The idea would fly today. Especially today. It's no longer a bad idea to buy a laptop if you require high performance. Not Apple though. Fuck Apple. Samsung, or Asus or Dell (Alienware) should do this.
On the other hand, you could simply buy a non-DUO PowerBook and be alright without all the accessories. So: No, it wasn't just "the Apple thing to do".
Your videos are an unlikely source of peace and stability during these hectic times, just like I imagine you use these projects to lose yourself and escape your day-to-day concerns, the audience gets to follow you to that tinkerer's nirvana. Thank you for doing such a wonderful job on these videos.
I still have my duo 2300c, along with the full duo dock. I bought it (lightly) used in the late 90s, and used it through middle and high school. It was a surprising powerhouse for the day…especially when in the dock. I boot it up every so often for nostalgia purposes, and to show people a docking-style laptop was around in the early 90s. A few years ago, I put an SSD in it, and it made the battery last significantly longer. Yes, even my battery still holds a charge. Definitely ahead of its time, and looks good next to my SE/30.
Awesomeness. I so coveted one of those back in the 90s. I still have my SE (2/40Mb) from early 1990, but I what I really wanted was an SE/30 when I bought it. (OK, truth be known -- what I absolutely REALLY wanted was a Mac IIci, but if anyone remembers color Mac prices back then I don't have to tell you my chances of getting a Mac IIci when I couldn't even afford an SE/30).
I love the careful repair you did on the standoffs. Great video! It reminded me of my early teenage years when I would buy out the local thrift stores of their outdated computer hardware to mess with at home
I was a wholesale sales rep for Caribbean Computer Exports in the late 80s / early 90s. We had the exclusive distribution rights to Apple Computer products for all of the Caribbean, Central America and South America. Watching your refurb videos brings back many memories. Apple products were so expensive because their authorized retailers earned a 40% margin on the sale at retail price. CCE was put out of business when CompUSA began selling in bulk into our region. The buyers would fly to Miami, purchase a container load of Apple gear, then ship it to their country, undercutting the prices we could offer. Great channel, great content.
glad to see these machines brought back to life. I'm the guy who donated the external floppy and the duo mini dock to you. Hope they were of some use to you and your project. Great video. I had been curious as to when i'd see this powerbook duo vid. no wonder it took so long with the display issues. Nice work. I really love your closeup shots.
Great video, Colin! You perfectly portrayed the frustration of trying to find parts for these machines, let alone waiting for them, only for the part to be the wrong one. I have had that happen many times, it makes the repair itself seem like a quarter of the total effort involved. Your 3D printed parts were thoroughly impressive. It's hard to maintain and preserve plastic that is getting older and older, but with solutions like yours, we can try our best.
"They weren't comfortable to use back at the office." Looks at the horrible keyboard and trackpad on my work provided HP ProBook. Yep, some things never change.
Which version of the ProBook? My HP ProBook 440 G7 has a good enough keyboard (except when the P key fcks up when it overheats) and a usable glass clickpad (although I prefer my Logitech wireless mouse)
When looks takes priority over usability these things happen for sure. You would imagine that something with the name "Pro" on it would be work focused tho instead of a shiny looks grabbing thing but I guess they just wanna capitalize on people buying stuff with a "pro" tag to seem better.
Omg the duo! I was lucky enough to have one as a kid and it forever my impacted my love of computers. My dad volunteered at computer refurbisher for Mac’s donated for schools. The plus side is I regularly got a Mac, albeit 2-4 years old and used. Of all the laptops I had, this was my favourite by far.
This video brought me peace for some reason. Just hearing those nostalgic clicks when that hard drive booted for the first time in 20 something years is music to my ears lol thanks for this awesome upload I know making these videos solo is not easy
Good on you for saving this! I saved two of these from being thrown out and stored them carefully at work. Then I fell ill and when I returned to work they had been dumped. They weren’t fast but they were a great talking point and that push button eject was amazing. Somewhere I still have the locking keys that physically locked it into the desk unit and disabled the switch that ejected the Duo.
When I was in middle school, I bought a Powerbook Duo 230 off eBay (circa 2001). I was into tinkering around on old Macs, and completely fell in love with this 68k gem. One day I made the mistake of renaming the system folder and rebooting-only to get the dreaded Floppy Desk "?" on start-up. I cried and cried until my parents would buy me one of those full desktop docks (then going for about $100 on eBay) so I could boot from a floppy and fix my careless error. Clearly, I was very popular.
26 min in and I just realized this basically was the first switch and switch dock haha. I love the idea and the complexity to each part. Thanks for the great and informative video!
YT suggested this to me 4 years after uploading, and it took me back to the late 90's. For a while my dad worked for a Motorola contractor, and got a TON of these Powerbook Duo's for free, with the docs, and we ended up with them all over the house. I played so much Civ 2 on them back then. Had more fun than a lot of the other games I'd play on our Packard Bell with an Intel Pentium 133. Thanks for reminding me of those, and they sadly aren't anymore affordable on ebay now than when you made this video lol.
Jerry had a Duo setup on his desk for a while on Seinfeld. The dock for the color models required a taller desktop dock to fit. But you could just replace the removable top to get it to fit. I’ve had several including the 2300c. They all had a lot of flex on the plastics. Neat units though.
For next time you need to install brass inserts, try adding a small chamfer to the top edge of the hole to catch any squeezed out plastic. Helps massively for trying to keep the top of the hole flush
This video was great, even on the second watch a year later! Thanks to it I happened to notice this very computer in the background of an episode of Seinfeld on Jerry's desk, I guess the set dressers were feeling a bit fun that season!
There's just something about "desktop replacement" machines from that era that fascinates me. Probably a mix of the immensely advanced and expensive technology combined with how rapidly it was totally obsoleted by even better things. This stuff is amazing.
