Opinion: Slick, capable and connected: it's time to go back to the PowerBook Duo

I'm hugely excited about that laptop from Apple. The one that's breathtakingly light and smaller than anything else on the market, which is pared back to its essentials, and which somehow bypasses the rational part of your brain to lodge itself firmly in the desire centre. You just want it.

Nope, I don't mean the rumoured 12-inch MacBook Air, but the PowerBook Duo, which was introduced over 22 years ago. Despite being an ancient relic in technology terms (and despite it really being a bit of a nasty kludge made necessary by technology limitations) the Duo concept is one that deserves to be reborn for the 21st Century.

While you might think that after more than two decades we'd be better able to make no-compromise, do-anything machines, when you get right down to it we're still faced with many of the same problems that faced Apple's designers at the start of the 90s. The technology that surrounds and augments a laptop just hasn't quite caught up yet.

So before I sketch out for you what a reborn PowerBook Duo might be like – and why that's a good idea – let me remind you what the original was.

For one thing, it was small, and astonishingly light for such an old computer. Wikipedia tells me that only the MacBook Air and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro are lighter. Since I regrettably don't have a walk-in closet packed with every Apple laptop ever made (whatever my wife might tell you), I can't easily verify that claim, but it sounds about right.

It achieved this feat essentially by stripping everything it could get away with out of the laptop. Of course there was no Wi-Fi in those days, but it didn't have an Ethernet port either, and while you could fit a 14.4 modem, it was optional. In fact, the only external port the Duo had was a printer/modem port.

You couldn't even plug in an external mouse or keyboard, and you might have wanted to because part of the reason the Duo's footprint was so small was because its keyboard was 88% full size, and the trackball too was smaller even than the one found on Apple's iconic PowerBook 100. It didn't have a floppy drive, far less a CD-ROM drive, and the processor was weak even by the standards of the time.

A desktop away from your desk

Basically, this sounds dreadful, doesn't it? Compromise after compromise just to make a slim, light laptop. Ah, but the joy of the PowerBook Duo concept was that it turned the idea of a laptop on its head: you should properly think of it as a desktop that you could take away from your desk, and here's why.

Central to the Duo system was the dock. There were three types of dock, but the biggest and best was the Duo Dock, a big hunk of metal and plastic that at first glance looked like a contemporary desktop – especially since you'd probably find it with a monitor on top, a keyboard and mouse in front and a printer to the side. See, you slid the PowerBook Duo right into a flap on the front of the Dock, and – thunk – it engaged with a 156-pin Processor Direct Slot (PDS) docking port at the back of the laptop.

Now you not only had a bigger screen, networking and all your peripherals attached, but you gained a floppy drive, an optional floating point unit to beef up the processor, the option for upgrading the VRAM so you could drive higher-res screens with more colours, space for a second hard disk and what's more two NuBus expansion slots so you could add all sorts of extra abilities – including the option of driving up to three external displays.

And this is why it's really a desktop you can take away from your desk. The idea is that you have a powerful, capable system at your desk, but when you stand up to walk out, you can pinch out only the bare essentials of what you need to get stuff done on the go – and it's still your Mac, still the same machine. You don't have to muck about with syncing of files or having to install and configure apps on a desktop and a laptop system: your desktop is your laptop.

As well as the practical advantages of this, to me there's something just so awesome about slotting your laptop into a desktop case like this and having it be turbo-charged. The Duo Dock would draw the Duo in a bit like a VHS cassette, and there was even an eject button to spit it out again.

There were smaller, cheaper and more portable dock options too, but all worked through that PDS, which gave it full access to the Duo's CPU and data buses.

Answering the same questions again

Again, the reason such an over-engineered system was even necessary was because the limitations of technology wouldn't let Apple make a small, light laptop that was as powerful and capable as a desktop. While we've made great progress with laptops' capabilities, though, that's actually still a problem that affects us today. So here's how and why Apple could reuse its old idea today.

One of the obvious areas where laptops still lag is in graphics performance, and it's at least theoretically possible to use an external graphics card hooked up over Thunderbolt – in some ways a spiritual successor to PDS – so that's the first thing we spec into in our imaginary dock.

What's more, with an increasing reliance on GPGPU – using a graphics card for general computing tasks – a big, meaty dedicated graphics card in the dock to augment a battery-boosting weedy graphics card inside the laptop will boost overall performance too.

And while we're about it, let's hook up a load of internal storage as well. I'd love to see Apple put a Fusion Drive in place – a hard disk paired with a PCIe SSD, in this case inside the laptop – but leave additional bays for more hard disks. When you filled it up, you'd slot a new drive into an empty bay (a bit like the old Power Mac G5 or Mac Pro) but the clever bit is that the OS would take care of expanding the storage dynamically so you'd only ever see one drive. The speed of the SSD would keep everything fast and responsive.

When you undocked, the files on those hard disks would still be "there", just greyed out, and you'd use Apple's Back to My Mac tech seamlessly to pull it over the internet. The same tech that tells a Fusion Drive what files you regularly use in order to 'cache' them on the SSD means that you should have most stuff you actually need on the laptop's internal SSD anyway. The only difference from a Fusion Drive inside an iMac is that here the hard disk is external to the laptop (inside the dock, over a Thunderbolt bus) rather than internal alongside the SSD – something you can actually do yourself today if you want to.

Indeed, one of the internal bays could be used for a dedicated Time Machine backup drive that would also work over your local network or even the internet, CrashPlan-style, when you're undocked. And since we're wishing, let's finally make this the first Mac that has built-in 4G, so that the remote file grab thing works wherever you are. Of course, you'd have loads of ports for peripherals on this dock, all piped through the Thunderbolt bus, with its support for USB, FireWire, high-speed Ethernet and even displays.

You could imagine two dock designs, one a little box that would have these ports on it (including connections for two or three displays) or one which is essentially a big screen – not unlike an updated, beefed-up Thunderbolt Display – with all that included. You don't have to make it suck in the laptop to amuse and delight me, but you could. And boom: a slick, hugely capable and connected desktop computer, a subset of which I can pick up and walk out the door with, which is breathtakingly svelte and has truly epic battery life.

It might be that one day we can make a portable computer that packs the full power of a desktop – or a desktop that's entirely portable, which was a bit more like what the Duo was trying to do – and it might be that a connection to the internet becomes so fast, robust and ubiquitous that we dispense with the need for vast stores of data held locally on hard disks. That day is not today. Today we still need to compromise, which is why today is the day to resurrect the PowerBook Duo's clever compromise.

The 12-inch MacBook Air looks all very nice in those artist mock-ups, but Apple might do well to radically reimagine the very notions of desktop and laptop computers, rather than just refining, refining and refining again the same basic recipe for a laptop.

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