The 10 Most Important Laptops of All Time
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7. The First Laptop to Use a Lithium Ion Battery: Toshiba's Portege T3400 (1995)
In 1995, the nickel-metal hydride battery, always considered an interim technology, was on its way out. Lithium ion batteries lasted longer and were lighter, both very important qualities for mobile computer users. They were also virtually maintenance free, unlike nickel-metal hydride, which had to be completely run down every couple of months.
However, because they are prone to overheating, lithium ion batteries have set more laptops ablaze and resulted in more recalls by notebook vendors than any previous type of notebook battery. (Most recently, Lenovo recalled more than 200,000 notebooks.) Millions of batteries have had to be replaced, inconveniencing untold numbers of notebook customers.
But most users have been unaffected, and continue to benefit from a technology that improves every few months. Lately, lithium ion batteries have had to keep pace with new power-guzzling laptop features such as dual processors, RAID-enabled hard drives, and 20-inch screens. The Toshiba Portege T3400's battery life 12 years ago? About 4 hours. Not bad, even for a 4-pound laptop with a dual-scan monochrome screen.
8. The First Wireless-Enabled Laptop: Apple's iBook (1999)
First out was Apple's $299 AirPort base station and $99 plug-in card for home and office users. That same year, Apple began selling the iBook, which could be outfitted with an optional, internal AirPort wireless card, another first. The 12.1-inch-screen laptop, which came in blueberry or tangerine, was the first one ready for Wi-Fi hotspots.
9. The First Gaming Notebook: WidowPC's Sting 917X2 (2005)
WidowPC's Sting 917X2 was the first out of the gate, with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor. At a time when most notebook manufacturers offered perhaps one brand of video card with, at most, 128MB of RAM, the Sting gave buyers a choice of three industry-leading, desktop-worthy 256MB graphics adapters. The 11.3-pound Sting, with its black-widow-spider graphic, soon gave way to models like Alienware's green Area-51 notebooks, but its status quo-busting debut gave notebooks something they'd never had before among gamers: street cred.
10. The First Serious PC Killer: Apple's MacBook Pro (2006)
Shortly after Apple introduced the MacBook Pro, it introduced Boot Camp, an easy-to-use utility that lets users switch between Mac OS X and a Windows operating system.
With the final barriers to running Windows apps on a Mac falling, will Apple at last win the converts it needs to give Microsoft a serious run for its money? The jury is still out. But the winners in the meantime? We, the users.
Contributing Editor Carla Thornton regularly covers notebooks for PC World.
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