We sold replacement screens for the Duos at MacVizion. Every screen was a working pull from laptops being parted-out, but replacement screens were shipped as the entire screen assembly, backlight, lid, and all. *That's* how Apple _always_ has intended replacement, and does in fact avoid these issues. Not ideal from a cost perspective, but absolutely saves a lot of time and potential for damage or incompatibility during repairs!
I owned a 280c and Duo Dock during the era where G3s were first getting announced. Bought both for about $300, including monitor and keyboard (had to reuse a mouse I had on hand), and it still did most stuff I needed a Mac laptop for. Was very satisfying to dock it at night.
Superglue and plastic works great! I like to add some baking soda on it. It hardens to rock-solid immediately. No wait and what seems like a stronger hold!
Yep, plus if you don't have a 3D printer, and need to say fill in a small gap it works wonders along with a small file to make it smooth once it's dried.
I usually glue the broken off inserts to the old plastic parts with a little bit of superglue to position them and then remodel the missing plastic with 2-part-acrylate resin.
Very impressive video. Your commitment to repairing these cool old machines is really nice to see! Thanks for letting us see your process step by step.
20:40 OH MY GOD look at how small that trackpad is!!!! I remembered early track pads being pretty small, but they didn't remember them being THAT small!
So much to love in this video! The disassembly and repairs and the whole trip down memory lane for one of my favorite Macintosh product families. I’ve loved most of the smallest PowerBooks from the PB100 and Duo series to the 12” MacBook Pro Retina and my current portable powerhouse, a 14” m1 MacBook Pro. I had a Duo Dock at home and at work, and several different PowerBook Duos over the years. The 270c and 280c were my favorites. I previously used a Syquest (removable hard drive) cartridge for software development and carried it back and forth to work, but the Duo was like a Syquest that was also a whole computer which worked in or out of the Duo Dock. ❤
Back in the day I really wanted this because as a teacher I could take my work home then pop it in as a daily thing.! Instead I had a 520C and an LC II at home using floppies to do the daily transfer for my work in class. But the prices were ridiculous back then especially for a teacher. Either way, I do love watching these restorations.
@@davidfrischknecht8261 After the Apple 1 and Apple 2 they made the Lisa's for fucking 10.000 dolars in 83. 100.000 dolars now, each. Today no are 20 Lisas in operation, and most were discarded from the stock to the trash for obsolescence in 84, or transform in Macintosh XL.
Siemens in Germany took it even further in the mid-90s! They had a „QuickDock“, which doubled the ports and included two ISA-slots. And they had a full Dock which included 4 ISA-slots, connections for harddrives, ZIP-drives, 3,5“-floppy and optical drives. It also was able to take a battery pack to charge it and had a monitor-stand, where you could park a tank on...
I get curious about all these computers but can never invest the kind of money necessary to get into them. I enjoy them vicariously through all your videos. Your presentation is so in-depth and high definition, I feel like I’m there having fun with them.
When dealing with old Apples, *always* copy the Control Panels (and Programs) from the disk before wiping the drive! So many of these are no longer available, *but they are fully portable!* You may need a registration key for activation (these are stored in plain text, too). A key for the Graphic Calculator shareware application that all Apples shipped with in the PowerPC era is a Holy Grail!
For those folks without a 3D printer - the standoffs can be repaired by carefuly placing the inserts back in the remnants of the broken standoff, and then using JB weld to cover the broken side. Also coat the remaining standoff remnant with a mm or so of JB weld to reinforce it. Its not pretty, but works perfectly and I've used it in many of these situations. Since its internal, you wont even know its there when reassembled. The other nice thing about JB weld is that its designed to be machined, so if you go too thick - you can file away any areas that are too thick.
As those of us who had the original Chromebook test units from Google found out, super glue will NOT hold for those inserts. You have to use a proper epoxy like JB Weld.
that would work, or he could try super glue mixed with baking soda. Tech Tangents did a video about it a while back with good results, and I've used the trick before in the past on a pair Philips headphones one of my nephews broke, and it's held up well for about a year so far.
In 1992 I worked on the board line manufacturing the mother boards in Fountain Colorado. 12 hr. shifts alternating 4 days a week then 3 days. I recall those days vividly. All the jobs have long since been out sourced over seas decades ago now. Sad what happened to most all of our manufacturing jobs. Thanks for the blast from the past.
Thats a very neat trick replacing the broken studs inside the laptop. I will give it a try should I ever come across the problem again. I tend to rely on using very effective solvents with a syringe to fix plastic. It's great on cracked cases.
20:54 Have you heard of a citrus-based product called “Desolv-It”? Great for dissolving sticky adhesive, and non-toxic. I used to use it a lot to remove floppy-disk labels, back in the day, for when I wanted to use a floppy for something new. Good to have a fresh label, rather than having to scribble over an already-used one!
David Bowie had one of these laptops back in the 90's. Cool computers. Edit: here’s Bowie with his duo and monitor www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/40iw3z/rip_david_bowie_the_duo_was_almost_a_rebel_rebel/?
From 2000-2001 I worked for a medium sized newspaper in IT-support. It was the time when the whole vintage IT was thrown out that had been collected in several cellars from the 80s onwards. There were about 10 PowerBook Duo with DuoDock from the media department (as well as CBM, Apple, Atari, Amiga and other computers and even terminals). The photographers had used the PB Duo machines together with early digital cameras that used a serial connection for image transfer. They had (of course) analog cameras as well. They usually took several photos with both digital and analog cameras on events, connected the digital camera after the event and transferred the digital pictures to the Duo. Sometimes they used a landline modem (maybe even quite expensive and slow mobile modems) for direct transfer to the newspaper for fast integration into articles for the next day. The serial port on the PB Duo was perfectly fitting for this use-case. When the photographer was back in his office, he just had to connect the PB Duo to the Dock to transfer the digital images to the network-archive. The analog developing and scanning of the analog camera film often took 1-2 days depending of the backlog the department had. Going digital was often the only way to have on-time reports of events from the pervious day in the current newspaper with pictures. The cameras had resolution (around 1.0 - 2.5 MP) that was good enough for a newspaper. I can remember that even in 2000, i was quite baffled that they had this kind of streamlined process since the early 90s.
