Apple just registered the PowerBook trademark. Why? Is there really a possibility of an eventual return of Cupertino’s legendary notebook family?
The Powerbook – small laptop – which became a cult for Apple in 1991 that allowed the Cupertino giant to enter the laptop market, may soon be back on the shelves. At least that’s what Apple’s registration of the Powerbook trademark suggests.
Everything is possible, but highly unlikely. The PowerBook trademark application had been made and obtained last February by Thomas La Perle, Apple’s chief legal officer. But, as we know, every single move of Apple makes news and triggers curiosity, speculations, rumors and gossips. The hypothesis that is in the news at the moment is the idea that Apple is going to retire the MacBook family and replace it with what? New laptops with the historical PowerBook brand. Perhaps the most logical explanation, although difficult to believe, is that the Cupertino giant had forgotten to register the trademark in question, or “who will live, will see”. Apple, meanwhile, does not comment.
Powerbook: a success story
Let’s take a small step back, however, now, especially for completeness and for the joy of nostalgic, and for those who, perhaps, did not live the initial era of PowerBooks. The first PowerBook featured a floppy disk drive, a black and white passive matrix display, and a multicolor Apple logo. Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, had described it at the time of its unveiling as the “first supercomputer that you could actually bring aboard an airplane.” The Powerbook 100 – the first in the series – had been designed by Apple, in collaboration with Sony, and brought into Cupertino’s coffers 1 billion in profits in its first year. It featured a 68HC000 16 MHz processor, with 2 or 4 MB of RAM and a 20 or 40 MB hard drive. The PowerBook G4, on the other hand, was the last in the series and the last to use the PowerPC processor aided by 128 MB of RAM and 10 GB of storage. It was on sale from 2001 to 2006 until the arrival of the MacBooks that ended its nearly 15-year lifespan.