Apple PowerBook Duo 280c and DuoDock Review and Repair
TheBasement TheBasement
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 Published On Mar 27, 2024

Thanks to https://www.pcbway.com for sponsoring this video.

Before the MacBook Air, there was another long serving range of PowerBook ultra portables. If you didn't want to trade power for portability, you picked yourself up a PowerBook Duo 280c. Complete with a Motorola 68040 and an active matrix colour screen it was a portable powerhouse for computing on the go. The downside however was the complete lack of any useful ports, requiring a dock for any sort of connection or expansion. It didn't even come with a floppy drive!
Thankfully Apple designed a couple of great dock options with the MiniDock and the DuoDock. The MiniDock gave you all the necessary ports you needed, but the DuoDock took this one step further. Not only did it provide the same ports as the MiniDock, but it also had built in Ethernet, extra video RAM for higher resolution displays, a built in floppy drive and space for NUBUS cards and even an extra hard drive!

Before we can use the PowerBook Duo, we have to do a bit of preventive maintenance by replacing some troublesome caps, then carry out a few upgrades like solid state storage, extra RAM and a unique SD card solution. Along the way we use a BlueSCSI to help out with the OS install.

Please note, this video is for entertainment purposes only. Don't try any of this yourself. Especially the dangerous sparky bits.

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Credit:
Macintosh Portable Footage: ‪@polymatt‬


Timestamps:
0:00 Intro and design
2:43 MiniDock
4:36 DuoDock
5:40 Kindly sponsored by PCBWay
6:15 Unique design
6:50 Tearing down the PowerBook Duo
10:29 More modifications
13:09 Powering it up and installing OS using MiniDock
14:33 Quick look inside the DuoDock
15:16 Using the DuoDock to connect to AppleShare
16:29 Conclusion and outro


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