I got a Duo 230 with the big dock in the fall of 1992 for college. I was an architecture major and we each needed a powerful Mac (including the math co-processor) in the design studio for 3D modelling software. Everyone else went for a IIci. But with my Duo, I could take my computer with me to other classes or my dorm room.
@@themajasticcreature sounds like someone has been drinking too much obsolescence kool-aid. There's no reason why the current M1 Macs wouldn't still be viable, especially with even less moving parts like a clicking hard drive or an active cooling solution.
The 195 grease pencil marking on the HDD in the dock is from a thrift store. Thrift stores use the grease pencils to mark the price of things. The HDD was found at a thrift store for $1.49
My mother was given one of these as a teacher at her school and i remember as a kid my mom getting to take it home during the summer. Me and my brother use to play hellcats, lemmings and prince of Persia on it all summer long. It was an awesome design. One thing I Rembrandt that sucked though was the battery life on the laptop. This might have been just because of the age of batteries( it was 95-98) when using this and she had had it for years by this point. Good memories!
Razor companies: Give them the razors, sell them the cartridges Printer companies: Give then the printer, sell them thr ink Apple: Sell them the item without necessary features, sell them the features.
I used to repair these back in the day and i also owned the power pc variant the 2300c. It was one of the thinnest and lightest laptops of its day. I really liked mine. Fyi, those plastics were pretty brittle even when new. I replaced a LOT of those screen backs. The Powerbook 100 and 500 series laptops were also notorious for the screen plastics breaking at the hinge.
Always a joy to watch these, Colin. As some born in 95' whose first computer was a Windows 2000 it's really interesting to learn what other companies like Apple were doing both before and during the decade.
I've had both a Duo 230 and a Duo 280c with the MicroDock and Floppy drive. I got the 280c first to run a database in a dusty mouse lab where I was doing research for my Master's thesis, but I quickly replaced it with the Duo 230 because it had a larger screen more fit to run the database (where colour didn't matter anyway). The Duos were then sold to a fellow student for his subsequent Post Doc lab work. Unfortunately, he once placed the Duo 230 on the floor and accidentily broke the power plug inside it by stepping on it, so it was subsequently scrapped, except for the harddrive. We planned to ship the Duo 280c to me this summer, but regretedly we had a big fall-out, so he gets to keep it. Anyway, I have a handful of old Mac's, including a TiBook and my maxed-out Performa 475 (even with a Quadra CPU upgrade, a PDS Ethernet card, and the CD300 SCSI CD-ROM drive), so it's not like I'm going to miss it. I never used the 280c much, since I had my Performa 475 (and later the awful Performa 6200) with much larger screens to work on, once the data were transferred, but I used the Duo 230 in the dusty lab on a daily basis for more than six months, and except from having to clean the mouse ball occasionally, it never let us down. Of course, the battery wasn't very good, but we were harvesting data for hours so we had to plug it in anyway.
@@UNSCPILOT I would argue that their current products can do way more for the dollar than their stuff back then. Most Apple consumers these days don't care about expandability. They just buy and buy again.
That was the neat thing about the 2300. All of the Duo displays would work with the mainboard and you could have the trackball or the touchpad. But using the 210 or 230 low resolution, passive matrix, monochrome display on a 2300 would be quite horrible. I used to have a Duo 280 prototype circa 2003. It had production style labels on the bottom stating it's a Yeager Prototype Unit and NOT FCC certified, not for sale. It had a Duo 250 lid on it. Straight out of the stock parts bin, with Duo 250 label at the bottom. It had one odd quirk. In a narrow vertical stripe under Edit on the menubar, black pixels in window title bars would not show. It only affected black pixels and only in the window title bars, nowhere else. IIRC the ROM chips had handwritten labels. I also had a Duo 230 Engineering Sample. It had no production style labels, just a paper label on the bottom saying it's an engineering sample. It had been taken apart a lot while undergoing testing. One thing of note was a handwritten note on the side of the internal frame. Glued and tested ground clips. With a date I don't remember. Aside from that it was apparently identical to the production Duo 230. I was having fun with 68K Mac emulators at the time so I used a utility to copy the ROM from both and I should still have those files. It would be interesting to do a difference check between them and production 230 and 280 ROMs. I was thinking about using one as an ebook reader but in 2004 I got a Handspring Visor Platinum for $60. I sold both Duos and an ordinary Duo Dock for $80 to someone somewhere in the eastern USA. So somewhere out there in the wild is a Yeager Duo 280 prototype. Dunno if it's ever changed hands again or vanished into the buyer's collection, or closet, and hasn't been seen for the past 20 years.
@@sunnohh Give me a break with that kind of BS, you can't even upgrade the internal storage, or RAM on the users side, and it's dongle city out the ying yang. I did a recycle center rescue towards the end of July of a 13in Mid-2012 Macbook Pro, and I was able to fix the bad HDD cable, give it a new battery, 240GB SATA III SSD, and 16GB of DDR3 RAM for less than $150 USD, you can't even think of doing any of that outside of the battery on a new one without board board level work, and donor parts if can get past the T1 security chip, and that ain't cheap. So IMHO Apple has only gone downhill from that point with their laptops.
I’ve got a 230 with the long dock I found at a junk shop, sadly when moving house the screen took a hit and has sat for years. After watching this I’m tempted to track down a replacement. While having restored a few pismo’s and my beloved titanium I’m reluctant to go in on this.
