Agreed. One small pedantic nit. TiBook was not unibody. They did not machine the frame from one giant chunk of titanium. I had one and loved it also, but it was made from a bunch of parts. Fantastic laptop. Still have mine.

More info for the curious: https://www.macworld.com/article/2918513/the-powerbook-g4-ti...

Toshiba was selling Solaris laptops.

Yeah, but were they as sexy as the tiBook?

Like the OP, for me the tiBook was a defining moment. A unix laptop, and it also looked good? Easy, immediate purchase.

Not as colorful,

http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0012.html

https://books.google.de/books?id=wDlUmfY9nQsC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT...

Additionally there were UNIX laptops from NatureTech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dios0v0n9eY

and Tadpole

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo...

https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-co...

So no, "I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,, " isn't how history went.

Other vendors were already at it, while Apple was trying to make Copland work and not being so successful with A/UX.

At that time, Linux on laptops was an absolutely great choice.

None of your vendors were considered viable - far, far too expensive. However, Linux on x86 laptops at the time was amazing - portable Linux.

So when Apple joined that party, and made the hardware neat, it was an easy switch. Portable, PPC-based, Unix. This was a delightful moment.

Of course, I still have a Linux laptop around, and 20 years later .. I consider moving back to it, 100%. The ride has been good with Apple, but the horizon doesn't look too great ..

At that time no one sane was putting GNU/Linux in production to replace battle tested UNIX systems, if they loved their job.

What Linux laptops? It hardly worked properly in most desktops.

The first laptop I managed to get Linux working at all was a Toshiba in 1999, while these systems were being sold since 1992.

Linux has always worked great if you choose your hardware wisely, and for a long time in the 90's it was perfectly viable to put a Linux machine against an SGI, Sun or DEC system as a workstation. Really, Linux had traction even before the 21st century cloud and 'droid reality came along.

For most of the 90's I was using Linux in some capacity, professionally as well as personally.

I also had a Linux laptop (Winbook, Sony, and then Sceptre..) on which I did a lot of development and for which my carefully selected hardware did in fact work, just fine - it was certainly viable as a dev platform, and for us Unix programmers at the time, a small and light Linux laptop was far more preferable to the pizzaboxes that had to be carried in the trunk .. or more, bigger iron that you would stay at the office to use, instead of having at home.

The point is Linux really did okay in the 90's, in terms of providing Unix devs a way of working away from the computer room. I think this is an underappreciated mechanism behind Linux' success over the years .. you could carry Linux with you pretty easily, but this was not the case for Solaris, Irix, etc.

tiBook arrived 10 years after BeOS

I know, but want you to imagine what the world would have been like if it'd been a beBook instead. Like, could've happened 5 years sooner, imho.