PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet)

Wallstreet took the Beige G3's performance and put it in a laptop that professionals still talk about. A G3 between 233 and 300MHz under Mac OS 8.1, a 14.1-inch active-matrix screen among the largest and sharpest on any portable, and two expansion bays. Those bays are the reason people loved it. You could carry two batteries, or a battery and a CD-ROM, or a floppy and a Zip drive, and reconfigure the machine on a desk in an airport. Build quality matched. Strong hinges, a good keyboard, ports placed where you would want them, and enough durability that owners were still using them a decade later. Against Pentium II mobile chips the G3 held the same advantage it held on the desktop, so video editors, programmers and designers had a genuinely fast machine away from a desk. Reviewers ranked it among the best laptops on sale at any price, which three years after the 5300 caught fire was a considerable distance traveled. A second revision arrived later in 1998 with higher clocks and better graphics. Lombard and Pismo refined this machine rather than replacing its ideas.