Photo: Starring the Computer PowerBook 5300 faces real-world problemsīefitting Apple’s bad luck at the time, its most high-profile Mac in years (at least in terms of screen time) suffered some embarrassing failures.

The PowerBook 5300’s Hollywood agent had a busy couple of years. You can see some of the PowerBook 5300’s big-screen cameos in the images below. The PowerBook gets some major movie screen time As a result, the Mac shows up on-screen running a command-line interface instead of Mac OS, making it look way behind the Windows 95 operating system then running on PCs.Įven worse, when a particularly tough job turns up later in the movie, the Mission: Impossible team’s computer expert prescribes the use of nonexistent “Thinking Machines laptops.” Supposedly only those computers are up to the task at hand. Why deem this a missed opportunity? Because Apple made the $15 million sponsorship deal late during the movie’s production, and therefore had no say over the screenplay.

As Owen Linzmayer relates in his excellent (although now considerably outdated) book Apple Confidential 2.0, the biggest missed opportunity for the PowerBook 5300 on the big screen came in 1996’s Mission: Impossible, in which Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt uses the laptop. Not all on-screen appearances by Apple computers proved so auspicious.

The computer then deactivates the enemy ship’s shields by uploading a virus. In Independence Day, for example, the Mac (a platform that was just beginning to get better at interfacing with Windows PCs) plugs into an alien mothership, courtesy of its 100MHz processor, 64MB RAM and Mac OS 7.5.2 operating system. But 1995’s PowerBook 5300 did a lot better than most, mainly due to its starring role in so many films. PowerBook 5300: Apple’s Hollywood computerĪpple always did a great job getting its products in movies.

Independence Day for mac instal