking the Mac in terms of speed, and Apple hoped that the PowerPC would meet the challenge from Intel’s new P5 (or Pentium) processor head on.

Given that Apple is now phasing out PowerPC chips in favour of Intel ones, one might ask why they didn’t switch from the Motorola processors to the Intel ones straight away. At the time, Apple, and the other PowerPC advocates, Motorola and IBM, believed that over the long term, the simpler and more efficient design of the PowerPC processor would win the day. Smaller chips are cheaper to make and easier to design around, and because they produce less heat, they can be run at high speeds with fewer problems. This is one reason they are so popular with game console manufacturers; the XBox 360 and the Nintendo Gamecube, for example, both use PowerPC processors.

The first of the PowerPC PowerBooks was the PowerBook 5300 series. Often remembered as being among the worst Macs ever made, this dubious appellation is only somewhat justified. In some ways, they were very innovative machines. They were offered with a full variety of screen types, from a 9.5″, greyscale, passive matrix screen through to a 10.4″, full colour, active matrix one. Removing the floppy drive module revealed an expansion bay into which other types of drive could be installed. These modules were hot swappable, meaning that there was no need to shut the computer down to change this modules. While this is taken for granted with today’s USB and FireWire devices, compared with the external drives and devices using the SCSI connection, which demanded that the machine was powered down before a SCSI device was installed or removed, this was revolutionary. These PowerBooks came with yet another neat expansion option, a PC card slot, allowing users to install all kinds of third party devices, such as modems and Ethernet cards.

On the hand though, there were a number of serious mistakes made in the design that turned the 5300 into a highly compromised machine. To get the 5300 as small as possible, the designers eschewed a full-size expansion bay big enough for a CD drive and went with a smaller design only really useful for hard drives and floppy drives. The motherboard didn’t include a Level-2 cache, hamstringing the performance of the 603e chip and making these PowerBooks much slower than their 100 MHz+ processor speeds would suggest. The PowerBook 5300 series was unlucky as well. Its release coincided with the launch of System 7.5, an update to the Mac OS teeming with cool new features, but also plagued with a myriad of annoying bugs. Troubles with the system software leant the PowerBook 5300 a reputation for unreliability it probably didn’t altogether deserve, and certainly machines upgraded to OS 7.6 or better tend to be much more stable. Then there were the infamous exploding batteries. These computers were intended to use the new lithium-ion (LiIon) batteries, which would power the computers for longer than the older nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) used in most of the other laptops at the time. Then two pre-production machines burst into flames, and then one more on the assembly line. The PowerBook 5300 stopped shipping, and Apple called back the stock it had already sold, and eventually replaced the LiIon batteries with NiMH ones. Though Apple extended the warranty on this series of PowerBooks to an unprecedented seven years, these machines did a massive amount of damage to Apple’s reputation, in effect obliterating much of the good work done by the earlier models.

The next PowerBook, the 1400, was in many ways the machines the 5300 should have been, featuring an expansion bay big enough for a CD module as well as much improved performance and reliability. Even so, these weren’t especially innovative computers, and at the time Apple’s portable computers were more about keeping up with those in the Windows world than in leading the direction of design. The super-fast PowerBook 3400, for example, may well have been the fastest portable computer at the time, but they were almost identical in shape and styling to the ill-fated 5300s released two years earlier. It is probably fair to say that Apple didn’t really get back into the game until the release of the “Wall Street” G3 PowerBooks in late 1997.