The Apple PowerBook 150 hit stores in July 1994. With a price of $1,450, it was the most accessible model of the series, but to reach that price, Apple used a passive-matrix display and a processor from the previous decade. Colin from the YouTube channel This Does Not Compute acquired one of these laptops with the goal of restoring it, and despite the good work he did, the feeling is one of regret…
I think all (or almost all) of us have complained about the prices Apple sets for its products. On many occasions, those complaints were justified, but there's a detail we can't ignore: Apple doesn't have a great track record when exploring the budget space. An example of this was the Apple PowerBook 150. The $1,450 price tag was interesting, however, a passive-matrix display with four shades of gray at 640x480 and a Motorola 68030 chip from 1987 left it in a very uncomfortable position. Colin from This Does Not Compute managed to obtain a PowerBook 150 and decided to restore it…
How to Repair and Restore an Apple PowerBook 150 from 1994
The restoration began with a fairly common problem: damaged plastic around one of the hinges. As if that weren't enough, the pressure of the screen managed to sink the keyboard, and the battery had already expressed its desire to become a demonic pillow. The first attempts to power it on came to nothing. Colin looked at the LCD panel more closely, and its capacitors emitted the classic fishy smell. Replacing them with tantalum equivalents was inevitable.
Good news: the motherboard uses tantalum capacitors from the factory. Bad news: the clock battery spilled part of its contents onto the "Jedi" interconnect board. The inverter for the panel has an electrolytic capacitor, and when Colin tried to replace it, he ended up damaging a coil and the connector. Luckily, Colin was able to extract all the necessary parts from another machine, and the PowerBook 150's screen came back to life. With a couple of 3D prints, the hinge damage was fixed, but…
… the problems continued for Colin. The trackball flex cable failed, and being part of the keyboard, that forced him to replace it. The PowerBook 150 is incompatible with all conventional CompactFlash adapters, and the only IDE drive within reach cannot be formatted by the official tools. The initial boot with the BlueSCSI adapter required a series of additional connections (due to the natural limitations of the port on the back)... and as the cherry on the cake, the T key stopped working.
In summary, we celebrate Colin's dedication, but it's clear that the PowerBook 150 is not one of his favorites, and in a way it serves as a warning for enthusiasts. Anyone who wants to experiment with vintage Apple hardware should look for other options.