I had several of these, at the time they were way ahead of their time. However, they felt heavy at nearly 2Kg’s. Imagine carting it around on a business trip. The docking station was not bad but lots of problems, you had to give it a good hard shove! To repair they were a nightmare, the ribbon cable to the screen often got broken or got snagged and disconnected. Reassembly especially for the screen was not easy, the plastics did not always want to ‘snap’ back. Still, for the time a great portable.
8:43: @This Does Not Compute: I recommend buying some black and white sugru or maybe some differently-coloured sugru as well, if you think you need it to perfectly match the colour, and mix that stuff to match and then form replacement feet from that. I'm not sure if sugru will eventually do the same thing years and years later, but it should definitely last you a good while.
for such covers, use some alcohol to soak the glue , then you can use a thin plastic sheat or thin plastic card to "slice" underneath them and get them free, i sometimes even use a small needle to lift of one corner and then a sheet of glossy paper to push it underneath , also return windows do start when the product arrives not when bought , and the send back date is the important one, if it arrives after return period than it still counts as long as it was send out in the window
I had a 280c that I used in High School (it was already a decade old at that point). I loved it. I regret selling it...it was fast and worked great for writing assignments.
The adhesive you want for those screw covers is called 3M 300LSE adhesive you can get large sheets of it on amazon for cheap and its useful for all sorts of things including mouse skates
You can put baking soda over the super glue to instantly glue the pieces together. I've used this method several times when I need to put two pieces together and it always worked perfectly.
In 1995 I had a Brother digital word processor which was basically a typewriter with a four line LCD display so that you could type along and when you had everything completed you could scroll through the pages, it would store on a 3.5 floppy and then when You wanted to print you loaded the paper in like a dot matrix printer and it would type out the documents. Fun times for 150 bucks back then,
one of my favourite systems that Apple ever came up with. a really great idea for people who need to move their data from place to place and be setup and ready to work in a matter of minutes. these days we can do the same with other kinds of docs, which are a different but fulfil the same niche. the closest they came to this after the return of Jobs was the Thunderbolt Display. I have one of those and wish I could have also had one at work as well. Ideally a screen/hub combo is the way to go for a similar pickup and move setup. In other ways I have seen apple patents whereby a MacBook could be created by using an iPad as the screen and an iPhone as the track pad. There may have been other components but now with the M1 series of chips, perhaps such a concept could now be created as an actual product. I think there was another that was more of a doc like the Duo that was a screen-less iMac with a MacBook being folded back to become the screen, with peripherals already connected to the desktop component. Anyway the dock concept overall is awesome :)
My Aunt had a Duo when I was a kid. It felt like a computer from the future.
Cool!
How much it cost back in 1992?
Thunderbolt 3 making this stuff possible again.
The idea would fly today.
Especially today. It's no longer a bad idea to buy a laptop if you require high performance.
Not Apple though. Fuck Apple.
Samsung, or Asus or Dell (Alienware) should do this.
@@nexxusty ah yess the docking gaming laptops migh be cool too
"a lot of potential buyers felt like they were getting nickeled and dimed by all the accessories' Oh Apple, you never change
This 100% 👍
That was the pre-Jobs era. They wouldn’t ever do that today.
@@JasperJanssen lol
@@JasperJanssen You're right, now they charge thousands of nickels and dimes for commodity hardware with an Apple logo on it.
On the other hand, you could simply buy a non-DUO PowerBook and be alright without all the accessories. So: No, it wasn't just "the Apple thing to do".
Your videos are an unlikely source of peace and stability during these hectic times, just like I imagine you use these projects to lose yourself and escape your day-to-day concerns, the audience gets to follow you to that tinkerer's nirvana. Thank you for doing such a wonderful job on these videos.
I still have my duo 2300c, along with the full duo dock. I bought it (lightly) used in the late 90s, and used it through middle and high school. It was a surprising powerhouse for the day…especially when in the dock. I boot it up every so often for nostalgia purposes, and to show people a docking-style laptop was around in the early 90s.
A few years ago, I put an SSD in it, and it made the battery last significantly longer. Yes, even my battery still holds a charge.
Definitely ahead of its time, and looks good next to my SE/30.
Awesomeness. I so coveted one of those back in the 90s. I still have my SE (2/40Mb) from early 1990, but I what I really wanted was an SE/30 when I bought it. (OK, truth be known -- what I absolutely REALLY wanted was a Mac IIci, but if anyone remembers color Mac prices back then I don't have to tell you my chances of getting a Mac IIci when I couldn't even afford an SE/30).
Using the soldering iron to get the brass threads in was genius! Thoroughly enjoyed the vid
I love the careful repair you did on the standoffs. Great video! It reminded me of my early teenage years when I would buy out the local thrift stores of their outdated computer hardware to mess with at home
So happy my dad kept his Duo Dock and a handful of Duo laptops.
Still have mine too.
That was my dream setup 👍🏽
I still have my 2300, my minidoc and my QuickTake (as shown in the advertising lol).
I was a wholesale sales rep for Caribbean Computer Exports in the late 80s / early 90s. We had the exclusive distribution rights to Apple Computer products for all of the Caribbean, Central America and South America. Watching your refurb videos brings back many memories.
Apple products were so expensive because their authorized retailers earned a 40% margin on the sale at retail price. CCE was put out of business when CompUSA began selling in bulk into our region. The buyers would fly to Miami, purchase a container load of Apple gear, then ship it to their country, undercutting the prices we could offer.
Great channel, great content.
one of my teachers had one of these setups and it genuinely inspired me to think differently about computers and form factors.
Right? This was so ahead of it's time. This is literally how I run my setup now: laptop > usb-c cable -> monitor with extended I/O.
glad to see these machines brought back to life. I'm the guy who donated the external floppy and the duo mini dock to you. Hope they were of some use to you and your project. Great video. I had been curious as to when i'd see this powerbook duo vid. no wonder it took so long with the display issues. Nice work. I really love your closeup shots.
