Amaya Toman The idea of how much a laptop should ideally weigh to be considered light naturally changes over time as technology evolves. A two-kilogram laptop nowadays would take the breath away with its weight, but in 1997 it was different. Apple released its PowerBook 2400c in May of that year, sometimes referred to as the "MacBook Air of the 2400s". The PowerBook 100c predicted the rise of fast, light notebooks, while maintaining the legacy of the popular PowerBook XNUMX in its design.
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From today's point of view, of course, this model does not look impressive at all, and compared to today's laptops and ultrabooks, it is ridiculously cumbersome. At the time, however, the PowerBook 2400c weighed half as much as a number of competing notebooks. Apple did a really admirable thing in this direction at the time.
The PowerBook 2400c was not only unusually light for its time, but also surprisingly powerful. IBM took care of the production, the computer was equipped with a 180MHz PowerPC 603e processor. It allowed most standard office and business applications to run smoothly, similar to the slightly more powerful PowerBook 3400c, which was also available at the time. The PowerBook 2400c monitor had a diagonal of 10,4 inches and a resolution of 800 x 600p. The PowerBook 2400c was also equipped with a 1,3GB IDE HDD and 16MB of RAM, expandable to 48MB. The laptop's lithium-ion battery promised trouble-free operation for two to four hours.
While today Apple tends to strip its notebooks of ports, the PowerBook 2400c was generously equipped in this direction in 1997. It contained one ADB and one serial port, one audio input, audio output, HD1-30SC and Mini-15 Display connector. It also had two TypeI/II PC Card slots and one Type III PC Card slot.
But Apple could not avoid compromises. In order to keep the laptop's slimmer design, he stripped his PowerBook 2400c of its CD drive and internal floppy drive, but shipped it with an external version. However, the possibilities of connecting other peripherals made the PowerBook 2400c a popular portable computer that enjoyed its popularity for quite a long time. Apple distributed it with the popular Mac OS 8 operating system, but under certain conditions it was possible to run any other system from System 7 to Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. The PowerBook 2400c was particularly popular in Japan.
The PowerBook 2400c was introduced about two months before Steve Jobs took over the (then temporary) role of CEO at Apple. Jobs decided to significantly reevaluate Apple's current product offering, and sales of the PowerBook 2400c were discontinued in May 1998. A new era of Apple began, in which other main products had a place - iMac G4, Power Macintosh G3 and laptops of the PowerBook G3 series.
Source: Cult of Mac
This is the beautiful design of OS X with nice icons, and not these garishly oversaturated colors like from a circus and disgusting flat icons.