PowerBook G3

The PowerBook G3 was a professional line of laptop Macintosh computers made by Apple. It was the first laptop to use the PowerPC G3 (PPC750) series of microprocessors.

Related Topics:
Macintosh - Apple - PowerPC G3

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The first Macintosh PowerBook G3 was introduced on November 1997 as a successor to the PowerBook 3400.

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The second generation of PowerBook G3's with the name PowerBook G3 series (Mainstreet/Wallstreet) were introduced on March 1998 with redesigned case which was lighter and more round. 233MHz, 250MHz and 292MHz version were made available with three display options which were 12" passive matrix LCD, 13.3" TFT LCD and 14.1" TFT LCD. The same design was updated on August 1998 (Wallstreet-II) and now had 14.1" display in all models. Processors were bumped with 233MHz, 266MHz and 300MHz models. The case contained two docking bays, one on each side. The left hand bay could accommodate a battery, a diskette drive, a third-party Iomega Zip drive, or a third-party add-on hard drive. The right hand bay was larger and could accommodate all of the above plus a 5-1/4" optical drive (CD-ROM or DVD-ROM). A small internal nickel-cadmium battery allowed swapping of the main batteries while the computer "slept". With a battery in each bay, battery life was doubled. DVDs could be displayed with the use of a hardware decoder built into a CardBus (PCMCIA) card.

Related Topics:
LCD - Battery - Diskette - Iomega - Zip drive - Optical drive - CD-ROM - DVD-ROM - Nickel-cadmium battery - CardBus

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The third generation of PowerBook G3 (Lombard) was introduced on May 1999 and was dramatically thinner and lighter than its predecessor. It also had longer battery life and the user could double the battery life to 10 hours by adding second battery in the expansion bay. The keyboard was also improved and now featured translucent plastics where the model gained its nickname "bronze keyboard". Because of increased processor performance, the display of DVDs no longer required the use of the hardware accelerator card. The Lombard was the first PowerBook to use industry-standard optical drives. This meant that CD and DVD recorders designed by other manufacturers will often work in this computer, often at a price far less than those manufactured by Apple. Drives for the Lombard and Pismo can be used interchangeably.

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A fourth generation of PowerBook G3 (Pismo) with the name PowerBook was introduced on February 2000. The word "Pismo? means "scripture? in Polish, as well as referring to the resort town of Pismo Beach, California. The form factor was identical to previous G3 PowerBooks, but the machine internals were improved dramatically. The Pismo PowerBook implemented unified motherboard architecture and had SCSI replaced with the FireWire (IEEE-1394), and the PCI graphics were updated to AGP. It was also the first professional Apple laptop with AirPort networking as an official option (although it could be added to the earlier models via various third-party CardBus (PCMCIA) cards).

Related Topics:
Scripture - Polish - Pismo Beach - California - SCSI - FireWire - AirPort networking

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