Powerbook 165: Apple's Mundane offering?
// wait.. I could of had color!?
When you think of Apple what comes to mind? You probably think of great devices such as the iPad, MacBook, maybe even the classic Macintosh, or even an Apple ][. What you don’t think of is this.
This is a PowerBook 165. One of Apple’s first laptops in their overly confusing lineup of products during the 90s. When it released in the summer of 1993, the PowerBook 165 was a major upgrade to it’s predecessors. Featuring a 33 MHz 68030 processor and 4MB or RAM with an 80MB SCSI HDD standard, it was like no other in it’s class at it’s launch. Being a midrange laptop, capable of addressing a color display and starting at under $2000 for the base model it was pretty impressive.
However, it wasn’t all great. Though this unit isn’t known as a “compromised Mac” it was still pretty low end. Having no Floating point unit, limited to a Max 14 MB of RAM, and a weak 4 bit grayscale Passive Matrix screen.
This computer came out alongside the 165c model which included a Passive Matrix 256 color display a first in the industry, however it was too limited at it’s release and was very expensive for it’s quality potentially setting you back ~$4000!
The unit I have added to my collection is the PowerBook 165 with the B&W display. With a whopping base 4MB of RAM, but with the optional 160MB HDD. Which like many others of this vintage has sadly passed away. I had purchased this laptop for $40 plus shipping from someone on 68kmla. A forum I tend to browse often. When it arrived the screen was blank though I could hear the Mac bong so I knew it was working. I had also seen pictures and the owner claimed it was working when it left. So I had an ideas about what was wrong, so I cracked out the tools and got to work!
Upon inspection of the screen assembly I found the capacitors must not of liked being shipped halfway across the US. They had just voided their electrolyte, I had just caught it before the board became a ground zero of corrosion. Thank god!
In the photos above I removed the capacitors to see a light coating of electrolyte which I promptly neutralized and cleaned up. Once the area was cleaned and retinned I went to my favorite part supplier and a week later I was ready to recap the screen. I needed a few 10uF and 100uF caps. Now I’m lucky that I ordered the short ones?
Or so I thought... yeah... apparently I purchased the wrong voltage which was slightly larger. Thankfully I had some spares left over from another project and swapped them out. So they no longer protruded towards the back of the screen case
