Consumer Portable Design and Hardware

Apple's Consumer Portable — possibly the most public of the many widely kept secrets in Cupertino. The project has already been the focus of one too many misinformation campaigns, though if you ask anyone at Apple if they have any regrets about the project, they'll probably grin and tell you that announcing the unit over a year in advance was their only mistake.

For over eight months now Apple has been showing the Consumer Portable to business associates in a purple-and-smoke-flavored eMate casing that sports a 9-10" color screen — assuring partners that the units' internals are among the most compact in the company's history of complete portable computing solutions.

According to sources, one of these units was present at Macworld San Francisco for Steve Jobs to demonstrate to executives from crucial Macintosh software corporations such as Adobe and Macromedia. The unit apparently would crash when running a custom version of Mac OS 8.6 — which at the time was in early alpha stages of development — shortly after the boot process completed, though both the system software and hardware have come a long way since then.

According to sources, the Consumer Portable will officially go by the name "iBook" and will be based on a 333MHz (downclocked to 300MHz) processor with 32MB of SDRAM. More recent information suggests that the unit will feature a FireWire bus, though this will not be a highlighted feature, since there will be no built-in FireWire port. Instead, FireWire connectivity is rumored to be provided via some form of card slot.

The units will include USB, 10/100BaseT, Modem and Audio ports, sources said. All components on the Consumer Portable are said to be internal, including a CD-ROM drive, with no external devices shipping as Apple-provided options. The traditional battery bay is also rumored to be absent from the machines, yielding to a more innovative and space-consuming bay.

The Consumer Portable will most definitely appear at the expo, sources said, as the photo shoot for these units has already been completed. Numerous sources noted that marketing shots of the iMac-style laptop have surfaced over the past week.

Word is that the Consumer Portable will be available in the same iMac fruity flavors. The casing design is clamshell like — more so than the current line of PowerBooks — and extremely compact. Each casing is rumored to be composed of iMac-style "Icing White" plus one of the fruity flavors.

The majority of the units, including the keyboard area, is said to be translucent iMac white icing color, while the top and base of the unit feature a wrap-around grip in fruit flavors. The edges of the machines are also said to be in color, as is the lettering on the keyboard. The unit definitely sports a handle, which some sources claim looks "a bit feminine."

While specific pricing information on the Consumer Portable has been obtained, it will not be published at this time, pending further confirmation. We'll be following the Consumer Portable up until its release, and plan numerous updates on the project over the next two weeks. Updates to the information presented in this report will also follow.