Apple Titanium PowerBook G4

powerbook g4 titanium.jpg

Date Introduced: 2001 Design: Jory Bell, Nick Merz, Danny Delulis* Words and Pictures: Adam Richardson

 

2001 was a big year for Apple. Steve Jobs had recently returned, and October of that year (just a month after 9/11) the iPod was launched, which led to the iPhone, which led to the Apple we know today. In early 2001 Apple was still finding its mojo and remained a decidedly niche brand. The colorful translucent iMac was a big hit in 1998, but the company’s laptop line was a languishing mess of polycarbonate blobs that even then felt cumbersome and uninspiring.

The PowerBook G4 was launched January 9, 2001 at MacWorld Expo and marked a 180 degree change from the curvy plastic PowerBook G3s that had come before (and from the consumer-oriented iBooks then on sale with their iMac-inspired colors and shapes). A cool, sleek 1-inch thick slab of titanium clad futurism that oozed power and brutalist refinement. And you paid for all that power and style: It was priced between $2,500 and $3,500 in 2001, or $3,800 to $5,125 today.

Just as the Apple IIc created the design language Apple would follow for years to come, the TiBook (as it was commonly known) kick-started the more minimalist aesthetic for PowerBooks and MacBooks to the current day. As we shall see, however, it was something of a one-off, as subsequent laptops took that aesthetic in a more bland direction.

Click images to enlarge.

Sadly, little is known about the design process and who drove it. Three people - Jory Bell, Nick Merz, and Danny Delulis - are typically credited, though the standardization of that order of mentioning them in every article, and the lack of any other details makes it seem like everyone is just repeating the same original source (whatever that was). That may very well be correct, but it’s difficult to discern their specific roles, or who else may have been involved. It’s hard to believe that Apple Industrial Design Group chief Jonathan Ive had no role in such a tent-pole product. But as some have observed, it bore little resemblance to anything else that Ive designed. The entry for the Industrial Designers Society of America’s Gold Award simply credits ”Apple Computer, Inc”, but that was standard practice at the time for the company. (Hence the asterisk up in the header.)

Square in all the Right Places

The TiBook is outwardly a simple rectangle which emphasizes its thinness by simply being a block, and not doing any visual tricks such as color breaks or chamfers to make it look thinner than it is. At 25mm (1”) thick, it was a full 18mm (0.7”) thinner than its G3 PowerBook predecessor. The 9mm bezels around the display that are actually thinner than on modern MacBooks, thanks to the rectilinear form being more efficient at packaging the LCD inside, and the 6.5mm lid thickness is the same as what you’ll find on current MacBooks. In 2001 it seemed impossibly thin. It’s 2.45kg / 5.4 lb weight is portly by today’s standards but was 30% lighter than a G3 PowerBook - even with that having a smaller 14” screen.

The G4 was the first Apple laptop with a widescreen display, leading to its more elongated footprint. Despite being touted as “mega-wide”, its 768x1152 LCD is in fact a little more square than the 16:9 movie ratio that became popular, and is closer to the 16:10 ratio that Apple uses to this day.

On the back of that display the lighted Apple logo was turned “upside down” for the first time so that it appears the right way up when the lid is open and in use.

The battery is removable (typical for the time as you only got 2-4 hours on a charge), and it has LEDs to indicate the level of charge at the push of a turned-metal button - a convenience that today’s laptops usually forego.

On the front edge is an optical-drive slot to the right of the lid latch, and around back a full complement of connectors: Firewire, ethernet, 2 USB, DVI monitor, S-Video, and RJ45 jack for a modem. There is a flap covering them which is notable for a few reasons: 1) It is spring-loaded and snaps shut with a satisfying clack. 2) The port icons are replicated on it, but upside down so that when you’re peering over from above the lid, they appear the right way. 3) It has a nicely cut out vent that matches the one that’s sitting in the middle of all the ports, allowing air to exit out. Oh, and 4) The flap is notoriously easy to have come off or get broken.

The keyboard is dark and translucent - its only nod to the bright translucent colors showing up everywhere else in the Apple product line at the time. Key travel is approximately 3mm, about double what you’ll find on a contemporary keypad. The trackpad has a separate button - Apple hadn’t figure out how to make the trackpad move to click yet - and is very small compared to modern ones. To my eye, the trackpad is the one off-note in the design. The overly rounded corners don’t fit with how squared off everything is elsewhere, and the wide frame around it takes away from the sleekness.

What I love about this machine is that there are visual surprises everywhere you look. Trackpad aside, there’s great consistency but the designers kept things interesting. For example, the vents and PC-card slot (which looks like a vent but is just a door) on the left side with its ejector button is a wonderful little mini composition of shapes and negative spaces. To me, the detailing is reminiscent of what one might have found aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars - sleek but purposeful and uncompromising.

The hinges are the only element to protrude from the slab, and to my eye they are one of the most beautiful shapes ever put on a computer - just really elegant, and a wonderful contrast to the flat surfaces everywhere else. The hinges are also quite fragile, and it was common for them to break.

Flies in the Ointment

That brings us to some of the downsides. Unfortunately, there were some significant flaws in the design. Despite titanium being touted as a material used in aircraft, it’s actually quite easily dented. It’s also very hard to paint, and many TiBooks had their paint flaking off after a few years. The hinges were particularly prone to this.

Another common issue was that the latch to hold the lid closed would get out of alignment and no longer work, so the lid would flop around slightly when shut. The designers wanted to get rid of the typical latches protruding out of above a screen that would hold it shut when closed. They devised a nifty spring-loaded latch that retracted into the display lid when the machine was opened. When the lid is closed, a magnet in the base pulls the latch down out of its hiding place, allowing the latch to hook into place. This complexity created some unreliability however.

Onward to Snoozeville

The persistent issues with the titanium material led Apple to abandon it in favor of aluminum just a couple of years later when the 12” and 17” PowerBook G4s were introduced, with what is virtually the same body design as we see now, almost two decades later. (I know Apple design is held up as a pinnacle, but really, you can easily guess what their products are going to look like from year to year. It’s well executed but predictable and unexciting - MacBook Pros have become the Honda Accord of laptops). PowerBooks and then MacBooks became every more minimalist, and more boring with each generation.

As a result, the far more interesting and nuanced design of the TiBook was left as a dead-end, never to be built upon. It reminds me of the Motorola RAZR (featured here), another device that sported an angular silvery-gray housing to create unprecedented thinness, which similarly proved to be a one-hit wonder.

What Gives it Soul?

Like the PowerBook 165 that came before it (which we’ve featured here), the Titanium PowerBook G4 set the template for laptops to come: thick and heavy plastic blobs banished in favor of lighter rectilinear metal slabs. The TiBook caused a sharp break in laptop design that everyone eventually followed, and which we still see all around us today, almost regardless of manufacturer. In fact, it’s only recently that bezels around the display have got as thin as what the TiBook achieved back in 2001.

But in their quest for minimalism, most laptops (including Apple’s) have lost the character that the TiBook has in spades. It’s simple, but not simplistic. Add on top of that the undeniable cool of aerospace titanium and - for its time - amazing power for a portable, and you have a machine that undeniably set the standard of style and performance for its time.

Other Sources

Product, FeatureAdam RichardsonComputing, American