# The best laptop Apple ever made

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Jeff Geerling
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpPIrmZB828
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/23059

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

You might think picking the best laptop Apple ever made is a subjective thing, but you'd be wrong because it's this one, the 11in MacBook Air. Some other YouTubers might disagree. And you know what? That's okay. Today, I'm going to try to convince you why the 11in Air is the best Apple laptop ever. Yes, even better than the Neo or the iconic toilet seat iBook. I bought this particular 11-in Air in 2014, and the main reason I liked it back then and still like it today was the raw portability. If a laptop is a portable computer, there has to be an ideal mixture of performance and portability. To me, the 11in Air is it. Now, yes, it had its flaws. One of them a showstopper, in fact, but it's also sentimental to me. And maybe that clouds my judgment a little. I took this thing to some of my first open-source conferences where I built my first Raspberry Pi cluster with an Ansible playbook. I wrote most of my Anible for DevOps book on it. It traveled probably the most miles of any computer I've ever owned and was also the computer I used around the house as I transitioned into new life as a father navigating all the insanity that entails. That's why I'm so attached to this thing. I acknowledge it has flaws though. A big one is the battery life. And unfortunately time is always against these things. So my first order of business today is replacing the battery. For that I'm going to need a few things. That's why I came to MicroEnter. Not only do they have all the tools I need, they have things like this, a set of replacement MacBook feet. If you've been using one lopsided for years, a part like this is a godsend. Or if you wanted to upgrade your MacBook's SSD and you just found out about Apple's proprietary connector, well, they have this. MicroEnter has these and thousands of other parts for any repair, Mac, PC, or even SPC. And right now, we're in the middle of monitor madness. All through the month of March, they have these special deals on monitors. Click on the link in the description to see all their latest deals. And if you're in Austin, Texas, get ready for a grand opening later this year. Now, I sold this laptop to my sister after I upgraded in 2017, and she used it for a few years. But apparently, according to this note that she left me, the hard drive had crashed at some point. Booting into Internet Recovery worked, but dis utility wouldn't format the internal SSD, so I knew it was shot. Luckily, MicroEnter sells this little NVME adapter that lets me plug in a standard SSD instead of a more expensive aftermarket upgrade. So, while I get that plugged in, let's ask YouTuber Brankus Creations his favorite laptop. Hi, I'm Bruce from Brankus Creations. And while I have a lot of favorite Mac laptops, the standout for me has to be the Titanium PowerBook G4. This wasn't just another new model. It was a major turning point in Apple's laptop design. When it launched in 2001, it instantly made every other laptop look dated. It was impossibly thin, wrapped in titanium instead of plastic, and the ridiculously narrow bezels around the display made the desktop feel huge. Unlike today's Mac laptops, it was upgrade friendly. You could easily swap the battery. Access to the RAM was right under the keyboard, and you could even replace the hard drive with the removal of a few case screws. It had desktop class G4 performance, loads of IO ports, and being released during the transition between two eras of Mac history, it could natively boot both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS 10. I remember when one of my relatives bought that Tai book. At the time, the bezel was, as Johnny would say, impossibly thin. — It's incredible. Let me just show you how thin this is. That's my finger. Okay. — But thinner laptops also means smaller batteries. And that was one of the many reasons the world never saw a G5 laptop. The CPUs would just suck down too much power, leading to photoshopped mock-ups like these. But even the Air's battery was barely up to the task. And that was one of the major sacrifices Apple made bringing an Intel chip into its smallest laptop. You could only get 9 hours of web browsing on here versus 12 hours on the 13-in. And that's with a smaller display and fewer ports. But I was willing to make that sacrifice back when I traveled more and used this thing like on airplane tray tables. The great thing is, just like the MacBook Neo, the battery in here is just installed in a removable tray. And replacing the battery takes all of like 10 minutes. So, while I'm replacing it, let's hear from Action Retro. Oh, hey Jeff. How'd you get in my house? This is my PowerBook 1400C, and it is my favorite Apple laptop of all time. Introduced in 1996, the C designates this as the high-end active matrix color version. The keyboard on this thing is among the best keyboards I've ever used on any laptop. You don't even have to take any screws out to get under the keyboard. Slide this piece to the left and lift it off and the keyboard lifts right up. Can you imagine modern Apple designing something like that? — Well, in terms of keyboards, probably not. But at least the Neo is back to

