May 8, 1997: on this day, Apple releases the ultra-portable PowerBook 2400c, weighing just 4.4 pounds, unique for its time.
Even years later, it remains a cult favorite among many Mac users.
Although the modern MacBook weighs only 2 pounds, but in the late 90s, the PowerBook 2400c weighed half the weight of most laptops and was surprisingly powerful. It was built on a PCI architecture with a 180 MHz PowerPC 603e processor, 256 KB cache, and was as functional as Apple’s more powerful PowerBook 3400c, which was available around the same time.
Impressively thin and unusually powerful
The PowerBook 2400C had good graphics, a 1.3GB IDE hard drive with 16MB RAM, expandable up to 48MB, a two to four hour battery life, and a decent number of ports, which were six.
To achieve unusual thinness and lightness, Apple made some compromises, abandoning the CD-ROM drive and internal floppy drive. It came preinstalled with Mac OS 8.
Unfortunately, after returning to Apple, Steve Jobs, reviewing all projects to optimize Apple’s offerings, removed the PowerBook 2400c from production in March 1998, leaving only four main products: the iMac G3, the Power Macintosh G3, and the PowerBook G3 series notebooks.
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