Apple’s MacBook Pro turned 20 this year. Steve Jobs introduced the move to Intel processors that made the original Apple MacBook Pro possible at WWDC 2005. The reason revolved around computing power per watt. PowerPC’s offered 15 units of performance per watt, Intel’s future roadmap at the time offered 70 units of performance per watt.
This impacted energy efficiency and heat management as much of raw processing power – both of which were important for portable devices and smaller desktop units. Those metrics were a symptom of IBM’s inability to push the PowerPC architecture and fabrication processes as far as Intel could. Here’s Steve Jobs’ from his keynote address:
Because we want to make the best computers for our customers looking forward. Now, I stood up here two years ago in front of you and I promised you [a 3 GHz Power Macintosh G5], and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. But these aren’t even the most important reasons. The most important reasons are that as we look ahead, though we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come, as we look ahead we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map. And that’s why we’re going to do this. When we look at Intel, they’ve got great performance, yes, but they’ve got something else that’s very important to us. Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.
My journey with Apple’s MacBook Pro.
I was leaving Yahoo! to go to an agency then called Waggener Edstrom, bringing my experience working on digital campaigns and using blogs as a product communications channel. My redundancy cheque was in my bank account and my Mac Mini was of limited use due to it being a desktop computer.
Based on what I had seen the previous year and conversations I had with Yahoo! engineers there was only one laptop for me to get: the Apple MacBook Pro.
The Apple MacBook Pro represented a step change in what you could do. You were longer tethered by your power cord to your machine. At Yahoo! we had a bad cultural habit of using our laptops in meetings, not only for presenting, but to retrieve relevant files, take notes and have sideline conversations on Yahoo! Messenger that may have been apropos to the meeting going on, or organising what to have for lunch.
While you could access Yahoo! Messenger on your phone, it was much slower and less user friendly than iMessage, Signal or WhatsApp would be now.
If you had two meetings back-to-back there was a dash back to your desk to plug into your charger. Going to a conference meant a scramble for those seats next to a power socket.
The MagSafe connector meant that your laptop would no longer get dragged onto the floor by the power cable if someone brushed past your table. Instead it would be secured magnetically and easily disconnected.
If your Apple MacBook Pro was plummeting to the floor, an accelerometer onboard would at least park the hard drive heads to minimise any damage on landing. It wasn’t fool proof but it was step out on options previously available.
On the Apple MacBook Pro, the laptop lid closed and stayed in place, once Apple moved way from using the last generation PowerBook design case. Many Windows laptops had to have their screens locked with a latch or a button, a number still do. Previous PowerBooks were only slight more elegant with a flush mechanical push-button placed on the front edge of the lower case. Pressing it pushed a small internal bar that unhooked a latch extending down from the display bezel.
In a darkened room the keyboard would light up. This was a game changer when you were watching a projected presentation, or in my case, going through emails while watching CSI DVD boxsets of an evening.
Apple’s MacBook Pro was a game changer for me. I didn’t need to work at my desk. I could work in a local coffee shop, or a different part of the office without bringing my power pack.
Apple’s MacBook Pro radically changed working from home. You no longer had to worry about a separate webcam perching precariously on the top of your screen. Instead, the MacBook Pro had it built into the top of the laptop screen. Giving you an integrated video studio that we now take for granted but was revolutionary when it was launched.
An aside on laptop cameras
So IBM made the first laptop with an integrated laptop with a webcam back in 1996 called the ThinkPad 850 which was a PowerPC workstation in a laptop format.
There was also the Sony VAIO PCG-C1 PictureBook which was a Windows sub notebook that had a camera which could be rotated to look towards the user or in front of the laptop lid. Both were very expensive for the time and saw limited usage. The MD in my first agency had a PCG-C1 and it was a beautiful piece of industrial design for the time.
It’s the kind of laptop that would have looked right at home in Ghost In The Shell. Neither of them models could be considered to mainstream products. But the Apple MacBook Pro brought the built-in camera into the mainstream of laptop design.
Remote working.
Skype was only a few years old at this point, allowing for video calls with clients, distributed teams and remote working. With a MacBook Pro, you had it all together in a seamless package. Twenty years ago we were pretty close to what became the new normal during COVID and in the post-COVID work world.
Battery life
Early on in my agency career, a lot of my clients had Tumi leather bags. The Tumi Alpha bag became a corporate rite-of-passage. You were a corporate traveller. Tumi had benefits for air travellers, being soft enough to squeeze into an overseas bin, but tough enough to protect the contents and not burst at the seams while you waited at the checked baggage carousel.
Beyond the social signalling Tumi bags became useful as a repository for spare batteries and a charging block with cable. There was probably a note pad and some pens in there as well, along with travel documents.
That’s what a work day outside the office needed. One of the pleasures of people watching in an airline lounge at the time was watching the passive aggressive conflict over a limited amount of electric sockets available.
The Apple MacBook Pro started off with a solid 4 1/2 hours of battery life making it ideal if you went to a conference like I ended up doing at the time. Or you could take it along to a pitch, present and head back to the office without your power brick. Things changed when Apple introduced the unibody model. You could no longer swap out a spare battery. Apple eventually compromised with a low price battery replacement for aged out batteries. This also meant that Apple pivoted to a full working day on batteries – a game changer in laptop computing.
The move to ARM-based Apple silicon
In the same way that Steve Jobs announced the move to Intel in 2005, that reasoning was mirrored in the 2020 move to ARM-based Apple silicon focus on performance per watt, which made the MacBook Pro even more ‘road warrior’ friendly.
ARM also offered other opportunities
- Custom silicon including on-silicon neural networks and security enclaves.
- Common architectures with iPads, iPhones and the AppleTV.
- Control over its own silicon roadmap, rather than being tied to Intel’s chip-making process delays.
What’s also changed over the 15 years of the MacBook Pro is their ubquity. In coffee shops like the ones near my home, the few people that seem to use non-Apple laptops are usually mainland Chinese students. And their laptops borrow a lot design cues from the MacBook Pro.
More information
Macworld Podcast: The history and future of the MacBook | Macworld
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