IBMs Thinkpad line was driven more by market pressure from Compaq much later. Again, far from perfect.. but arguably an order of magnitude better than other options at the time.
Most relatively great platforms remain around years later. =)
I thought if only they pushed the keyboard back the would be a palm rest.
Apple’s PowerBook was the first computer that I knew of moved the keyboard back. And Apple had the first nicely integrated mouse.
When the ThinkPad was introduced a year or two later, it copied the keyboard placement on some (all?) of its keyboards. And I preferred the TrackPoint to Apple’s trackballs and trackpads. Although over time and many improvements I came to like the trackpad more.
But it was not based on the 170, as that launched in 1994, 3 years later.
I think the models that influenced it were the 140 and 170, both from 1991, and much chunkier than the 100.
Though of course, it makes sense despite Thinkpads existing in one form or another since 1991, they've also evolved a lot over three decades.
Apple co-designed the first PowerBook, the PB 100, with Sony.
Apple's original concept for a "laptop" was no-compromise, with the first active-matrix LCD... but it was the size of a small suitcase.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook/specs/mac_porta...
It accommodated left-handed users (like me) with a relocatable trackball, something Asus hasn't thought of in the ZenBook Pro, or I might have considered one.
Sony took that design and turned it into this:
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook/specs/mac_power...
Relatively slim and light for the time, a relatively crappy passive-matrix display, but that meant it was usably slim and light and didn't need 5kg of lead-acid battery.
The history is mentioned here: https://lowendmac.com/1991/powerbook-100/
Used it for 5 or more years before switching to a ThinkPad.
The aluminium Powerbooks and iBook G4s were introduced during 2003 and ran OS X exclusively. You can get them to boot OS9, but only via hacks that haven't become available until recent years. And of course, no x86 machine ever ran OS 9 in any form, so setting Apple's transition to "UNIX machines" with unibodies in 2008 - two years after the Intel shift, and five years after that's the only OS Apple actually shipped - seems a bit strange.
While it's true the beta of OS X as a desktop OS wasn't released until September 2000 [0], OS X Server 1.0 was released into "production" (limited though it may be) in March 1999 [1], which preceded the first G4's release in August 1999 [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Public_Beta
Predates Cheetah by two months, not Mac OS X. If you want to get super pedantic, Mac OS X is a continuation of NeXTSTEP which is partially based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe, but there were also the Betas including the Public Beta from September 2000 which Apple would have happily sold you for $29.95.
I don’t think there’s anything in particular about the Unibody MBP’s feature set that makes it more of a “professional-ass UNIX machine” than even say, the Pismo PowerBooks though other than about a decade’s worth of iterative improvements. They could all run Terminal, PhotoShop, PERL and AppleScript. It’s the software that defines them, and a MacBook Pro from the unibody era could also be reasonably called a “professional-ass NT machine” if you were primarily booting Windows on it.