Any list of the most revolutionary Apple products includes the original Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Too often overlooked is the PowerBook 100 series, Apple’s first laptops.

On the anniversary of the launch, I can explain why the series was groundbreaking. I had a PowerBook 140, and it’s as important to Apple history as the original iPhone.

August 25, 1995: Apple releases the PowerBook 5300, the same Mac laptop that saves the world from alien invaders in the 1996 blockbuster movie Independence Day.

The computer makes a whole lot more big-screen appearances too, for that matter. See some of the laptop’s most high-profile cameos below.

August 16, 1993: Apple ships the PowerBook 165, a lower-cost, grayscale version of the PowerBook 165c, which was the company’s first laptop to offer a color display.

The new model lacks the most attention-grabbing feature of the 165c, but it also brings its own claim to fame. The PowerBook 165 is Apple’s most affordable laptop yet.

Surely you already know that the newly redesigned MacBook Air is super thin. But you might not have realized just how  very sleek it is. It’s actually slimmer than the original iPhone.

In fact, the macOS laptop is much, much thinner than a lot of other classic and recent Apple devices.

June 7, 1993: Apple debuts the PowerBook 180c, a solid upgrade that brings a world of dazzling colors to the company’s laptop line.

The 180c’s big improvement over the grayscale PowerBook 180, which launched the previous October, is its active-matrix, 256-color screen. Such a screen is something of a novelty for laptops in the early 1990s.

May 8, 1997: Apple launches the PowerBook 2400c laptop, a 4.4-pound “subnotebook” that’s the MacBook Air of its day.

The PowerBook 2400c predicts the rise of speedy, lightweight notebooks, while also paying tribute to Apple’s past. Its design echoes the original PowerBook 100. Even years later, it remains a cult favorite among many Mac users.

A couple of news outlets are flipping their lid over the news that Apple has filed a new worldwide trademark for the word “PowerBook,” the name of Apple’s pre-MacBook laptop series, which ran from 1991 until 2006.

The suggestion is that this could mean that Apple’s bringing back its iconic laptop brand name, either as a replacement for, or to run alongside, the MacBook series. We’re not so sure!

Many of us have old MacBooks and PowerBooks collecting cobwebs and dust bunnies in the back of our closets. It seems an ignominous end to a computer that we not only loved, but probably spent a lot of money on. Did we waste our cash on something little better than a dust collector?

That’s what TNW co-founder Patrick de Laive wanted to know, so he ended up asking himself what would have happened if he’d bought Aple stock back in 2003 instead of spending $3,299 for the 17-inch PowerBook G4 back in April of 2003. The answer is that today, he could buy a starter home with the money he’d have earned on AAPL, while a PowerBook G4 on eBay can be had for under $50. Woof.

Source: The Next Web

When you open up your MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro, the glowing Apple logo on its hood sits upright so that everyone in Starbucks knows that you’re using a Mac. However, it hasn’t always been that way. There was a time when Apple logos were upside down on the lid of Apple notebooks, until Steve Jobs realized his mistake.

Smoking Apples has published a lovely post extolling the virtues of an ancient iBook G4, which given a little TLC and a wipe-and-install has been reborn as a perfectly functional household computer.