The 1400/117 lacked an L2 cache altogether, which definitely made it slower than it should have been. (My 1400 started as one of these until I replaced the mainboard with the much better /166.) And even if you had L2, the memory bandwidth to the unusual RAM was slow (it was only 70ns and it was not interleaved), and even then, you only had 64MB max. My 1400 has a double-pumped bus allowing it to run a 466MHz G3, and even with that it doesn't feel like, say, my 7300 did with a 500MHz G3.

That said, it is no slouch, and the PowerBook 1400 is my favourite PowerBook not only because of my long history with them (I got it as a hand-me-down, fixed it myself, and used it heavily through my last years of medical school), but *because* you can expand them so much. It now has an external video port, 64MB of RAM, the G3, a modem and an Ethernet card, plus a new faster hard disk. That's pretty damn modular.

Nowadays all laptops above a certain price point are desktop replacements, so sometimes it's good to remember the days when that wasn't necessarily the case.