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

user serviceable parts accepting the RAM and storage upgrades. I never had a 1400, but I do have a G3 Wall Street and 3400C. And those keyboards are great. But the trackpad, man, going back and using these earlier laptops, I'm remembering just how revolutionary Apple's glass trackpad was. Everyone made fun of it for being so huge at first, but really the glass trackpad with multi-touch was the first time in computing where it felt better to use a touch surface than a mouse, at least for things that aren't games. And the 11in Air had that trackpad, which is another reason I loved it. That huge trackpad made up a lot for the fact that the rest of the thing was so small, and the way the little cutout lined up with it was just perfect when I was using the trackpad with the laptop on my lap. The modern cutout here, like on this Neo, just doesn't feel the same. Anyway, while I'm busy installing Mac OS 10 on the new SSD, let's hear from someone else. Hey, it's Colin from This Does Not Compute. I think one of the most influential laptops is the Clamshell iBook G3. It came at a time when laptops were finally approachable and affordable by the general public instead of being this esoteric thing used by nerds and business executives. Its design followed in the footsteps of the iMac and really reinforced how fun computing was in the late '9s. This is one of the later special edition models with a 466 MHz Power PC G3 processor, DVD ROM drive, and FireWire port for better expandability than standard models. And of course, it is green. The clamshell iBook certainly wasn't the best laptop of its time, but that was never really the most important factor for its target audience. What mattered most is that it put a friendly face on this thing called the internet that people were just getting to know. That is, after all, what the I in eyebook stood for. Now, that got me thinking. First of all, I'm a little jealous of that lime eyebook because I didn't even know that color existed until today. But back in the early 2000s, the I did mean a lot, especially on the i Book because it was the first laptop on the market that you could get builtin Wi-Fi. In fact, I have one of the original airport base stations. Maybe in a follow-up, I could see about getting that to dial up to the internet through my Orangey eyebook. Let me know in the comments if you want to see me try it. But this iBook, which is technically Tangerine, not Orange, has a little personal history. This was my aunt's old laptop. And I remember the first time I experienced Wi-Fi was at a family party at her loft. She was showing my grandpa how to use it. And in a fun turn of events, I actually have a picture of me taking that picture because my aunt's partner caught me snapping a photo on my digital Mava back at the turn of the century. And I think for that reason alone, the iBook deserves its own distinction as the first laptop where Apple took the industry fully wireless. Really, that was the era that led Apple down the path to the razor thin air that's 100 times better in every way. But this wouldn't have existed without the iBook. Before I get stuck in nostalgia land though, let's hear from three other YouTubers. — Hello there. I'm Steve from Mac 84 and one of my favorite Apple portables is the clamshell iBook G3. Wait, you guys did that one already? Even the key lime one. Got the box here and everything. Well, I'm going to talk about them anyway. First, we have Tangerine and Blueberry. And then the second generation of iBooks were key lime, indigo, and graphite. Those all had FireWire ports on them for the most part. But the Key Lime one was something special. You could only get this color if you ordered online through the Apple Store. This was my first DVD player. Well, not just watching it on the screen. It actually has a composite video jack and you could plug a cable into that. Of course, it's a proprietary cable. Apple switched some of the signals in there, but you could plug it into your TV, which was really cool. These clam shell iBooks were so cool because they had handles. You could just close it up and that's it. You didn't need a laptop bag or anything. Although the handles do tend to have some cracked plastic on them time and time again. But that wasn't the first laptop with a handle. Apple had this, the Emate 300, which is kind of a weird name for it because they only released one of them. But I think they had more in the pipeline. I know what you're saying. This is not a laptop. It's a Newton. But I mean, look at that. It's got a screen. It's got a keyboard. You have wireless through infrared. I mean, it's close enough to a laptop, right? Hey everyone, Mr. Macintosh here, and my favorite laptop is the iBook G3. Lime. Wait a minute. My actual favorite laptop is the Macintosh Portable. This was Apple's very first laptop. It was introduced in 1989 for a whopping price of $7300 with the hard drive option, which equals to $19,000 in 2026. It weighed 15. 8 lb. And in comparison, a 15-inch MacBook Air today weighs only three pounds. This was truly a desktop class Macintosh in a luggable case. And this is why the