Thanks again for sending them along! I’ve also got another long-term project in the works that they’ll come in useful for...
18:02 "they mustve had experience installing car stereos too". I feel personally attacked lol
I legit laughed out loud from that… it’s so freaking true. 😆
Your vids are the best, great job! Also, I take no offense to the car stereo comment about wiring :-P
It would be fun, if you were the original owner who hacked that wiring together.
@@silvernode right, that guy is probably still out there. Maybe he'll run across this video and explain himself....
I dont know id find Big D heeeeere
we've all been there lol
yeah
Great video, Colin! You perfectly portrayed the frustration of trying to find parts for these machines, let alone waiting for them, only for the part to be the wrong one. I have had that happen many times, it makes the repair itself seem like a quarter of the total effort involved. Your 3D printed parts were thoroughly impressive. It's hard to maintain and preserve plastic that is getting older and older, but with solutions like yours, we can try our best.
Thankfully you can still find a lot of this stuff for super cheap out in the wild. Just sad that it is getting harder to find.
Hey Rin.
Ywnbaw
"They weren't comfortable to use back at the office." Looks at the horrible keyboard and trackpad on my work provided HP ProBook. Yep, some things never change.
Laptop manufacturers these days seem to have a vendetta against sensible keyboard layouts and usable pointing devices. "Clickpads" are unacceptable.
Which version of the ProBook? My HP ProBook 440 G7 has a good enough keyboard (except when the P key fcks up when it overheats) and a usable glass clickpad (although I prefer my Logitech wireless mouse)
@@s8wc3 ya for my two cents, I still like the stick between the F and G keys , but still seems to only be on some Lenovo models
When looks takes priority over usability these things happen for sure.
You would imagine that something with the name "Pro" on it would be work focused tho instead of a shiny looks grabbing thing but I guess they just wanna capitalize on people buying stuff with a "pro" tag to seem better.
@@Kalvinjj newer (~
Omg the duo! I was lucky enough to have one as a kid and it forever my impacted my love of computers. My dad volunteered at computer refurbisher for Mac’s donated for schools. The plus side is I regularly got a Mac, albeit 2-4 years old and used. Of all the laptops I had, this was my favourite by far.
Loved this video and the soldering iron tip is brilliant!
This video brought me peace for some reason. Just hearing those nostalgic clicks when that hard drive booted for the first time in 20 something years is music to my ears lol thanks for this awesome upload I know making these videos solo is not easy
Good on you for saving this!
I saved two of these from being thrown out and stored them carefully at work. Then I fell ill and when I returned to work they had been dumped.
They weren’t fast but they were a great talking point and that push button eject was amazing. Somewhere I still have the locking keys that physically locked it into the desk unit and disabled the switch that ejected the Duo.
When I was in middle school, I bought a Powerbook Duo 230 off eBay (circa 2001). I was into tinkering around on old Macs, and completely fell in love with this 68k gem. One day I made the mistake of renaming the system folder and rebooting-only to get the dreaded Floppy Desk "?" on start-up. I cried and cried until my parents would buy me one of those full desktop docks (then going for about $100 on eBay) so I could boot from a floppy and fix my careless error. Clearly, I was very popular.
26 min in and I just realized this basically was the first switch and switch dock haha. I love the idea and the complexity to each part. Thanks for the great and informative video!
I scrolled and scrolled to find this comment! Just goes to show that this was a solid idea, just ahead of its time.
YT suggested this to me 4 years after uploading, and it took me back to the late 90's. For a while my dad worked for a Motorola contractor, and got a TON of these Powerbook Duo's for free, with the docs, and we ended up with them all over the house. I played so much Civ 2 on them back then. Had more fun than a lot of the other games I'd play on our Packard Bell with an Intel Pentium 133. Thanks for reminding me of those, and they sadly aren't anymore affordable on ebay now than when you made this video lol.
Although not entirely original, I think I have seen SATA to SCSI adapters.
Also the OS is still available.
So at least you can get a working machine.
There's also the SCSI2SD Powerbook Edition.
I would love to see a solid state disk in one of these. A 1GB CompactFlash card might be perfect if you can find a scsi adapter for it
Jerry had a Duo setup on his desk for a while on Seinfeld. The dock for the color models required a taller desktop dock to fit. But you could just replace the removable top to get it to fit. I’ve had several including the 2300c. They all had a lot of flex on the plastics. Neat units though.
He also had a 20th Anniversary Mac (which I'm dying to see Colin work on) and a couple others
“ARE YOU *quack*ING KIDDING ME”
😂
For next time you need to install brass inserts, try adding a small chamfer to the top edge of the hole to catch any squeezed out plastic. Helps massively for trying to keep the top of the hole flush
This was a great watch. Repairing a classic and throwing in an abundance of well researched material.
This video was great, even on the second watch a year later!
Thanks to it I happened to notice this very computer in the background of an episode of Seinfeld on Jerry's desk, I guess the set dressers were feeling a bit fun that season!
There's just something about "desktop replacement" machines from that era that fascinates me. Probably a mix of the immensely advanced and expensive technology combined with how rapidly it was totally obsoleted by even better things. This stuff is amazing.
I bought a duo 2300 in the late 90s and it was awesome to have a color screen!
that grease pencil pricing is the same thing that they use to price items at Savers thrift store.
We sold replacement screens for the Duos at MacVizion. Every screen was a working pull from laptops being parted-out, but replacement screens were shipped as the entire screen assembly, backlight, lid, and all. *That's* how Apple _always_ has intended replacement, and does in fact avoid these issues.
Not ideal from a cost perspective, but absolutely saves a lot of time and potential for damage or incompatibility during repairs!
I used to have the same PowerBook. It was an amazing machine.
