Retro [geek] Corner - F**k iPad - here is $4110 Powerbook!

Today in Retro [geek] Corner, I will present you an ultimate machine that was kicking ass in 1992 - Apple Macintosh Powerbook 180 Laptop (!), which has been recently discovered by Marc in the dungeons and kindly made available to me (thanks Marc!).

When you watched the most recent Keynote from iPad launch, Steve Jobs presented a slide in one moment, showing the first laptop that was ever released (see Photo below). Then it all went down, but lets wait with the full judgment for iPad until I put my hand on this device.


So today we back in time to 1992, with one of the first series of laptops ever released - Powerbook 180. It was worth $4110 (£2635) at the time of release. $4110!!! It had Motorola MC processor running with stunning 33 Mhz, 4MB of RAM, 80 MB of hard drive, and 1.4 Floppy Drive. This 3.1 kilogram gray beauty (Photo) had amazing 10" grayscale LCD screen with maximum 4-bit resolution of 640x400. It had speaker, microphone (all mono), SCSI port, and some other esoteric ports (1 x ADI, 2 x mini DIN-8), and was running Mac OS 7.1, with games like puzzle and... other stuff like Word. It was 5.5 cm thick comparing to 2.5 cm of my 5 years old Macbook Pro (Photo). It was a $4110 gray beast with trackball (Photo) and up to 1 hour of battery life (yeah right;-) with the Apple Rainbow logo (Photo). A nice touch was adjustable stand on the back, allowing to adjust the position of Powerbook (Photo). It was indeed a beautiful machine...

Now, 18 years later, what's different? Well, for around $1000 (£700) (that is quarter of the 1992 Powerbook 180 price) you get white Macbook with 2.26 GHz, 2GB of RAM, 250GB of hard drive, and Superdrive. It weights 2.1 kilos and has 13" LED screen with 1280 x 800 resolution. It also has bluetooth, airport, Ethernet, multitouch track-pad, camera, and 7 hours of battery life.

So for the quarter of the Powerbook 180 price you get a machine that is basically around 300-400 times faster, has 3200 times more storage space, and is basically a portable multimedia studio. Which makes you reflect on how 18 years changed the scope of portable computers. And I am excited about what tomorrow will bring.

Finally, I was thinking - what I could use such machine for? Uh, it wasn't easy to come up with practical application (recycle?), but it could potentially be used as a book-stand or a bookshelf holder (Photo).

Any other suggestions?[photo by Geek On Acid]