There have been various iBook colors over the years, since it's introduction in July 1999. Originally it debuted in two colors, Tangerine and Blueberry. It had a clamshell design, no latches to break (it closes like a cell phone with a spring hinge), and a handle. The best school laptop I've had the pleasure to use. It had a 300Mhz G3, 2 USB ports, stereo out, modem, ethernet, and AirPort wireless ethernet. All for US$1599.

The first batch sold out instantly. The Taiwan earthquake of 1999 caused some manufacturing delays, making them commercially unavailable until October. It got rave reviews, until John C. Dvorak, of TechTV's Silicon Spin fame, called it 'girly' and "Barbie's laptop." "No self-respecting businessman would bring one of these to a boardroom meeting." (of course, there's a powerbook for that) A very public flame war between him and a columnist from Salon ensued for a month.

About nine months later at Macworld Tokyo, a new graphite special edition was announced. It was 50MHz faster, a more professional graphite color, had extra RAM but otherwise the same specs, except for being US$200 more.

About a year after the iBook's introduction, the entire iBook line was revised. There was a traditional iBook, available in a deeper blue "Blueberry" and a new color Key Lime for $1499. At a higher end was the iBook Special edition in Graphite and Key Lime, with DVD, 100MHz speed increase, and larger HD for $1799. Both included firewire and 64MB RAM. The Key Lime color became a subject of debate, as the photographs were so... bright. It looked radioactive, garishly yellow and green.

I went with Graphite, as I wasn't sure how the other would look in real life, plus I didn't want to stand out that much, like Reese Witherspoon did. In Legally Blonde, she had a very stylish setup with a Tangerine iBook starkly contrasting the rest of the black PC laptops in the class.

On May 1, 2001, Apple Computer introduced a new iBook to compliment the new Titanium Powerbook G4, aka "TiBook." The new iBook is pure white, rectangular with curved edges. It's the size of a sheet of paper (but thicker ;)), weighs two pounds less than my iBook, has a 12 inch 1024x768 LCD screen, and RGB and composite out. The base price is $1199 as of 10/2001, and the higher end models come with a CD-RW/DVD combo drive. It also has built in antennas for AirPort wireless ethernet. It's been called a chiclet, an "iceBook," and has been considered the best student laptop of all time by just about everybody.

In fact, Henrico County, Virginia school district has bought 23,000 iBooks for use by each and every student in the district.

At Macworld San Francisco 2002, Apple announced a 14.1 inch special edition iBook, with a bit larger screen. Also, Maine is paying Apple $25million US to supply all their seventh and eighth graders in the state with iBooks, a figure of 36,000. This is the largest education sale in History, even better than Henrico county's plan (but with better tech support, Maine learned from Virginia's mistakes).