The processing power in the 2016 MacBook (right) is nearly seven million times greater than the first PowerBook. Only one inch thick and weighing five pounds, it became a cult machine, and its thin, crisp look began a new era in Mac laptop design that was carried through to the MacBooks. Introduced in 2001, the 99.5% pure titanium body and 15" wide screen set this G4-based PowerBook apart from the crowd. The first version I had, 400Mhz, ran so hot it would scold your lap. It was a thin flexible component that only had a tiny plastic screw at the top row to hold it in place. Except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when certain models were experiencing battery problems, PowerBooks were very popular. PowerBook G4 keyboard wasn't stable and firm and the caps could easily break off. 2003 and replaced by the 15 aluminum PowerBook G4. These are the original software discs that would have came with the very first PowerBook G4 Titaniums that were made in early 2001 (PowerBook3,2). Back then, there was an unwritten rule that you skip the first generation of a new Apple product. This was a landmark introduction that would influence generations of designs across the PC industry (and still holds up well today). There was just no comparison in regard to the GUI.
Mac OS X Tiger was light years ahead of Windows XP. I was really impressed by the build quality and the OS. A friend let me try it out for a few hours. The first Powerbook G4 I ever got my hands on was back in 2004. Introduced in 1994, this model used a touchpad instead of the trackball found on earlier models. Apple introduced its first G4 notebook, the Titanium PowerBook (TiBook), in January 2001 the last one was discontinued in Sept. In January 2001, Apple brought out the Titanium PowerBook G4. I was not using any Apple laptop back in 2001, just desktops. Like the Mac desktop evolution, the first PowerBooks used Motorola 68K CPUs and subsequently changed to PowerPC chips in 1995.
Although not terribly popular, there was an Apple portable prior to the PowerBook (see Macintosh Portable). The first portable to feature a wrist rest on the keyboard, PowerBooks were very popular and lasted until the MacBook line in 2006. PowerBookApple's first family of laptop computers, introduced in 1991 with a monochrome screen.