I owned a 280c and Duo Dock during the era where G3s were first getting announced. Bought both for about $300, including monitor and keyboard (had to reuse a mouse I had on hand), and it still did most stuff I needed a Mac laptop for. Was very satisfying to dock it at night.
Superglue and plastic works great! I like to add some baking soda on it. It hardens to rock-solid immediately. No wait and what seems like a stronger hold!
Yep, plus if you don't have a 3D printer, and need to say fill in a small gap it works wonders along with a small file to make it smooth once it's dried.
I usually glue the broken off inserts to the old plastic parts with a little bit of superglue to position them and then remodel the missing plastic with 2-part-acrylate resin.
25:24 Woooah. Serious nostalgia over that Netscape logo.
Very impressive video. Your commitment to repairing these cool old machines is really nice to see! Thanks for letting us see your process step by step.
e
e?
ee
I
a.
25:21
20:40 OH MY GOD look at how small that trackpad is!!!!
I remembered early track pads being pretty small, but they didn't remember them being THAT small!
finally some more stuff about the Duo that isn’t just “this laptop is rare, oh right the battery will die”
So much to love in this video! The disassembly and repairs and the whole trip down memory lane for one of my favorite Macintosh product families. I’ve loved most of the smallest PowerBooks from the PB100 and Duo series to the 12” MacBook Pro Retina and my current portable powerhouse, a 14” m1 MacBook Pro.
I had a Duo Dock at home and at work, and several different PowerBook Duos over the years. The 270c and 280c were my favorites.
I previously used a Syquest (removable hard drive) cartridge for software development and carried it back and forth to work, but the Duo was like a Syquest that was also a whole computer which worked in or out of the Duo Dock. ❤
Back in the day I really wanted this because as a teacher I could take my work home then pop it in as a daily thing.! Instead I had a 520C and an LC II at home using floppies to do the daily transfer for my work in class. But the prices were ridiculous back then especially for a teacher. Either way, I do love watching these restorations.
your patience alone deserves sub! Content is superb!
One word comes to mind when thinking about Apple products: expensive. This seems to be no exception.
Ultraportable ultralight comes at a price. For all manufacturers.
@@JasperJanssen That's only half the story.
Their products weren't super expensive when they first started out. The Apple II line was relatively inexpensive.
@@davidfrischknecht8261
After the Apple 1 and Apple 2 they made the Lisa's for fucking 10.000 dolars in 83. 100.000 dolars now, each. Today no are 20 Lisas in operation, and most were discarded from the stock to the trash for obsolescence in 84, or transform in Macintosh XL.
So how much would a comparable Windows Laptop sell for?
I love how in depth you go in your videos! You spend loads of time bringing great quality and information!
I was in middle school when these were new. I remember the principals all had one in their offices, but never undocked them.
Siemens in Germany took it even further in the mid-90s! They had a „QuickDock“, which doubled the ports and included two ISA-slots. And they had a full Dock which included 4 ISA-slots, connections for harddrives, ZIP-drives, 3,5“-floppy and optical drives. It also was able to take a battery pack to charge it and had a monitor-stand, where you could park a tank on...
I get curious about all these computers but can never invest the kind of money necessary to get into them. I enjoy them vicariously through all your videos. Your presentation is so in-depth and high definition, I feel like I’m there having fun with them.
When dealing with old Apples, *always* copy the Control Panels (and Programs) from the disk before wiping the drive!
So many of these are no longer available, *but they are fully portable!* You may need a registration key for activation (these are stored in plain text, too). A key for the Graphic Calculator shareware application that all Apples shipped with in the PowerPC era is a Holy Grail!
TDNC: repairs a PowerBook Duo
* Louis Rossman has entered the chat.
For those folks without a 3D printer - the standoffs can be repaired by carefuly placing the inserts back in the remnants of the broken standoff, and then using JB weld to cover the broken side. Also coat the remaining standoff remnant with a mm or so of JB weld to reinforce it. Its not pretty, but works perfectly and I've used it in many of these situations. Since its internal, you wont even know its there when reassembled. The other nice thing about JB weld is that its designed to be machined, so if you go too thick - you can file away any areas that are too thick.
The original laptop dock, nice!
Jolly fine stuff. Thank you. There's so much cheap, amateur muck about these days; so nice to find a properly-made video. Thank you again.
As those of us who had the original Chromebook test units from Google found out, super glue will NOT hold for those inserts. You have to use a proper epoxy like JB Weld.
that would work, or he could try super glue mixed with baking soda. Tech Tangents did a video about it a while back with good results, and I've used the trick before in the past on a pair Philips headphones one of my nephews broke, and it's held up well for about a year so far.
In 1992 I worked on the board line manufacturing the mother boards in Fountain Colorado. 12 hr. shifts alternating 4 days a week then 3 days. I recall those days vividly. All the jobs have long since been out sourced over seas decades ago now. Sad what happened to most all of our manufacturing jobs. Thanks for the blast from the past.
the Toshiba "dock" at 16:19 is more like a dongle
Thats a very neat trick replacing the broken studs inside the laptop. I will give it a try should I ever come across the problem again.
I tend to rely on using very effective solvents with a syringe to fix plastic. It's great on cracked cases.
Mis-labled parts that take forever to get, then refund(assuming yourvin the window) I f$#kn hate that. Too
My 6th grade teacher had one of these. Not sure which model but I remember she had the full size duo dock on her desk. This was in 1999/2000.
Jerry Seinfeld had one on his desk on the show - yaddi yaddi yadda, it served him well.
The one I always remember from Seinfeld is the 20th Anniversary Mac, hard to forget a weird one like that though!
