![]() When I say “Mac docking station,” you probably can imagine what I’m talking about. Apple sold two of them, and third-party vendors filled in the gaps with all sorts of other contraptions, all connected via the Duo’s most important (and most nonstandard) port, the 156-pin Processor Direct Slot. It remains the only Mac to be built with an Apple docking station in mind. But, that was it.Īnd this is where the PowerBook Duo got…interesting. That wasn’t nothing, because you could use it to connect to a modem (if you didn’t pay for the optional internal modem) or a printer or even a very slow local-area network via LocalTalk. The only standard port on the Duo, hiding behind a little door that you could rotate and turn into a foot to help angle the keyboard perfectly for carpal tunnel syndrome 2, was a single Mac serial port. ![]() But back then, we didn’t really play music on our computers-this was the Walkman era-so Apple got away with shaving that port off. It also didn’t have a headphone jack! This one seems completely bananas now-I can’t imagine working on a laptop out in public without plugging in headphones. (If you needed access to floppies, you’d need to buy an external disk drive.) Even six years later, people screamed bloody murder when the original iMac was released lacking a floppy drive. Today we don’t flinch at the idea of a computer without a built-in floppy drive, but back in the mid-90s, floppies were the currency of the realm. For all of that stuff, you needed to connect it to a docking station. (Sound familiar, MacBook fans?) There was no support for floppy drives, external hard drives or monitors. It had a shrunken-down keyboard and trackball, and only a single standard port. It was also 1.4 inches thick-more than an inch thinner than my PowerBook.īut it wasn’t a complete Mac. My first PowerBook weighed seven pounds the first PowerBook Duo weighed four. How small and how light? By today’s standards the PowerBook Duo was laughably large, but 1992 was a different time. Separated at birth? The PowerBook Duo was the MacBook Air of its day, prioritizing thinness and lightness over “required” features. If you wanted the absolutely smallest, lightest Mac laptop you could find, you got a PowerBook Duo and dealt with the weirdness. Introduced in 1992, 1 it was the MacBook Air or one-port MacBook of its time-all compromise in a quest to be as thin and light as possible. It wasn’t trying to be the Mac on your desk. The premise was: “Let’s engineer a Mac that’s like the one on your desk, but put it in a single package with screen, keyboard, pointing device, and battery.” My first laptop was a PowerBook 160 and it did everything my old Mac SE did (and much, much more). ![]() Most of Apple’s early laptops were, like today’s MacBooks, complete Macs. Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.
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