From TiBook to MacBook
The millennial Macs that introduced Apple’s metal years
Intel era
In June 2005, Steve Jobs told the faithful that hell had frozen over: Apple was moving to Intel processors. The PowerPC G5 was too hot and too hungry for laptops, and Apple felt the PowerPC was now a dead end. “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 roadmap,” Jobs said. Intel offered what PowerPC couldn’t: chips running 3GHz and more that didn’t make Powerbooks hotter than the sun.
O neof the great years for Mac has to be 2001. The PowerBook G4 was made from 2001 to 2006 first in titanium (nicknamed the TiBook) and then in aluminium (nicknamed the AlBook). It wasn’t just beautiful. It was highpowered too, with impressive battery life and a powerful G4 processor. The titanium model had a 15-inch display and the aluminium one came in 12-, 16- and 17-inch sizes. The 17in aluminium G4 was the first Apple laptop to get FireWire 800.
The PowerBook looked very different from its consumer-oriented sibling, the iBook G4. Apple had already moved away from the oversized candy-coloured clamshells of the original iBook G3, embracing a more sober and traditional design, and in late 2003 it replaced the G3 in the iBook with the more powerful and efficient G4. A slot-loading optical drive replaced its predecessor’s CD/DVD tray and there was a new, less spongy keyboard.