CAV'S WONDERLAND

PowerBook 170 Repair and Teardown

Dumpster gold (actually gold is far more expensive), January 30, 2024

Further Reading

The Apple PowerBook 170 is awesome little piece of computing history. It is the direct descendent of the Macintosh Portable, which was the first battery powered Macintosh. The 170 was the only in its original lineup to feature an active matrix display, and the one of the first to ship with System 7 installed. I got this piece of tech by pulling it out of a dumpster while on vacation.

True story: I was surfing Craigslist while on a road trip with my family, and saw someone giving away some free tech. It didn’t look like anything all that interesting, just some old floppy disks and weird AGP cards, but I sent him a message anyway. The next day, we drive over, and as expected the stuff is a bit underwhelming. Then he says that in the dumpster across the street he threw away some more old tech if we wanted to take a look at it. That old tech was 5 laptops from 1998 on, a sound mixer, and a 1991 PowerBook 170, with all of its original manuals *may provide images at a later date. So we bring it all back home.

At home, I immediately want to get the PowerBook working, and it’s in really good condition. No big dents/scratches, but it won’t boot (unsurprisingly). As it tries to boot, I can hear a scratching coming from the inside, and since there are no other moving parts (ignoring the floppy drive), I think the hard drive must be dead. So, I go out on a limb and order a 40 USD 60MB replacement drive off of eBay, which is an upgrade to my PowerBook’s 40MB. It arrives, and I will say looks far more modern than the original.

It’s an easy installation, especially by modern Apple standards. I power it on, and COMPLETELY subverting expectations, it just works. I don’t even have to install the OS, the previous owner didn’t wipe the drive. It just has a couple of simple games, and a customized nav button.

But don’t worry, this post isn’t done yet. The laptop may be repaired, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do a complete teardown, showing every nook and cranny of this machine. So that is exactly what I’ll do, pictures will be after all this text so it’s less interrupted.

The full specs of the PowerBook 170 are: a Motorola 68030 @ 25MHz with a 68882 FPU, 8MB of RAM, with 2MB soldered on and another 6MB on an expansion card*, and 1MB ROM. It sold for 4,599 USD in 1991, which equals about 10,300 USD as of January 2024. Which is insane, not only that a 10 thousand dollar computer was mainstream, albeit high end, but that I got it for free-yes I will continue to gloat about that.
*I am about 90% sure it’s 6MB, but not 100%

Also as a final side note before the teardown images, the battery is *incredibly* busted. It holds absolutely no charge, and is currently splitting its think plastic shell open; it is an active fire hazard. Anyway, enjoy!