Apple PowerBook G4/550
I have the main (CIB).
type computer
country USA
year 2001
os Mac os 9.2.1 & X 10.1
cpu PowerPC 7440
speed 550 MHz
ram 128 MB
hd Ultra ATA 20 GB
graphic 15.2″ 1280 x 960 ATI Mobility Radeon 16 MB DDR SDRAM
colors millions
sound yes
ports VGA, USB (2), firewire, modem, ethernet, S-video, sound out
The Apple PowerBook G4/550 — The Titanium Laptop
Released in January 2001 at Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote, the PowerBook G4 Titanium was one of the most beautiful and influential laptop designs ever created. Its titanium enclosure — at 2.5 cm thick, dramatically thinner than any previous PowerBook — combined with a stunning 15.2-inch widescreen display to create a laptop that looked unlike anything else available. Jobs famously produced it from a manila envelope to demonstrate its thinness. The Titanium PowerBook established the design language for Apple’s professional laptops for years and directly inspired the aluminium MacBook Pro that succeeded it.
Titanium Construction
The use of titanium for the enclosure was a bold and expensive engineering decision. Titanium offered an extraordinary combination of strength and light weight — the PowerBook G4 weighed just 2.4 kg despite its large display — and its rigid construction resisted the flex that plagued many plastic laptops. The material gave the machine a premium, almost jewellery-like quality that set it apart from every competing laptop of the era. The titanium finish, combined with the large widescreen display, made it instantly recognisable and genuinely desirable as an object.
PowerPC G4 and AltiVec
The 550 MHz PowerPC G4 processor with its AltiVec ”Velocity Engine” SIMD unit provided excellent performance for the creative professional tasks at which Apple’s laptops excelled — video editing, graphic design, music production, and 3D rendering. AltiVec delivered dramatically accelerated performance for applications optimised to use it, making the PowerBook G4 a capable professional workstation in portable form. It ran Mac OS X and Classic Mac OS in a dual-boot configuration, providing access to both Apple’s new operating system and the legacy software library.