Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

OWC: Get the Right Memory for Your Mac Top Quality, Competitive Price, Lifetime Backed Free Expert Support + Installation Videos too! MacBook & mini 8GB, iMac 16GB, Mac Pro up to 32GB. Click here

Poker Mac Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Second Class Macs & Road Apples

PowerBook 150

one

Dan Knight - 1999.09.18

Second Class Macs are Apple's somewhat compromised hardware designs. For the most part, they're not really bad - simply designs that didn't meet their full potential. (On our rating scale, the more brown apples, the worse the hardware.)

For the most part, the PowerBook 150 is a very nice computer. It was the fourth and final model in Apple's economy series that started with the PB 140 in October 1991. The 140 ran a then-decent 16 MHz 68030, shipped with 2 MB of memory (expandable to 8), and had a 20 or 40 MB hard drive.

The second generation was the PowerBook 145, introduced in August 1992. It replaced the pedestrian 16 MHz CPU with a 25 MHz 68030. Apple also included SCSI disk mode (which lets the PowerBook act as an external hard drive for another Mac), dropped the 20 MB hard drive, and added an 80 MB hard drive option.

About a year later, in June 1993, Apple quietly replaced the 145 with the 145B, which was almost the same computer with a few cost-cutting internal changes.

The PowerBook 150 came out in July 1994 with some advantages over the earlier models - and one seemingly insignificant drawback.

The 150 ran at 33 MHz, twice the speed of the PB 140, had a 4-bit grayscale display (earlier models had been strictly 1-bit b&w), and shipped with a just reasonable 4 MB of memory, which could be expanded to a whopping 40 MB. Hard drive options were 80, 120, and 250 MB. The screen was 640 x 480, not 640 x 400 as in earlier PowerBooks, and it was one pound lighter than the models the preceded it.

The one little drawback, and the only reason the PB 150 merits the Road Apple label: Apple eliminated the ADB port.

Big deal, you may think, so you can't attach a mouse or external keyboard. If that was all the ADB port was good for, the 150 wouldn't be a Road Apple.

The problem is, that ADB port is sometimes used to power peripherals, such as the PowerPrint cable that let's a PowerBook in the field work with almost any parallel port printer in existence. And the impressive Farallon EtherMac and EtherWave adapters that managed to triple bandwidth on the printer port and let older PowerBooks work easily on ethernet networks.

This in no way impairs the core functioning of the PowerBook 150, which is an excellent computer in every respect but one. We considered ourselves fortunate to have purchased a brand new PB 150 in late 1995 for under US$950, a record low price for a PowerBook at that time or any other.

Of course, a lot of us didn't discover the missing ADB port until we tried to use PowerPrint or EtherWave. By then, it was a bit late to discover this was Apple's only PowerBook (before 1999) without ADB. LEM

Details

Other Resources

Links for the Day

Recent Content

Recent Deals

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2009 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.

Custom Search

Amazon.com

Navigation

Used Mac Dealers
Apple History
Video Cards
Email Lists

Favorite Sites

MacSurfer
MacMinute
MacInTouch
MyAppleMenu
InfoMac
Macs Only!
The Mac Observer
Accelerate Your Mac
RetroMacCast
PB Central
MacWindows
The Vintage Mac
   Museum
DealMac
DealsOnTheWeb
Mac2Sell
ramseeker
Mac Driver Museum
JAG's House
System 6 Heaven
System 7 Today
the pickle's Low-End
   Mac FAQ
Abandonware
   Petition
Mac vs. PC Info

Affiliates

The Apple Store
Mac Connection
B&H
MacMall
TechRestore
ExperCom
Crucial Memory
batteries.com

Advertise

All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact at BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.

Open Link

Problems viewing this page with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6? It works fine in other browsers, including IE 7. We recommend Firefox for those using Windows, as it is standards based and more secure than IE 6 (and earlier). More LEM visitors use Firefox than any other browser.