I had a Sharp Actius MM10 in 2003, which in some respects was way ahead of where most of the market is today. Criticism centered on the lack of an internal CD-R

I had a Sharp Actius MM10 in 2003, which in some respects was way ahead of where most of the market is today. Criticism centered on the lack of an internal CD-ROM (yeah) and video playback performance. But I could hack on something in Visual Studio for 6-8 hours with the extended battery. A quick search pulls up a Wired article that calls it a 'fugly black box' (mine was a silver Mg-alloy case actually), but people would ask me about it so frequently that I printed up an info card to hand out. I'm not even mentioning some of the more interesting features. Of course the thing was expensive, but so is a 13" Air today (and it doesn't come with a docking station). Then vmware came out and I was sure it wouldn't be long before I'd be able to dynamically share compute power between my laptop and workstation, when I plugged the former into the docking station. Then OQO showed up and I thought the same thing there. But all of it died, for various reasons. Apple deserves credit for pushing a more aggressive roadmap than most, and I'll be buying another round of systems here shortly, but being 'first' isn't enough. The Transmeta chip in the MM10 was dual-core 128 bit VLIW with a soft x-86 translation layer. The next chip was 256 bit. Both were very low power devices for their day.