8 ms·

History of Apple Portables

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
My first portable was The Luggable (that 20-pound, lead/acid-battery monster), in the late 1980s. I also had a Duo, for a couple of years; complete with its dock. I've probably had just about every one of them, over my career. I think my favorite design was the "Blackbird" model. It would be ridiculous, these days, but back then, it was pretty awesome.
- ftio 5y ago
  My first childhood computer was an IBM P70 luggable. I loved that thing. It had such great feel — so many clicky parts — that really appealed to me as a little kid. The keyboard, which snapped into the case, also had these little legs on the back that swiveled so you could set it at an angle. The 3.5" floppy drive tilted out, and it had a great IBM-blue button to press to eject. Naturally the keyboard was clicky as all get-out. Beautiful orange plasma display. In hindsight, you'd think it would make MS Paint boring, but I loved it just the same. One story. At maybe 4 or 5 years old, I thought to myself: I wonder if I can make this blue floppy eject button pop out without putting a disk in the drive. So I jammed a plastic ruler around inside the drive feeling for some kind of latch to press. I was not able to get the button to come out, but I sure as hell broke the drive. Whatever software was on the machine before jamming that thing around is the software that stayed on that machine for the rest of its days.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I can relate (esp. about the breaking something find out how it works part). We had an Osborne at my job, and later, a KayPro. Pretty similar luggables.
sys_64738 5y ago
No mention of Uncle Clive's Z88, the one that started the craze.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  The Sinclair Z88 that came out five years after the Kyocera/Model 100/NEC/Olivetti which sold millions of units worldwide, while the Z88 was a regional curiosity? By the time Sinclair got on board, almost every company had a portable machine. Even IBM.
lmilcin 5y ago
I am seeing these post recently and they get on my nerve. I have actually lived through a lot of that history and I remember it quite differently. One could think, after reading these kinds of posts, that Apple was the single force that created modern portable devices. This is selecting facts from history, taking away any context, creating impression that Apple did it all alone. For an alternative history, look for example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops
- wffurr 5y ago
  I didn't see that in this post at all. If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. You do have to somehow acknowledge and explain the dominance that Apple portables have in the popular imagination though, and that's what this does.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. I can't remember any laptop doing the same trick at the time. Perhaps some Vaio models could? The trick with the envelope was the long-needed nail in the coffin of netbooks: it was a fully-functional laptop with none of the compromises that netbooks at the time had.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      "It didn’t matter that there were many PCs smaller/ lighter (including from SONY!) and many that fit in a yellow envelope." https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443653349376010 https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/144944365334937601...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
geogra4 5y ago
My parents had a powebook 160 when it first came out. Wonderful, high quality device that we kept for years to play with as kids long after the 68030 could run any modern software.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Mine had a PowerBook 100. It was underpowered even at the time and that passive matrix screen was awful, but damn it was sexy. So sleek, even compared to the clunky PC laptops from the end of the 1990s. A fantastic piece of engineering.
klelatti 5y ago
The Acorn A4 laptop was, I think, the first Arm laptop. Acorn of course died fairly quickly but it would be interesting to consider how history might have been different if it had gained some traction given the early Arm CPUs we’re both powerful compared to x86 and had low power consumption. I wonder if anyone here used one of these machines? https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Laptop/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Lapto...
1cvmask 5y ago
One of the jobs that Steven Sinofsky had was to go to trade shows and copy best-of-breed software for Microsoft. He excelled at that and rose through the Microsoft ranks. A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering. Just look at how they still fail at edge cases compared to Zoom or how clunky they are compared to Slack. Yet they dominate those categories.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- easton 5y ago
  That’s not really their strategy anymore, it’s not “bundle a bunch of mediocre stuff” but more “Bundle it with Exchange and Outlook”, which is an excellent product. People will buy Exchange, and then the Teams button just magically pops up and they don’t see a good enough reason to go buy Slack unless their employees complain too much.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    “Bundling” in some form was almost always their power move.
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    Google does basically the same thing. Lots of other products become the default because they became "free" once the company chose gmail. Yeah, other products are better, but expensive compared to "$0".
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    >“Exchange and Outlook”, which is an excellent product I've never seen anyone compliment those products voluntarily. Care to elaborate why do you find them excellent?
    - neilalexander 5y ago
thunderbong 5y ago
Better readability - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449443506783543297.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449443506783543297.html
- RistrettoMike 5y ago
  Never seen threadreader before, really cool. Thanks for posting it.
- Bradlinc 5y ago
  I stopped reading half way through and came back to the comments to complain about how this was unreadable. Then I found your comment.Thank you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  It absolutely blows my mind that people try to use Twitter for long-form writing. Honestly, it blows my mind that people use Twitter for anything at all, other than outrage and anxiety disorders. But if you do want to use an awful platform for long-form writing, then that's why we have Medium.
  - zerkten 5y ago
    They probably feel like you when preparing these too. The reason it excels is that a few of the individual tweets go viral and it drives the complete thread. Twitter could provide a long-form writing platform where you write the whole thing and then some tweets you want to package with it. I suspect they feel that this is a form of experimentation where any of the sets of sentences could go viral, but the author may be unlikely to select the correct ones most of the time.
    - tambourine_man 5y ago
      It's probably seems less commitment for the reader as well. Instead of a block of text upfront, a few paragraphs with a punchline and a thread a tap away if you are really interested. Certainly an interesting experiment, which can be improved on for sure.
webwielder2 5y ago
As a 7 year old I loved watching the Apple commercials that came on the Apple Multimedia Starter Kit CD-ROM. I still think this is the greatest commercial ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1hSU_qz5Es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1hSU_qz5Es
- xattt 5y ago
  One thing that is absent from today’s technoculture but was pervasive in the 1990s is the fact that the use of any feature that might have required an intermediate/advanced level of technical knowledge seemed subversive. Also, the feeling that big institutions seemed obtuse and unaware of advancements in technology. You want to what on an airplane? What’s a network? Now, it’s normalized and might be perceived mildly annoying at worst (ie asking someone to AirDrop a photo for better quality versus them messaging a quality-reduced photo to you).
protomyth 5y ago
Didn't Sony have some involvement in the design of this portable?
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Mentioned here: https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443643404607492 https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443643404607492
tacobelllover99 5y ago
Portables cringe
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Readable version for older computers: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/stevesi/status/1449443506783543297 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/stevesi/status/144944350678354329...

