Better by Design: The Best Designed Apple Laptops

September 16th 2002

What were the best -designed PowerBooks? Not the most popular, not the best-looking, not the most expensive.

Charles Moore's recent article at MacOpinion asked what features we'd like to see on the next-generation PowerBook G4. That got me thinking about form and function of previous PowerBooks and iBooks. But how do we define these?

Form: how well does the 'Book's design fulfill the purpose for which it was intended? Naturally, form may simply be designed to look cool, business-like or be designed down to a particular weight or size. How many drives, batteries, slots and what size screen will heavily influence form.

Function: how well does the 'Book perform its intended function? You might well argue that a portable is a portable is a portable. But some laptops clearly do this better than others. Why? Our criteria here might be how well the Power/iBook functions as a desktop replacement without too many compromises. Equipment here is important; a notebook with no removable storage is not as practical as one with a floppy. Equally, a CDRW-equipped portable has a wider degree of flexibility and functionality than one with a mere floppy.

Innovation: does the 'Book provide innovative features, or is it a me-too notebook? Does it provide significant technological advances over the previous generation of Mac portables?

These are clearly subjective criteria, not professional design parameters. But the aim here is to consider portables from the point of view of the end user - this is what is important. You don't just buy a PowerBook or iBook because it's a Mac; you don't necessarily even buy it because it's a technological tour de force.

You buy it because it fulfills your notebook needs more closely than any other market entry - within your price range, obviously. The reason the original PowerBook 100/140/170 sold over 300,000 units in less than 12 months was because its design was due to its innovation. It was far from the fastest on the market (especially the 100) and was very expensive (until the 100s were discounted as they reached EOL). The 030s were toasted by 486s and they offered no color displays for the first two years. But the palm rests, SCSI docking convenience (and the Mac OS) sold them by the boatload until they became wildly uncompetitive.


So these are the narrow, yes, subjective lenses through which we'll look at these Mac portables. But it can be about taste as much as anything else: Woz, for example, regards the TiBook (and the Cube) as the greatest Macs ever. I don't know his criteria. But I'm betting that there are some hacked-off Ti and Cube owners who would vehemently disagree. Even with Woz.


iBook (original) (1999-2001)
The first iBook, initially available in Tangerine and Blueberry, gets the nod here for a number of innovative new features, never previously available on the Mac, although some became available on subsequent Macs. Designed principally for the school/college market, over 600,000 were sold as Apple priced it as a stripped-down consumer portable.

The first was the oval design, the infamous 'toilet seat'. iBook's rounded edges made it more impervious to shocks than squared-off designs, and its polyurethane shell made it generally more scratch and crack-resistant than any other previous Mac - and probably any other PC notebook (not including notebooks made for industrial/scientific purposes, which are specially ruggedized).

Tough? Strong enough to withstand severe mistreatment at the hands of 5-to-50 year olds. Schoolbags, drops, knocks - the iBook could take it. Of all the notebooks I've ever dealt with or serviced, I'd have to say it's the most trouble-free. When no one brings one in to fix, to replace a case plastic or whatever, you can tell that AppleCare probably loves these babies; nothing breaks. Yes, the key caps broke off early models, but the hinges are incredibly strong.

The downside to this is weight: well over 7 pounds of it, something Apple couldn't overcome until it moved to an entirely fresh iBook design. However, original iBook owners will swear their models are much tougher than their successors.

Integral to the design strength, and also a key part of the iBook's form and function is the foldaway handle. Phil Schiller demonstrated its strength on release in 1999 by jumping off stage and swinging it around his head. As a security device, it meant you could secure the iBook's handle to a desk and know that no one could walk off with it.

iBook also emphasized hardware/software integration. In an Apple portable first, it had no screen latch, but held together firmly like a jewel case. It slept when you closed it (like all PowerBooks), but woke up when you opened it. It could automatically save contents to RAM (after a bug fix solved the problems in the original 8.6(.1) release. Rather than having the enternally-breaking rear port cover, iBook did away entirely with the cover. Plug right in, a feature carried over to the current iBook.

Also innovative was the under-the-hood wireless connectivity: Airport to you and me. An Apple industry first, the iBook led the PC market by at least 12 months with this feature alone. The iBook had no PC slot and no dongle to break or snag, while the antenna was built into the handle. The fact that the iBook was otherwise a little lackluster in the equipment department was offset by the wide variety of innovation the original iBook demonstrated.

PowerBook 500 Series (1994-95)
Business-like and high-tech, the 500 was built for the corporate environment and carried an enterprise price-tag: around $5,000 for the top-of-the-line 540c. It was good-looking and innovative enough to woo some of the DOS/Win 3.1 crowd to tote a Mac portable, even if they had to look through Windows at work.

Flying buttresses and sharp angles distinguish the 500 series from virtually any other PowerBook. Perhaps only the G3 Series, the TiBook and the fruity iBooks have been as daring in their looks - and the latter three designs are much more understated, conservative designs than the 500.

What's more, the 500 had a removable CPU daughtercard, allowing for PowerPC upgrades (eventually, up to the always-rare 183MHz Newer upgrade).

It's difficult to work out whether loading a model with fruit qualifies it for the 'innovative' tag. But in the case of the 500, it undoubtedly did, as many were industry firsts. The 9.5" 16-bit 540c display was one example, albeit at only 640x400. The twin NiMH 'Type III 'Intelligent' batteries, giving around 5-6 hours' work time. The left-hand battery bay could take an optional dual- PCMCIA slot cage connected via a 32-bit PDS. Although standard on many PC notebooks, this was the first PCMCIA Mac portable.

Not that the 500 had much use for PCMCIA at the time. The modem was the faster 19.2kbps model available at the time. 10bT ethernet was built in, as was video out to monitors up to 20" (with separate VRAM for operating external displays), virtual desktop or mirror mode, SCSI, and serial/LocalTalk connectivity. A row of Function keys ran across the upper reaches of the keyboard. To top it all off, the 500 dumped the PowerBook 100 and 200 Series trackball for a solid-state trackpad (tappable with software).

Not that the lower-end models were short changed. The 520 and 520c sported slightly slower 68LC040 processors, and less impressive passive-matrix screens, but exactly the same feature set as the 540 and 540c (the modem was optional).

At over 7 pounds, the 500 was no lightweight, but it was well within the ballpark of comparable high-end notebooks at the time. And even today, almost 10 years on, many Wintel notebooks still don't have ethernet as standard. A yardstick? Arguably, the benchmark by which many Mac and PC portables were judged for many years. Indeed, by comparison, Apple's successors to the 500, the 190/5300 and 1400, were considered lackluster in the equipment and innovation departments.