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 14:00) [10:00]

Macintosh Portable is my favorite Apple laptop. How come everybody has Lime except for me? Hey, it's Crazy Ken from the Computer Clan. And when asked what is Apple's best laptop, well, I got to be pragmatic. I think their latest design and their Apple silicon stuff is currently their best. But if I had to pick a favorite, it would absolutely be the iBook G3 clamshells because of the whole new design and the introduction of wireless networking. I mean, can't go wrong with that, right? That's pretty it's pretty sweet. But, you know, I have a graphite and I wish I had a Blueberry. Something about that blue just looks nice. It does indeed. But Steve wasn't done earlier. He mentioned a couple other contenders for Apple's best laptops, at least judging by my criteria of portability. Later on, they came out with these more traditional style laptops. I was always jealous of this one because it had two USB ports and a built-in microphone. This is the iBook G3 dual USB or Snow or whatever model it is. They actually came out with a G4 one as well. And boy, this one stinks. There's some sort of adhesive under the keyboard that just smells like dirty feet or something like that. That eyebook does remind me of another favorite Apple laptop, and that is the 12in PowerBook. This thing is so tiny and compact, but it still has most of the features of its 15-in and 17-in siblings, except for maybe that PC card slot. But Apple actually made another 12-in laptop in 2015. This is the MacBook. This only has one USBC port here, but look at that screen. It's a 12-in diagonal screen. The keyboard's a little bit flat, but it's very, very portable. Oh jeez, I'm way over time. Hold on one second. There's just a few more laptops I want to mention here. — Okay, judging by the background, I don't think we have time in this video to go through Steve's whole collection, but I think that 12-in MacBook solved one of the two major problems I had with the 11-in Air. It had a larger retina display with smaller bezels. On the other hand, it cost too much, had a horrible keyboard, and only one USBC port. But honestly, the main reason I finally gave up on my Air was the narrow height of the screen. Developers never tested stuff on such a short display. So, I'd inevitably run into websites or even applications where a button would be beyond the bottom of the screen with no way to scroll down to it. At least on websites, I could adjust the CSS using Safari's web inspector to get the button up higher. But as time wore on, developers used more and more vertical real estate for eye candy, and I'd see dialogue boxes that were like 800 pixels tall. That's no good when your display only has 768 and the first 22 are sucked up by the menu bar. I mean, I guess I should count my blessings. If I ran Mac OS Tahoe on here, I'd probably just see like a rounded corner in the window title and that's it. But I digress. That 12-in MacBook seems to be a direct inspiration for the Neo because the Neo is basically that, but at a price that people can actually afford, and it has two USBC ports, not just the one. But the two big issues that held back the 11-in Air were the display and the battery life. And both of those problems could be solved today by Apple putting in basically the 12-in display and swapping in Apple silicon chips instead of Intel. It's a shame really. I love this form factor. I love the thin front tapering to the thicker back. The way the laptop slides into a sleeve or bag is just awesome. These modern boxy MacBooks have nothing on the feel of these old Airs. They look good in product shots, sure, but it's like how I feel about cameras. I love the precision and the capabilities of my Sona cameras, but man, that grip, it feels like it's made for robots. Even my ancient Nikon D700 has a more organic grip that just feels right when you hold it. Older Macs from the Power PC era had their highlights, but technology wasn't to the point where they were truly portable. I mean, just look at a sidebyside of this iBook and the Air. I can even stack up three MacBook Airs, and we're still not at the same height. But the 11-in Air was ultimately a failure. It was a product ahead of its time. I think if Apple introduced it today with the same specs as the Neo, but in this smaller enclosure, it would reach its perfect form. But what should you do if you have one of these laying around? Well, it's certainly still useful. You could install Mac OS Mojave on it and still run modern apps like Sublime Text. That's what I did to type up the script for this video right off my NAS over Wi-Fi. Or you could install Linux on it. it won't run super fast, but if you just need a little portable laptop for typing without distractions or SSH access, this might be the perfect option. But in the end, I agree with some of the other YouTubers that the iBook G3 was maybe the most influential laptop Apple ever made. But I don't think it's the best. That's this laptop. And I wish Apple kept this design for the Air because it truly feels different than the boxy modern Airs or even the Neo. Until next time, I'm Jeff Gerling.