My first portable was The Luggable (that 20-pound, lead/acid-battery monster), in the late 1980s. I also had a Duo, for a couple of years; complete with its dock. I've probably had just about every one of them, over my career. I think my favorite design was the "Blackbird" model. It would be ridiculous, these days, but back then, it was pretty awesome.

ftio 5y ago
My first childhood computer was an IBM P70 luggable. I loved that thing. It had such great feel — so many clicky parts — that really appealed to me as a little kid. The keyboard, which snapped into the case, also had these little legs on the back that swiveled so you could set it at an angle. The 3.5" floppy drive tilted out, and it had a great IBM-blue button to press to eject. Naturally the keyboard was clicky as all get-out. Beautiful orange plasma display. In hindsight, you'd think it would make MS Paint boring, but I loved it just the same. One story. At maybe 4 or 5 years old, I thought to myself: I wonder if I can make this blue floppy eject button pop out without putting a disk in the drive. So I jammed a plastic ruler around inside the drive feeling for some kind of latch to press. I was not able to get the button to come out, but I sure as hell broke the drive. Whatever software was on the machine before jamming that thing around is the software that stayed on that machine for the rest of its days.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I can relate (esp. about the breaking something find out how it works part). We had an Osborne at my job, and later, a KayPro. Pretty similar luggables.

sys_64738 5y ago

No mention of Uncle Clive's Z88, the one that started the craze.

reaperducer 5y ago
The Sinclair Z88 that came out five years after the Kyocera/Model 100/NEC/Olivetti which sold millions of units worldwide, while the Z88 was a regional curiosity? By the time Sinclair got on board, almost every company had a portable machine. Even IBM.

lmilcin 5y ago

I am seeing these post recently and they get on my nerve. I have actually lived through a lot of that history and I remember it quite differently. One could think, after reading these kinds of posts, that Apple was the single force that created modern portable devices. This is selecting facts from history, taking away any context, creating impression that Apple did it all alone. For an alternative history, look for example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laptops

wffurr 5y ago
I didn't see that in this post at all. If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. You do have to somehow acknowledge and explain the dominance that Apple portables have in the popular imagination though, and that's what this does.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick. I can't remember any laptop doing the same trick at the time. Perhaps some Vaio models could? The trick with the envelope was the long-needed nail in the coffin of netbooks: it was a fully-functional laptop with none of the compromises that netbooks at the time had.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    "It didn’t matter that there were many PCs smaller/ lighter (including from SONY!) and many that fit in a yellow envelope." https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443653349376010 https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/144944365334937601...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

geogra4 5y ago

My parents had a powebook 160 when it first came out. Wonderful, high quality device that we kept for years to play with as kids long after the 68030 could run any modern software.

