Macinography 9: The First PowerBooks

The Icon Garden

In the eighties, our arms ached from lugging around big, heavy portable computers everywhere. Some companies started making laptops, but the real game changer were notebooks made by NEC and Compaq. Where was Apple in all of this? They stumbled with the Mac Portable, but a resourceful team had a plan: make the smallest, most powerful notebooks on the market. Listen in to learn about the birth of the PowerBook and how Apple changed laptop history.

Sources / Notes:

• Alan Kay’s Dynabook paper
• MacUser December 1991
• Birth of the PowerBook, Low End Mac
• CHM Oral History of David Levy
• The WalkMac
• Apple: the inside story of intrigue, egomania, and business blunders by Jim Carlton
• Fortune Magazine
• Apple Industrial Design with Bob Brunner and John Mannock
• Design Management Institute Case Study: Apple PowerBook Design Quality and Time To Market
• TidBITS
• PowerBook 100 Recall

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