The new MacBook is cool, but the PowerBook Duo was cooler (2015)

Christopher Phin argues that while the new MacBook is impressive, the PowerBook Duo was cooler because of its clever dock-centric design. The Duo was a compact, if chunky by today’s standards (about 1.5 inches thick and 4.2 pounds) notebook that deliberately traded onboard ports and drives for a transformative docking system. Slide it into the Duo Dock and it became a full desktop with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, network, internal floppy, NuBus expansion, a second hard disk and optional accelerators like an FPU, L2 cache and extra VRAM. The mechanical delight of ejecting the laptop - complete with a manual eject mechanism - made the Duo feel like a portable subset of a larger machine rather than a standalone compromise.

That affection sits alongside clear-eyed criticism of the Duo’s dated Fit and Finish: spongy keyboard, wobbly screen and awkward key placement. Small design pleasures persist - swing-down feet that double as port covers, a power brick with fold-out cable arms and a clip-in battery recharger - features the writer wishes modern machines still offered. He imagines a 21st-century Duo with Thunderbolt-attached GPU, an external cloud-aware Fusion drive and a large Retina dock, and insists that the Duo’s physical ritual and modularity remain uniquely appealing despite modern laptops’ superior raw power.