Thirteen Years of Laptops - The good, the bad and the ugly

[asiafish]

I've been playing with some older laptops lately and this got me to thinking about what I've owned and used over the years, and whether or not things have gotten better. My current X41 is a dream, tiny and fast, with good battery life and a terrific keyboard. Here my look back.

1993 - I bought my first laptop, an Apple PowerBook 145B. This powerhouse ran its Motorola 68030 processor (about equal to a 386sx) at 25MHz and accepted a maximum of 8MB of strictly proprietary ram. It had a massive 80MB hard drive (SCSI, faster than the IDE of the time) and a 10.4" passive matrix monochrome (no grayscale here) display in the now popular widescreen format (640X400). Using the current System 7.1 it was actually quite fast, and unlike most portables of the time, it had a comfortable keyboard and a spacious palmrest with a big trackball dead center. Despite the lack of video out, this was my primary computer for more than two years.

1995 - I went to work at Apple as a tech support trainer and got a brand-new PowerBook 5300c. Despite its 100MHz PowerPC processor this computer wasn't much faster in real world use than the old 145B that I still kept. What was a huge step up was the 10.4" active matrix VGA screen and the PC card slots that finally gave me ethernet.

1995 - Part of my work at Apple involved presales support, and for that a big aspect was explaining to customers the advantages of Apples over PCs running Windows. For that task, Apple bought a high-end Windows 95 laptop, a Toshiba Portege 650CT, a few desktops and a Windows NT 3.51 server. I adopted the Portege immediately, and when I left Apple in late 1996, I was able to buy the Portege and take it with me.

The Portege was my first exposure to really great laptop hardware. Its Accupoint (TrackPooint knock-off) mouse was a step up from the trackballs and touchpads I've used at Apple, while the SVGA 11.3" TFT screen was a revelation. Yes, Windows 95 couldn't match Mac OS 7.5.3 for ease of use or stability, but it wasn't too bad. 4 hour battery life and very small dimensions (about the size of an X32, but twice as thick) combined with 4-hour battery life made this a real keeper. I finally gave it away last year, by which time its 133MHz Pentium (non MMX) had been augmented with 140MB of RAM, an 80GB 5400 RPM drive and a wireless PC card. I liked it so much that I really regret selling it, as despite its age and slow processor, it had a fabulous keyboard and made a decent Windows 2000 machine for basic tasks.

1999 - I went back to school for a masters degree and a new laptop was in order. The Portege still worked great, but I wanted something with a bult-in floppy and CD drive and a larger XGA screen. I bought a Micron Transport Trek 2, wiht a 300 MHz Pentium II and a 14.1" screen. It was a 10lb monster that I sold almost immediately and replaced with a Toshiba Satellite 2675DVD, a powerful Pentium 3 with a DVD drive. I thought it would be cool to watch movies on the airplane, but constant crashes from Windows 98 and even WIndows 2000 (bad ram I think) resulted in Toshiba replacing that machine with a Portege 3490 only three months later.

1999 - Toshiba Portege 3490CT. This was my second exposure to an ultraportable, and I saw immediately that a lot of progress had been made in the 4 years since my older Portege 650 was made. This thing was about the same size as an X32 again, though the battery protruded from the back like the 8-cell on the X41. It weighed 3.4lbs and ran for 2.5 hours on the battery. The screen was the same 11.3" as on the 650, but full XGA resolution.

2000 - I got tired of the lack of built-ins and went to a thin-and-light, a used ThinkPad T20. This was a wonderful machine to use, but after the Portege 3490 I just hated carrying it. After two years the system board failed, was repaired under warranty, then failed again. IBM gave me a new T23 as a replacement that I just sold to buy an X21.

2002 - ThinkPad X22. I was in law school now and the light weight ThinkPad X22 was a much better match. Sadly, while the hardware was terrific, I got so fed up with malware and system crashes that I sold the X22 and went back to Apple, buying a 12" PowerBook.

2004 - Apple PowerBook 12". I loved the hardware that fell somewhere between a thin-and-light and an ultraportable. If Apple had an updated Intel version of the 12" PowerBook, I would buy it this minute.

2005 - ThinkPad T42p. I just wanted a toy to play games on, and this did a great job.

2005 - I started practicing law and wanted something smaller than even the PowerBook, so I sold the T42p and bought an X32. I was generally happy with it, but the keyboard was something of a let-down compared to theNMB keyboard on the T42p.

2006 - Bad Choice - I sold the 12" PowerBook and upgraded to the new MacBook. After three bad MacBooks in a rpw, I got rid of it and switched to the ThinkPad X41.

2006 - My brother-in-law wanted a tiny laptop after seeing my X32, so I ordered an X41 with the plan of keeping the one I liked better. The X32 went bye bye and I'm now a happy X41 user.

Looking back, the X41 is remarkably similar in concept to that old Portege 650 (I'd love to find one in good condition used). Both have as large a screen as could be installed at the time, excellent keyboards and absolutely nothing else. Both were as small and light as a laptop cold be at the time (4.9lbs was VERY light in 1995) while still being just large enough to be very confortable for even long periods of use.

Guess things really haven't changed that much after all.

[Thinkpaddict]

1995 - Part of my work at Apple involved presales support, and for that a big aspect was explaining to customers the advantages of Apples over PCs running Windows. For that task, Apple bought a high-end Windows 95 laptop, a Toshiba Portege 650CT, a few desktops and a Windows NT 3.51 server. I adopted the Portege immediately, and when I left Apple in late 1996, I was able to buy the Portege and take it with me.

Think about the irony.

It was an interesting retrospective on your experience with laptops, thanks.

[pianowizard]

Asiafish, I enjoyed reading your 13 years of experience with laptops. I started using laptops not so long ago, when I bought a $1,700 Dell Inspiron 8200 in Aug 2002. I was a grad student then and that was a lot of money! I regretted getting it because that 8.1-lb monster was almost impossible to carry around. So, just a month later, I bought the 5-lb Thinkpad 600E from Geeks.com (compgeeks.com at that time) for $407 including shipping, so that I had something light enough to travel with.

Since then, I have owned about two dozen laptops, most of them purchased used but a few were new. These laptops were manufactured between 1993 and 2005. I agree with Asiafish that that major advances were made in the mid 1990s. My Ambra NC425SL made in September 1993 was very heavy (probably close to 8 lbs) and thick, had a 25MHz 80486SX CPU and 4MB onboard RAM, a 9.4-inch monitor with VGA resolution (I think), and an ugly-and-hard-to-use trackball. But in just ~4 years (Nov 1997, I believe), Umax made the ultraslim H1P233MTX which looked very modern, had 233MHz Pentium-MMX and max memory of 128MB, an internal CD-ROM drive that could be swapped with a floppy drive, 12.1" XGA monitor, a USB port, and a nice touchpad, and was quite portable at 6.2 lbs.

Of course, laptops have continued to get better since 1997, but I think the biggest progress was made in the mid 1990s. I sold the Umax laptop last year, but if I still had it, I could still use it to run Win 2000, Office XP, Photoshop 7, etc.