![]() Still-and this is likely just my age-I find there’s something just kind of right and enduringly exciting about this PowerBook and its Duo Dock. ![]() If Apple reinvented the PowerBook Duo for the 21st century, you could expect to see my kidneys on eBay. You could argue, of course, that what you were taking with you with the PowerBook Duo was a compromise necessitated by the limitations of the technology of the day, and that today our portable computers don’t need to have the same compromises thanks to advances both in wireless technology and in the power and power demands of modern CPUs. What the Duo system really was was a desktop machine that gave you the option of taking the essential bits with you when you got up from your desk, and I think there’s something very appealing about that idea even today. In fact, actually you shouldn’t really think of it as a laptop at all. Indeed, gloriously, just as there were slots next to floppy drives into which you could insert a straightened paperclip to force-eject a recalcitrant disk, so too was there a manual eject button for the laptop itself on the Duo Dock! Pressing the eject button on the front would prompt you to save work, shut down the PowerBook, then physically push it out of the front of the Duo Dock just as if the whole laptop was an oversized floppy disk. When you were done, you just ejected the PowerBook Duo-and I do mean “ejected”. The Duo Dock would also, of course, charge the Duo’s internal battery. Once you did, your Duo was immediately connected not just to all this stuff but also to the Dock’s internal floppy drive, NuBus expansion slots, and a second hard disk, as well as optional features that gave it more processing grunt: a Floating Point Unit, level 2 cache and more VRAM to drive bigger monitors with more colors. The idea was that you’d have a monitor on top of it, and a keyboard, mouse, printer and network permanently attached to it, all just sitting waiting for you to slide the PowerBook Duo in. The daddy of these docking systems was the Duo Dock, a big case the size of a traditional desktop computer. But the real joy and genius of the PowerBook Duo is that you could either attach one to a small portable dock or, best of all, slide it into a big desktop dock, and by adding ports, extra storage and features, it transformed into a highly usable desktop system. And even though the last model got one of the spangly new PowerPC processors, they were definitely both slow even by the standards of the day and they didn’t even have a floppy drive far less a CD-ROM or Ethernet. Actually, I need to caveat all of that! It was still nearly an inch and a half thick, and at 4.2 pounds, it nevertheless weighed more than two of the new MacBooks. PowerBook Duos were small, light, capable laptop computers.
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