Journey down Powerbook memory lane...

Quincy Pince-Nez
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October 13, 2008
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Gizmodo takes us back to the past with its retrospective on the powerbook. 

Money quote:

Watching this ad for the very first PowerBooks, it's funny to see Apple going hard after business users, the very same type mocked in today's Apple ads by John Hodgman. Sales reports! How very unhip. Before the MacBook became the laptop of choice of coffeshop-located freelance graphic designers, Apple wanted its laptops to be the choice of the suit set.

The Powerbook was the cheapest of the three PowerBooks first introduced by Apple in 1991. Its price was $2,300, which is surprisingly close to how much MacBook Pros are today. Sure, the form factor has changed a lot, as has the hardware inside and the software loaded on it. But isn't it comforting to think that, nearly 20 years later, you're still gonna drop around $2,000 on a new Apple laptop? In an unstable time, it's nice to see some things stay the same.

Comments (4)

zulusafari (not verified) | October 13, 2008 - 3:31pm

The guy at the very end has been in quite a few movies now. He usually plays a martial arts guy.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 13, 2008 - 5:17pm

"Everything else is a dinosaur." Gotta love it.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 13, 2008 - 5:56pm

I had a Powerbook 100, and I loved its small size and portability. B&W only, it was virtually indestructible. I left it on a Boston subway train one day. It was picked up by a stranger who tried to hack it, but couldn't. All he had access to was my name, address and phone number. He called me to give it back. I picked it up and it still worked like a charm. Basically, all it did was word processing, but that was all i needed. Oh, and it had a really cool drawing program.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 14, 2008 - 6:12am

I loved playing Shufflepuck on the first powerbooks.

Also, $2300 in 1991 = $3699 in 2008 (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl), so actually, we're doing all right these days.