PowerBook 5300

Macintosh PowerBook 5300

The PowerBook 5300 was Apple's jump into mobile PowerPC based notebooks. It was offered in 100MHz and 117MHz configurations using the 603e CPU. Like the 190, the 5300 came in both grayscale and color screen configurations. Base memory was 8mb expandable to 64mb. This series was plagued with a few problems, most notably being the original lithium ion batteries catching on fire during testing at Apple. This led to a recall and replacement with a NiMH style found in the 190 series. For a PowerPC notebook, the 5300 was also painfully slow compared to its desktop counterpart as the CPU lacked L2 cache.

My personal PowerBook 5300 is actually a frankenstein unit as the screen was pulled from a 190cs model. I have 24mb RAM and a 540mb HD, running OS 8.1. I find that performance is only slightly better than my PowerBook 190 in standard tasks.

Ultimately the 5300 fails as a PowerPC notebook. Anyone considering purchasing one should instead look into the PowerBook 3400 which offers a larger screen and a better system design.