History
It was introduced on 16 May 1994 with the expensive active matrix LCD PowerBook 540c and 540, with the passive matrix 520c and 520 soon after. One of its marketing highlights was the promise of a PowerPC upgrade to its CPU and PC Card (PCMCIA) expansion. The introduction of this model came at the time of Apple's change over to the new PowerPC Chip from the 68k line of CPU's, and Apples advertising and promise of the PowerPC was the cause of headaches to the company. The resulting strong demand for its ground breaking design and wrong market prediction of waiting for the fully PowerPC PowerBook resulted in shortages early on.
In due course the 540 was dropped from the line, 8 mb of additional memory and the modem was offered installed from the factory, hard drive capacity was increased (from 160 and 240 to 320 and 500 mb), and the installed system upped from System 7.1.1 to 7.5. The PC Card Cage also started to sell on the market.
In 1995 Apple gave permission for Apple Japan to introduce an updated version, called the 550c, with a bigger display (10.4"), CPU with FPU (68040), bigger hard drive, and Japanese keyboard. It was only sold in Japan, and never received FCC certification.
With delays in the new PowerPC book (5300), demand for the PPC upgrade mounted, and Newer Technology began to market the upgrade before Apple did, although they had produced the upgrade modules for Apple first. What's more, they offered 117 MHz versions over Apple's 100 (actually, 99) MHz offering. Soon thereafter, Newer Technology introduced a 167 MHz model that outperformed the fastest PowerBook 5300, the $6800 5300ce, at a time when problems with that line became a real issue to Apple.
About the time Apple introduced the PowerBook 1400, Newer Technology introduced a 183 MHz upgrade with 128 Kb of L2 Cache that kept it ahead of the power curve performance wise. Newer Technology stated they could not produce more of the 183 MHz upgrades because the supply of connectors was exhausted.
Read more about this topic: Power Book 500 Series
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