An Ode to an Old Friend

The very first computer I truly considered my own was a 2008 black polycarbonate MacBook with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of 667 MHz RAM and a (whopping for the time) 250GB of storage. I still remember begging my mother to get the higher capacity model, and her incredulity at the very idea of 250 whole gigabytes of storage, (“You’re never going to fill it!”). Now my Photos library alone is over 253 GB in size, and is so large it takes Finder ~30s to calculate the size. The past really is a different country (and indeed this will very much be the theme of this blog post).

People get very sentimental about the computers of their youth; something I think is underrated as a strange and slightly absurd phenomenon. A lot of computers that people eulogise (particularly the early ones) aren’t just worse than today’s machines – which, of course they are – they’re also practically unrecognisable as the same kind of device. Think of the Commodore 64, with its now-alien, screen-less keyboard body, command-line interface, and unintelligible keys (“RUN STOP” anyone?). Yes, they were pioneering and historically important. Yes, they helped bring computing to a wider public. But they were also full of limitations and compromises that are too often airbrushed away.

In one sense, perceived performance has not changed as much as the hardware has. Your phone gets a faster processor every year, but the software bloats to match, so the net experience barely moves. But that kind of observation I think really undersells the underlying reality of technological progress.

Overall though, I think most nostalgia is totally misplaced – ridiculous even.¹ That original PowerBook 100’s lead acid² battery could, optimistically, manage perhaps 3.5 hours of battery life – and it was at that time a market leader! The much more typical IBM ThinkPad 350C could barely manage 2 hours. It would be another two decades before laptops regularly managed much above five or six hours. That PowerBook also cost $2,500 (equivalent to $6000 in 2025), weighed 2.3kg ³ and had a 640 × 400 black-and-white display that was dimmer, lower-contrast, and more angle-sensitive than the active-matrix screens that followed (themselves poorly remembered today!).

Were I to go over every single example of how computers have got better in my lifetime this essay would quickly become a short book. If you want to read that catalogue, I recommend Gwern’s excellent essay on the subject. Suffice it to say, I think rose tinted glasses are rarely if ever a helpful analytic for looking at the past.

That said I really do think that first MacBook I had was an exceptional computer!

Far more than most of its predecessors, it feels like a machine a modern user could still instantly recognise. It was relatively thin for its time, with a widescreen, glossy, reasonably colour-accurate display. The MacBook was among the first wave of Apple laptops to adopt the MagSafe power connector, and was the first to ship with the sunken keyboard design and the non-mechanical magnetic latch. It shipped with a DVD±RW/CD-RW “SuperDrive”. That meant not I only could I watch DVDs in the car (just like the kids with parents who could afford cars with built-in screens in the seat backs), but write DVDs and make mix CDs to give to my friends and family! It was offered with the then astronomical aforementioned 250GB – nearly twenty years later and I am writing on a computer that has 6x the RAM, over 11x the memory bandwidth, but only 4x the storage at 1TB. The just-announced MacBook Neo, as of time of writing, comes with just 8GB of RAM and starts at 256GB of storage – 18 years later!

In some ways it was actually better than later generations of computers that Apple shipped. It had an amazing keyboard that was and even now still is superior to the current line of keyboards on Mac laptops, with a key travel distance of 1.5 mm (vs only 1 mm in the current generation of Magic Keyboards, and an absolutely abysmal 0.7mm in the butterfly switch era keyboards).⁴

The polycarbonate MacBooks were also much easier for users to fix or upgrade themselves than either their predecessor or successors. Where the iBook required substantial disassembly to access internal components such as the hard drive, (later Macs had the SSDs soldered on the motherboard), the MacBook required that users only remove the battery and the RAM door to access or replace the hard drive. ⁵ Apple even provided easy to follow do-it-yourself manuals for these tasks on the Apple website. Even the bottom case screws were just ordinary Phillips heads!

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses for sure. One long-forgotten aspect of computers of that era, (the MacBook being no exception), was that booting them up was a process that took 3-4 minutes. You would typically press the on button and then get up and go do something else – although I can no longer imagine what given that smart phones weren’t common and of course your only computer was stuck booting for another 3 mins! ⁶ An actual selling point of this MacBook was that it had a claimed “near instant” boot time at merely ~2 minutes!

Then once it was successfully on, there was no guarantee that it would stay running, with a constant low-grade anxiety being that it might crash or kernel panic and you would lose potentially hours of work. Before Apple introduced continuous save states, users would develop a tic to constantly hit Command-S every few minutes, lest their beloved Mac kick the bucket mid-sentence. Right now I am typing this essay in Byword, and have not manually saved it once. I might not ever! It doesn’t matter as even if the app crashes my work is probably saved – and that’s if it crashes. A very improbable if.

Overall though I am confident that had I been 33 in 2008, and decided to write an essay looking back at my first computer from the year 1990, it is very unlikely I would have been able to look back to a computing device that so resembled the device I would have been writing it on. Like the 2008 MacBook (first launched in 2006!) is recognisably the same species of computer that the 2026 MacBooks are, in a way that the PowerBooks of the early 90s really weren’t.

I think what made the black MacBook special wasn’t that it was the best at anything in particular. It wasn’t the fastest, or the lightest, or the most capable machine you could buy in 2008. What made it special was that it was the point at which the laptop as a form basically settled into what it still is today. Thin-ish, wide-screen, instant-on (well, near enough by the standards of the time, and certainly aspirationally). A keyboard you could actually type on. A trackpad you could actually point with. A screen you could actually look at for hours without your eyes staging a walkout.

If the PowerBook 100 was the proof of concept, and the titanium PowerBook G4 was the prototype, the MacBook was the first draft that an editor would recognise as essentially the same book. Nearly two decades later I’m typing on something that is unambiguously, incomparably better in every measurable dimension ⁷ – and yet if you put the two side by side, a stranger would immediately clock them as relatives. The same cannot be said of almost any other eighteen-year gap in computing history.

I don’t think that makes the nostalgia rational, exactly. My current machine would annihilate that old black MacBook in (almost) every hardware benchmark and I’ll even begrudgingly admit most software ones too. But it does make the nostalgia intelligible, which is more than I can say for anyone getting misty-eyed over a Commodore 64. ⁸ The MacBook wasn’t a relic from a lost world. It was the first citizen of this one.

Rest in peace, old friend! Whether or not you actually did transform the world of portable computers, you absolutely did transform my personal world. You definitely earned your eulogy!