PowerBook Duo 210

The Duo 210 shipped October 19, 1992 as the thinnest, lightest and most stripped-down Mac Apple had made. 4.2 pounds, a little over an inch thick, a 68030 at 25MHz and a 9-inch monochrome passive-matrix screen. No floppy drive. Barely any ports. The missing hardware was the point, because the Duo slid into a desktop dock. The Duo Dock swallowed the machine whole and gave it a full monitor, a full keyboard, NuBus slots and more storage, which turned a bare travel computer into a desktop when you got back to the office. Nobody else was doing this, and the idea would not properly return until the MacBook Air and the USB-C dock two decades later. A magnesium internal frame kept the small case stiff. The compromises were real all the same. One Duo-specific expansion connector, a cramped keyboard against the full-size PowerBooks on the same shelf, and no floppy at a time when software arrived on floppies. Against the NEC UltraLite and Compaq's early subnotebooks it was thinner and far better integrated, and it was also the slower of the two Duos launched that day. Executives and consultants bought them. Reviewers admired the ambition and then added up what the docks cost, which was the recurring complaint about the whole line.