The PowerBook family

Charlotte Henry looks back at the groundbreaking product that launched Apple into the laptop market

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A look back at the PowerBook family

The PowerBook 100 series of portable computers from Apple was launched in October 1999. Unlike its predecessor, the Mac Portable, the PowerBook was (relatively) lightweight, and easy to carry, with the team behind it reportedly determined to keep the weight to under 3.6kg. It came in three versions, the 100, 140, and 170. They all had an eyecatching trackball built in, a feature then not offered by PC rivals. Only the top-end 170 model had an active-matrix display though.

The product was granted a marketing budget of just $1 million by then CEO John Sculley. This was mostly spent on deploying the advertising firm behind the famous 1984 advert to create a spot featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The former basketball star is crammed on to a plane but pulls out his new PowerBook, accompanied by a narrator saying: “at least his hands are comfortable.”

Despite his seeming lack of desire to push the product, the PowerBook became one of the major successes of Sculley’s tenure. It generated $1 billion of revenue for Apple in just its first year. Beyond the bottom line, the effect of the product on both the company and the wider industry was significant. The PowerBook proved to be attractive to those who had to travel for work and ultimately helped make Apple a major player in the modern laptop market. No surprise, then, that after the initial success Apple continued to upgrade the product line. It did so first with the PowerBook Duo in 1992, which lasted until 1997 over seven different iterations. Then there was the PowerBook 500 in 1994, which was a significant upgrade from the 100 line-up and is regarded as the first computer with a built-in trackpad. The product remained as Apple moved to PowerPC architecture, and there were redesigned G3 and G4 models too.

In 2005, Mobile PC magazine declared the PowerBook 100 the “number 1 gadget of all time”. A year later though it was no more, replaced by the MacBook Pro.