Lol indeed
He had a few different macs during the run of the show. First was an original all in one style model
@@JaredConnell Yep that was a SE/30. My fav all in one model.
i came to the comments for this
20:54 Have you heard of a citrus-based product called “Desolv-It”? Great for dissolving sticky adhesive, and non-toxic. I used to use it a lot to remove floppy-disk labels, back in the day, for when I wanted to use a floppy for something new. Good to have a fresh label, rather than having to scribble over an already-used one!
David Bowie had one of these laptops back in the 90's. Cool computers.
Edit: here’s Bowie with his duo and monitor
www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/40iw3z/rip_david_bowie_the_duo_was_almost_a_rebel_rebel/?
Added Bowie and his Duo to my comment.
Something about these old macs that I just love. The boot sound, the looks. Where can I get one
25:22 whoever owned this predicted gen z humor
e
e
What?
@@Fede_uyz E
From 2000-2001 I worked for a medium sized newspaper in IT-support. It was the time when the whole vintage IT was thrown out that had been collected in several cellars from the 80s onwards. There were about 10 PowerBook Duo with DuoDock from the media department (as well as CBM, Apple, Atari, Amiga and other computers and even terminals). The photographers had used the PB Duo machines together with early digital cameras that used a serial connection for image transfer. They had (of course) analog cameras as well. They usually took several photos with both digital and analog cameras on events, connected the digital camera after the event and transferred the digital pictures to the Duo. Sometimes they used a landline modem (maybe even quite expensive and slow mobile modems) for direct transfer to the newspaper for fast integration into articles for the next day. The serial port on the PB Duo was perfectly fitting for this use-case. When the photographer was back in his office, he just had to connect the PB Duo to the Dock to transfer the digital images to the network-archive. The analog developing and scanning of the analog camera film often took 1-2 days depending of the backlog the department had. Going digital was often the only way to have on-time reports of events from the pervious day in the current newspaper with pictures. The cameras had resolution (around 1.0 - 2.5 MP) that was good enough for a newspaper. I can remember that even in 2000, i was quite baffled that they had this kind of streamlined process since the early 90s.
5:37 I had this exact scenario so many times.
I got a Duo 230 with the big dock in the fall of 1992 for college. I was an architecture major and we each needed a powerful Mac (including the math co-processor) in the design studio for 3D modelling software. Everyone else went for a IIci. But with my Duo, I could take my computer with me to other classes or my dorm room.
I’m not gonna lie, getting up to eject my dad’s duo before he left for work was my main incentive for getting up for elementary school.
I loved my Duo210. Cycled to and from work with it for years using a day pack.
Just imagine someone in year 2052 reviewing M1 Macs
lol would be safer to say they'll be reviewing the power pcs and such, i wouldn't rely on anything newer lasting that long. you're very optimistic XD
@@themajasticcreature sounds like someone has been drinking too much obsolescence kool-aid. There's no reason why the current M1 Macs wouldn't still be viable, especially with even less moving parts like a clicking hard drive or an active cooling solution.
The 195 grease pencil marking on the HDD in the dock is from a thrift store. Thrift stores use the grease pencils to mark the price of things. The HDD was found at a thrift store for $1.49
What about the eucalyptus oil though? :)
Wrong channel
@@kit7une_ :D
A lot of work, and risk, went into this video. Subscribed.
Wow, I don't think I've ever heard him so angry.
I'd be pissed too.
My mother was given one of these as a teacher at her school and i remember as a kid my mom getting to take it home during the summer. Me and my brother use to play hellcats, lemmings and prince of Persia on it all summer long. It was an awesome design. One thing I Rembrandt that sucked though was the battery life on the laptop. This might have been just because of the age of batteries( it was 95-98) when using this and she had had it for years by this point. Good memories!
Apple: Removing ports since 1992.
And selling docks🤣
Razor companies: Give them the razors, sell them the cartridges
Printer companies: Give then the printer, sell them thr ink
Apple: Sell them the item without necessary features, sell them the features.
Best thing about colins videos are the no BS intro it's just hey here's the thing. It's brilliant
aah apple making their customers spend money on adapters since 1992 LOL
I used to repair these back in the day and i also owned the power pc variant the 2300c. It was one of the thinnest and lightest laptops of its day. I really liked mine.
Fyi, those plastics were pretty brittle even when new. I replaced a LOT of those screen backs. The Powerbook 100 and 500 series laptops were also notorious for the screen plastics breaking at the hinge.
The 230 was very popular with dentists 😉
Always a joy to watch these, Colin. As some born in 95' whose first computer was a Windows 2000 it's really interesting to learn what other companies like Apple were doing both before and during the decade.
The powerbook that was dropped probably belonged to some relative of Linus.
@@kreuner11 Not the Danish clown Linus. The other Linus. Does the dropping not ring a bell?
I've had both a Duo 230 and a Duo 280c with the MicroDock and Floppy drive.
I got the 280c first to run a database in a dusty mouse lab where I was doing research for my Master's thesis, but I quickly replaced it with the Duo 230 because it had a larger screen more fit to run the database (where colour didn't matter anyway).
The Duos were then sold to a fellow student for his subsequent Post Doc lab work. Unfortunately, he once placed the Duo 230 on the floor and accidentily broke the power plug inside it by stepping on it, so it was subsequently scrapped, except for the harddrive. We planned to ship the Duo 280c to me this summer, but regretedly we had a big fall-out, so he gets to keep it.
Anyway, I have a handful of old Mac's, including a TiBook and my maxed-out Performa 475 (even with a Quadra CPU upgrade, a PDS Ethernet card, and the CD300 SCSI CD-ROM drive), so it's not like I'm going to miss it.
I never used the 280c much, since I had my Performa 475 (and later the awful Performa 6200) with much larger screens to work on, once the data were transferred, but I used the Duo 230 in the dusty lab on a daily basis for more than six months, and except from having to clean the mouse ball occasionally, it never let us down. Of course, the battery wasn't very good, but we were harvesting data for hours so we had to plug it in anyway.
lol everything about Apple was expensive back then.
