>The PowerBook 5300 well earned the term "road apple" for being not only one of Apple's worst products ever but possibly one of the worst laptops ever. Between its crumbly "Spindler plastic" case, sluggish performance, battery faults, and numerous other hardware issues, it was symbolic of Apple's near-collapse during the mid-1990s when CEO Michael Spindler embarked on a frenzy of cost-cutting. Originally planned to use Sony lithium ion batteries, they were swapped for lower performance nickel hydride ones after two pre-production units caught fire. Four models were offered; a base model with a 640x480 grayscale screen, the mid-range models with either a passive or active matrix color 640x480 screen, and the flagship 5300ce which had an 800x600 screen, a 117Mhz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and a towering $6,800 price tag (lower 5300s had a 100Mhz CPU and 8 or 16MB standard RAM). Maximum supported RAM was 64MB.
>Among other hardware faults, the ribbon cable connecting the screen to the computer was wrapped around the hinges and easily damaged. Apple also used several different vendors for the screens, all of which used different and incompatible cables, making it impossible to swap them except for the exact screen it was designed for. Scores of PowerBook 5300s were recalled to have screens, motherboards, and other hardware repaired or replaced, resulting in numerous unhappy customers.
>It was one of the first production laptops to have hot-pluggable equipment bays to swap out storage devices and other peripherals. An internal CD-ROM drive was not offered to keep size down. The 5300 was sold for just short of one year, from August 25, 1995 to August 3, 1996.