I’d love to see Apple make some sort of docking station that you could slide your Air into and turn it into a full desktop with extra storage and even card slots. Bought new in 1994, the Duo 280 would set you back the equivalent of over $4500.
What still amazes me to this day is pricing. The new MacBook Air is much thinner and lighter. Storage without any moving parts making them blindingly fast in comparison. It was over 22 years ago, but just look at how far the tech has come. I never really was a ‘PC’ guy except for gaming. It was small and light with a decent built-in trackball. I was still impressed with the little Mac Duo. Only a few years into the 2000’s I got a job as an IT assistant and was given a PowerBook G3. While there is no comparison of a 1994 Duo to the new MacBook Air, at the time the 040 chip was pretty impressive. It also allowed the grayscale notebooks to connect to a color monitor showing 16-bits color depth.
Doing this would turn your tiny portable into a full desktop computer with all the ports you’d need, two NuBus expansion card slots, and space for a full sized internal hard drive. The Apple Duo Dock was unique in that you actually closed up the Duo notebook and slide the entire thing into the Duo Dock. This included multi-port, floppy drive, and SCSI docks.Īll of these docks kept the Duos portable. This connector was used for all sorts of add-ons. Each of the Duo laptops had a large docking connector in back. One of the selling features of the Duo line was the Duo Dock. The philosophy of the Duo line was simple – small, lightweight, and powerful. The screen was a very crisp 9.1-inch active matrix grayscale LCD running at 640×400 pixels. The Duo 280, had a 68LC040 running at 33MHz, 4MB of RAM, and a 240MB hard drive. Macintosh computers were based on the original Motorola processors – the 68000 series. You have to remember that this was back in the mid 90’s. At the time, these Duos were the pinnacle of portable computing. I was able to purchase a used working PowerBook Duo 280 and was given a broken Duo 210 for no additional cost. My first portable Mac was the PowerBook 100, which was the smallest Mac laptop at the time. It was back in the late 90’s that I happened upon the PowerBook Duo Mac laptops.