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ITEM 150: Apple Macintosh PowerBook 140
Found on: 7/22/15
Materials: plastic, metal
Damage/wear: detached trackball falls out, missing power supply
Provenance: 702 Bandley Dr., Fountain, CO
Production details: This laptop was manufactured by Apple Inc., as a mid-range version of the PowerBook series (which also included the PowerBook 100 and PowerBook 170). Apple was established in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, who famously came up with their first computer in a garage in Los Altos, California. They began selling Macintosh computers, the first personal computers to be sold without a programming language (vs. their earlier computers like Apple II and III and the Lisa computer), in 1984. At the time, many of the computers were manufactured at a Fremont, CA facility, established in 1983 and which the company made a short documentary about.
For a brief time in 1990, when Apple was gearing up to sell the the 140 and 170, manufacturing had to be moved to Cork, Ireland, because the US had passed a 67% import tariff on active-matrix LCDs from Japan, which the laptops used. This laptop appears to have been made after that, since it says “Made in the US.” It was probably one of the first products made at the Fountain, CO plant that Apple bought from another computer manufacturer (Delta General) in March 1991, since at least one testimonial from a former employee states that mostly Powerbooks were made there (and only desktop computers appear in the Fremont, CA documentary). 
The Fountain, CO plant is a 340,000 square foot building next to a highway in a relatively rural area. At the time it was slated to employ 800 and 1,000 Apple workers. It was bought by SCI Systems of Alabama (a computer parts manufacturer) in 1996, the year that Apple laid off 1300 employees. In 2002 SCI merged with a company called Sanmina to become SCI-Sanmina (the same company that acquired the manufacturing facilities of Item 115: Verifone Vx570 credit card payment terminal in Kunshan, China). SCI-Sanmina then shipped jobs overseas and and closed the plant sometime in the 2000s. IRG, a Los Angeles-based real estate investment firm, bought the vacant plant in 2014. In 2011 StreetView, the building still has a Sanmina-SCI sign as well as a For Sale sign. But in current StreetView, that sign has been replaced with a “No Trespassing” sign with a and another sign has been added, reading “Under New Ownership - Available Immediately,” and beneath that, “Quantum Commercial Group.” (Quantum Commercial Group represented IRG in the acquisition of the building in 2014.) The building is still vacant.
Apple continues to make computers as well as smartphones and computer accessories but all of its manufacturing is now done overseas, much of it by Foxconn in China. However, like many other technology companies who are currently moving to Southeast Asian countries, Foxconn is planning to move out of China due to rising costs – in their case, to India.
Note: a rare transparent prototype of the PowerBook 140 is kept by a California collector named Henry Plain.
Date or date range: 1991
Still in production: no
Rare: somewhat
Still attainable from: eBay but without power supply
Value: retailed for somewhere between $2,299 (PowerBook 100) and $4,599 (PowerBook 170) (adjusted for inflation: between $4,028 and $8,057); currently $20-30 used without power supply
Use: This was a portable computer and one of the first to exhibit what would later become the standard laptop design. Its original brochure said it was “designed for those who want solid Macintosh performance and flexibility in a convenient, take-it-wherever-you-work notebook computer.” The laptop had a trackball for navigation, a floppy disk drive, and ports that could be connected to printers, hard disks, and input devices. Its owner may have used it for word processing, spreadsheets, or (if it was connected to a modem) email and fax. The original TV commercial for the PowerBook stressed how light and modern the laptop was; “everything else is a dinosaur,” one man says to another.