But it had more ports and expandability than anything they make these days, kinda funny really
@@UNSCPILOT I would argue that their current products can do way more for the dollar than their stuff back then. Most Apple consumers these days don't care about expandability. They just buy and buy again.
That was the neat thing about the 2300. All of the Duo displays would work with the mainboard and you could have the trackball or the touchpad. But using the 210 or 230 low resolution, passive matrix, monochrome display on a 2300 would be quite horrible.
I used to have a Duo 280 prototype circa 2003. It had production style labels on the bottom stating it's a Yeager Prototype Unit and NOT FCC certified, not for sale. It had a Duo 250 lid on it. Straight out of the stock parts bin, with Duo 250 label at the bottom.
It had one odd quirk. In a narrow vertical stripe under Edit on the menubar, black pixels in window title bars would not show. It only affected black pixels and only in the window title bars, nowhere else. IIRC the ROM chips had handwritten labels.
I also had a Duo 230 Engineering Sample. It had no production style labels, just a paper label on the bottom saying it's an engineering sample. It had been taken apart a lot while undergoing testing. One thing of note was a handwritten note on the side of the internal frame. Glued and tested ground clips. With a date I don't remember. Aside from that it was apparently identical to the production Duo 230.
I was having fun with 68K Mac emulators at the time so I used a utility to copy the ROM from both and I should still have those files. It would be interesting to do a difference check between them and production 230 and 280 ROMs.
I was thinking about using one as an ebook reader but in 2004 I got a Handspring Visor Platinum for $60. I sold both Duos and an ordinary Duo Dock for $80 to someone somewhere in the eastern USA.
So somewhere out there in the wild is a Yeager Duo 280 prototype. Dunno if it's ever changed hands again or vanished into the buyer's collection, or closet, and hasn't been seen for the past 20 years.
4000 dollars for an apple laptop setup? Sounds about right what's changed?
Honestly? They are designed a lot better and cost much, much, much less
@@sunnohh designed better? i guess they are much better at planned obsolescence now
@@virtualtools_3021 Don't forget complete lack of repairability!
If Apple laptops were actually repairable, I'd buy one in a heartbeat
@@sunnohh Give me a break with that kind of BS, you can't even upgrade the internal storage, or RAM on the users side, and it's dongle city out the ying yang.
I did a recycle center rescue towards the end of July of a 13in Mid-2012 Macbook Pro, and I was able to fix the bad HDD cable, give it a new battery, 240GB SATA III SSD, and 16GB of DDR3 RAM for less than $150 USD, you can't even think of doing any of that outside of the battery on a new one without board board level work, and donor parts if can get past the T1 security chip, and that ain't cheap. So IMHO Apple has only gone downhill from that point with their laptops.
I’ve got a 230 with the long dock I found at a junk shop, sadly when moving house the screen took a hit and has sat for years. After watching this I’m tempted to track down a replacement. While having restored a few pismo’s and my beloved titanium I’m reluctant to go in on this.
I had several of these, at the time they were way ahead of their time. However, they felt heavy at nearly 2Kg’s. Imagine carting it around on a business trip. The docking station was not bad but lots of problems, you had to give it a good hard shove! To repair they were a nightmare, the ribbon cable to the screen often got broken or got snagged and disconnected. Reassembly especially for the screen was not easy, the plastics did not always want to ‘snap’ back. Still, for the time a great portable.
13:00 That interlocking keyboard was so cool
8:43: @This Does Not Compute: I recommend buying some black and white sugru or maybe some differently-coloured sugru as well, if you think you need it to perfectly match the colour, and mix that stuff to match and then form replacement feet from that. I'm not sure if sugru will eventually do the same thing years and years later, but it should definitely last you a good while.
Just bought one as well! Your video has kindled my interest in them.
for such covers, use some alcohol to soak the glue , then you can use a thin plastic sheat or thin plastic card to "slice" underneath them and get them free, i sometimes even use a small needle to lift of one corner and then a sheet of glossy paper to push it underneath , also return windows do start when the product arrives not when bought , and the send back date is the important one, if it arrives after return period than it still counts as long as it was send out in the window
I had a 280c that I used in High School (it was already a decade old at that point). I loved it. I regret selling it...it was fast and worked great for writing assignments.
The adhesive you want for those screw covers is called 3M 300LSE adhesive you can get large sheets of it on amazon for cheap and its useful for all sorts of things including mouse skates
i love the focusing on the small parts great job on camera shots!
The Duo laptops were VERY popular with Sales reps and especially journalists.
Really enjoyed this video and your repair 👍
You can put baking soda over the super glue to instantly glue the pieces together. I've used this method several times when I need to put two pieces together and it always worked perfectly.
In 1995 I had a Brother digital word processor which was basically a typewriter with a four line LCD display so that you could type along and when you had everything completed you could scroll through the pages, it would store on a 3.5 floppy and then when You wanted to print you loaded the paper in like a dot matrix printer and it would type out the documents. Fun times for 150 bucks back then,
one of my favourite systems that Apple ever came up with. a really great idea for people who need to move their data from place to place and be setup and ready to work in a matter of minutes. these days we can do the same with other kinds of docs, which are a different but fulfil the same niche. the closest they came to this after the return of Jobs was the Thunderbolt Display. I have one of those and wish I could have also had one at work as well. Ideally a screen/hub combo is the way to go for a similar pickup and move setup.
In other ways I have seen apple patents whereby a MacBook could be created by using an iPad as the screen and an iPhone as the track pad.
There may have been other components but now with the M1 series of chips, perhaps such a concept could now be created as an actual product. I think there was another that was more of a doc like the Duo that was a screen-less iMac with a MacBook being folded back to become the screen, with peripherals already connected to the desktop component.
Anyway the dock concept overall is awesome :)