From TiBook to MacBook
The millennial Macs that introduced Apple’s metal years
One of the great years for Mac has to be 2001. The PowerBook G4 was made from 2001 to 2006 first in titanium (nicknamed the TiBook) and then in aluminium (nicknamed the AlBook). It wasn’t just beautiful. It was highpowered too, with impressive battery life and a powerful G4 processor. The titanium model had a 15-inch display and the aluminium one came in 12-, 16- and 17-inch sizes. The 17in aluminium G4 was the first Apple laptop to get FireWire 800.
The PowerBook looked very different from its consumer-oriented sibling, the iBook G4. Apple had already moved away from the oversized candy-coloured clamshells of the original iBook G3, embracing a more sober and traditional design, and in late 2003 it replaced the G3 in the iBook with the more powerful and efficient G4. A slot-loading optical drive replaced its predecessor’s CD/DVD tray and there was a new, less spongy keyboard.
We didn’t know it at the time, but these would be the last of the PowerPC laptops: both the iBook G4 and the PowerBook G5 made way for Intel processors in 2006.
Meet the MacBook
Apple announced the MacBook Pro in January 2006. It looked like the PowerBook G4 and came with a 15-inch display; a 17-inch arrived three months later. It had a MagSafe connector for charging, a built-in iSight camera and Intel Core processors inside.
The MacBook arrived in May 2006 as a direct replacement for the iBook in a polycarbonate and fibreglass casing designed to look like the PowerBook G4. But the really interesting little Mac was the MacBook Air, which launched in early 2008. Steve Jobs caused gasps when he pulled it out from the thin envelope he was holding. It may not look revolutionary now, but at the time even the smallest laptops weighed the best part of 2kg and had tiny displays. To have a full-size keyboard and decent battery life from something thin enough to cut cheese was extraordinary.
It was also very limited and very expensive. To make it so thin Apple removed all but one USB port, micro-DVI port and headphone jack, and the optical drive went too. The price? $1,799. That’s a lot of money now, and it was even more in 2008. But while not everyone could afford one, the MacBook Air completely transformed laptop
design and you can see its influence everywhere today, not just in Apple hardware.
The Air’s design would appear later that year in the thicker but clearly related MacBook Pro, which boasted a new aluminium unibody design, although the MacBook kept a more PowerBookesque look until it was discontinued in 2011.
I can see clearly now
The next big change in Apple’s MacBook Pro was the introduction of the Retina display in 2012 alongside Intel’s Core i7 chips and solid-state drive (SSD) storage as standard. These were very quick machines, and thanks to their SSDs and the elimination of both Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports they were quieter and thinner too – some 25% thinner than the second-generation models they replaced. They were also the first Mac laptops to include HDMI ports.
These were the least user-upgradeable MacBooks. The memory was soldered, not clipped in, so you couldn’t upgrade it, and the SSD had a proprietary connector so you couldn’t swap in a better one. The battery wasn’t removable either. A DIY repair could damage your laptop. To some observers it seemed that Apple was trying to make its Macs more like iPads. They were right.