The shots were apparently taken in 1997, but the laptop looks older than that. I can't tell what logo that is on the lid.
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Anybody know what PC laptop Steve Jobs is using in these old photos?
- Thread starter calabi-yau
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Looks like it could be a Toshiba Satellite, but none of the laptops I can find look exactly like it. The ports on the back and the side don't match, but the logo on the top looks like it matches the Satellite logo
Thanks for the Toshiba tip. I couldn't find a Satellite that matched either, but the styling of Steve's laptop looked very Toshiba, so I looked around for other older Toshiba models. Then I ran across the Toshiba Tecra, and the Tecra logo definitely looked close to the one in the photos. Tecras also had that funky asymmetrical hinge design. After looking around at different models, it seems to be a 700-series Tecra, maybe a 740CDT (pics below). He probably ran OPENSTEP on it, according to people familiar with Steve's habits back then. Funnily enough, I Googled around and found no mention of Steve using a Tecra. Everyone else points to Steve's love of ThinkPads back then, and there are mentions of specific models he used, but nothing about this Tecra that shows up across multiple different photo dates in 1997.
Anyway, the logo and layout of the lid match the Tecra 740CDT:
The rear also matches:
And here's the front. The 740CDT seems to date to 1996:
Interesting; I wonder if Steve had any PC products at home? I'd assume not; while most who had the luxury of owning a Mac also needed to own a PC to keep up with work, I imagine Steve forced all those around him to adopt his ecosystem lol.
I mean, there were ways around it, but you'd always run into that one weird scenario where you'd need to run a Windows program.
I mean, there were ways around it, but you'd always run into that one weird scenario where you'd need to run a Windows program.
In the later days of NeXT, and in the early days after his return to Apple, Steve pretty much used only PC laptops, especially IBM ThinkPads. He hated Apple PowerBooks (probably for a mix of 1) valid reasons, and also 2) his love of grudges and being spiteful in general lol). But supposedly he liked ThinkPads so much, he directed his engineering and design teams to take a lot of inspiration from them for the PowerBook G3, which was developed at least partly under his watch.
EDIT: as for Windows, I bet he had some machines running it just to poke at it, but he probably mostly ran OPENSTEP. Here's a shot of him prepping for MacWorld on a ThinkPad w/ OPENSTEP:
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