PowerBook G3 (Pismo)

Pismo is the one people kept. February 16, 2000, a G3 from 400 to 500MHz under Mac OS 9.0.4, and the first PowerBook with both FireWire and USB as standard. FireWire mattered because DV camcorders did. An editor could shoot on location, plug the camera into the laptop and cut, which had not been possible on a portable Mac before. An internal AirPort slot arrived at the same time, which made this one of the first mainstream laptops built with wireless networking assumed rather than added on. The dual expansion bays carried over from Wallstreet and Lombard, so you could still hot-swap optical drives and batteries, and you could run two batteries at once, which people traveling long distances appreciated a great deal. The G3 was no longer humiliating Intel's mobile chips the way the first ones had. It was fast enough for professional work and nobody complained. New World ROM is why Pismos lasted. They ran Mac OS X natively, so owners kept them for years, and a community grew up fitting faster processors and larger drives long after Apple stopped selling them.