kergonath 5y ago
Mine had a PowerBook 100. It was underpowered even at the time and that passive matrix screen was awful, but damn it was sexy. So sleek, even compared to the clunky PC laptops from the end of the 1990s. A fantastic piece of engineering.

klelatti 5y ago

The Acorn A4 laptop was, I think, the first Arm laptop. Acorn of course died fairly quickly but it would be interesting to consider how history might have been different if it had gained some traction given the early Arm CPUs we’re both powerful compared to x86 and had low power consumption. I wonder if anyone here used one of these machines? https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Laptop/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Lapto...

1cvmask 5y ago

One of the jobs that Steven Sinofsky had was to go to trade shows and copy best-of-breed software for Microsoft. He excelled at that and rose through the Microsoft ranks. A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering. Just look at how they still fail at edge cases compared to Zoom or how clunky they are compared to Slack. Yet they dominate those categories.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
easton 5y ago
That’s not really their strategy anymore, it’s not “bundle a bunch of mediocre stuff” but more “Bundle it with Exchange and Outlook”, which is an excellent product. People will buy Exchange, and then the Teams button just magically pops up and they don’t see a good enough reason to go buy Slack unless their employees complain too much.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  “Bundling” in some form was almost always their power move.
- _ea1k 5y ago
  Google does basically the same thing. Lots of other products become the default because they became "free" once the company chose gmail. Yeah, other products are better, but expensive compared to "$0".
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  >“Exchange and Outlook”, which is an excellent product I've never seen anyone compliment those products voluntarily. Care to elaborate why do you find them excellent?
  - neilalexander 5y ago

thunderbong 5y ago

Better readability - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449443506783543297.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449443506783543297.html

RistrettoMike 5y ago
Never seen threadreader before, really cool. Thanks for posting it.
Bradlinc 5y ago
I stopped reading half way through and came back to the comments to complain about how this was unreadable. Then I found your comment.Thank you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
StevePerkins 5y ago
It absolutely blows my mind that people try to use Twitter for long-form writing. Honestly, it blows my mind that people use Twitter for anything at all, other than outrage and anxiety disorders. But if you do want to use an awful platform for long-form writing, then that's why we have Medium.
- zerkten 5y ago
  They probably feel like you when preparing these too. The reason it excels is that a few of the individual tweets go viral and it drives the complete thread. Twitter could provide a long-form writing platform where you write the whole thing and then some tweets you want to package with it. I suspect they feel that this is a form of experimentation where any of the sets of sentences could go viral, but the author may be unlikely to select the correct ones most of the time.
  - tambourine_man 5y ago
    It's probably seems less commitment for the reader as well. Instead of a block of text upfront, a few paragraphs with a punchline and a thread a tap away if you are really interested. Certainly an interesting experiment, which can be improved on for sure.

webwielder2 5y ago

As a 7 year old I loved watching the Apple commercials that came on the Apple Multimedia Starter Kit CD-ROM. I still think this is the greatest commercial ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1hSU_qz5Es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1hSU_qz5Es

xattt 5y ago
One thing that is absent from today’s technoculture but was pervasive in the 1990s is the fact that the use of any feature that might have required an intermediate/advanced level of technical knowledge seemed subversive. Also, the feeling that big institutions seemed obtuse and unaware of advancements in technology. You want to what on an airplane? What’s a network? Now, it’s normalized and might be perceived mildly annoying at worst (ie asking someone to AirDrop a photo for better quality versus them messaging a quality-reduced photo to you).

protomyth 5y ago

Didn't Sony have some involvement in the design of this portable?

aidenn0 5y ago
Mentioned here: https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443643404607492 https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1449443643404607492

tacobelllover99 5y ago

Portables cringe

forgotmypw17 5y ago

Readable version for older computers: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/stevesi/status/1449443506783543297 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/stevesi/status/144944350678354329...