Photo: the evolution of Apple’s pro-level notebooks

John Brownlee ()

Photo: the evolution of Apple’s pro-level notebooks

An archeologically stratal cross-section of the port placement of Apple’s metal-skinned professional line of notebooks over the course of the last decade, courtesy of photographer and Mac enthusiast Robert Donovan. Fireflies dance in the background.

From top to bottom, the notebooks pictured are:

• The 13-inch Unibody MacBook Pro (2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)

• The 15-inch Titanium PowerBook (400MHz G4)

• The 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook (1.25GHz G4)

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• The 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)

For me, this is morbidly erotic. It’s like four ex-lovers stacked nakedly atop each other, two of whom were dumped for their younger, hotter sisters, one of whom ran off on me because of my drinking problems, and the last so emphysemic from passive smoking that she’s due to cough up a lung any day now… a medical emergency definitely not covered by Apple Care.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Hardware, Macbook, MacBook Pro, News |

  • ged

    My Ti-book looks just like that! It was a great computer in its day, but the details were poorly specified by Apple-the flakey paint on the hinges!
    BTW it still works.

  • solar

    I’m a Machead but this is just plain hardware masturbation.

  • Darcy McGee

    Pismo’s should be there. I skipped the titanium PowerBook’s because of the Pismo’s were solid, great machines.

    Yes, I still call them PowerBooks and you can pull mine from my cold dead fingers.

  • http://web.me.com/bob_brent/ Bob Brent

    The “fireflies” dancing in background in photographic terms are called “bokeh”.

    It derives from Japanese, meaning blur or haze and is used to describe the ability of the lens to produce pleasing blur, which the photographer creates using a lens at full open aperture to reduce the depth-of-field to blur the background, in this case lights become fireflies.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

    The bokeh images are almost perfectly round, very pleasing to the eye suggesting a high-quality professional lens F/1.2-F1.4 lens with the diaphragm likely wide open to create the perfectly circular shape. At higher stops you can often see the bokeh as pentagonal, hexagonal shapes, depending on how many leafs make up the diaphragm of the lens.

  • imajoebob

    It is with both pride and dismay that I say I am still using my Ti 1GHz 6 1/2 years later. I still can’t justify replacing it.

  • chano

    John, I always believed that evolution was a straightline process, not the 2 steps backward followed by a giant leap forward shimmy you so carefully arranged.
    Shall we say a minor fail?
    Otherwise a champion post.

  • http://ObamaPacman.com Obama Pacman

    I would have put the oldest on the bottom…

  • Optical

    Someone needs some time off with his SO, pronto. Purple prose about some titanium laptops? Geekishly disturbing.

    Now, if we were talking about the sensuous, smooth curved surfaces of a vintage quicksilver G4, with its’ ample side panels, plump apple logos and snuggly, circular, rubbery opening latch, well… *arrum – cough*