PowerBook 180

The 180 topped the second PowerBook generation on October 19, 1992 with a 68030 at 33MHz and, more importantly, an active-matrix grayscale screen. That panel is the whole reason to care about this machine. Passive-matrix screens like the 160's ghosted and smeared, and dragging a window or scrolling quickly left trails across the display. Active matrix did not. It was the first Mac notebook screen that stayed comfortable through a long working day. The chassis was the PowerBook shape everyone had already copied: recessed keyboard, palm rests, trackball in the middle. A math coprocessor was available, and the 180 took more RAM and storage than the 160, which made it genuinely competitive with desktop Macs for a lot of work. Reviewers wrote about the screen and little else. Against Windows laptops still shipping monochrome STN panels, this was the usual evidence that Apple was ahead on portables. It cost a lot. Battery life came in under the 160's, because a brighter screen and a faster clock both draw more, and the real-world speed gain over the 160 was modest for ordinary office work. The display was what you were paying for. Color arrived with the 165c and 180c the following year, which makes the 180 the last and best of the black-and-white PowerBooks.