The PowerBook 190 and its companion PowerBook 190cs are
laptop computers manufactured by
Apple Computer as part of their
PowerBook brand, introduced to the market in August 1995. The two models differ only in their screen: the 190 had a 9.5"
greyscale
In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a grayscale image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an ''amount'' of light; that is, it carries only intensity information. Gray ...
display, while the 190cs featured a 10.4" color display. Apple's target sales audience for this model was the college student in need of a no-frills portable computer.
In terms of hardware, along with the
PowerBook 150, the 190 has much in common with Apple's "professional" laptop of the same period, the
PowerBook 5300 series. In exchange for the cheaper price point (approximately US$2,200 compared to over US$6,000 for the cutting-edge PowerBook 5300ce), the 190 was equipped with a
passive matrix Passive matrix addressing is an addressing scheme used in early LCDs. This is a matrix addressing scheme meaning that only ''m'' + ''n'' control signals are required to address an ''m'' × ''n'' display. A pixel in a passi ...
LCD rather than a crisper
active matrix Active matrix is a type of addressing scheme used in flat panel displays. In this method of switching individual elements (pixels), each pixel is attached to a transistor and capacitor ''actively'' maintaining the pixel state while other pixels ar ...
screen.
More significantly, while the 5300s ran
PowerPC 603e processors at 100 or 117 MHz, the 190 had only a
Motorola 68LC040
The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola nam ...
clocked at 33 MHz - in fact, the 190/cs were the last Macintoshes to use a
68k CPU. However, Apple offered a PPC upgrade for the 190, a heavily marketed selling point for all new 68040 Macs at the time. In addition, a rather cramped 500 MB
IDE hard drive was standard, and factory models shipped with
System 7.5.2.
It is the only one of the 100 series PowerBooks that does not use the original 140 case design (except the PowerBook 100), thus was the only one to include a
68LC040 processor, a
trackpad
A touchpad or trackpad is a pointing device featuring a tactile sensor, a specialized surface that can translate the motion and position of a user's fingers to a relative position on the operating system that is made output to the screen. Touchp ...
rather than the standard
trackball
A trackball is a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes—like an upside-down ball mouse with an exposed protruding ball. Users roll the ball to position the o ...
, and along with the 150 the only ones to provide for more than 14 MB RAM expansion and larger, less-expensive IDE drives. The 190 was the de facto replacement for the
PowerBook 500
The PowerBook 500 series (codenamed ''Blackbird'', which it shared with the older Macintosh IIfx) is a range of Apple Macintosh PowerBook portable computers first introduced by Apple Computer with the 540c model on May 16, 1994. It was the firs ...
series, which was completely discontinued with the introduction of the 5300 and the only 68040-based PowerBook Apple offered.
Sales figures for the 190 are unavailable, but in any event it did not benefit from reports of "exploding battery syndrome," where the similar 5300 factory-default
lithium-ion battery
A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery which uses the reversible reduction of lithium ions to store energy. It is the predominant battery type used in portable consumer electronics and electric vehicles. It also s ...
could short-circuit and burst into flames. Apple quickly offered a recall on all such batteries. The PowerBook 190 series used a
nickel metal hydride battery
Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive but large pieces are slow to ...
which did not exhibit this problem.
Production of the 190 halted in June 1996, while the 190cs was sold until October of that year, when it was replaced by the
PowerBook 1400
The PowerBook 1400 is a notebook computer that was designed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.) from 1996 to 1998 as part of their PowerBook series of Macintosh computers. Introduced in October 1996 at a starting price of $2,499, ...
cs.
Timeline
External links
* Apple's datasheets
PowerBook 190PowerBook 190cs
* apple-history.com
PowerBook 190PowerBook 190cs
{{Apple hardware before 1998
190
Year 190 ( CXC) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Aurelius and Sura (or, less frequently, year 943 ''Ab urbe condita'' ...
68k Macintosh computers