Macintosh 100 (PowerBook 100)

The PowerBook 100 shipped October 21, 1991 with the 140 and the 170, and it settled what a laptop looks like. Sony did much of the manufacturing and mechanical engineering. Between them Apple and Sony pushed the keyboard to the back of the case and put a palm rest and a centered trackball in front of it. Every laptop since has done this. At the time, portable PCs put the keyboard at the front edge and the pointing device wherever it fitted, and using one was worse in a way people had stopped noticing until this turned up. The internals were the weakest of the three. A 68000 at 15.667MHz rather than the 68030 in its siblings, which made it slower, lighter, cheaper and easier on the battery. The 10-inch passive-matrix screen was nowhere near the 170's active matrix. None of that mattered much. It weighed little enough to carry, ran for a few hours, and felt like a laptop rather than the 16-pound Macintosh Portable of two years earlier. Writers, students and anyone traveling bought them. It was the cheapest of the three and sold accordingly, and its contribution was industrial design rather than silicon: rear keyboard, palm rest, pointing device in the middle, which is the shape of the machine you are probably reading this on.