I wonder if that was paid placement, or was there some Hollywood types who liked Macs back then. For writing, perhaps?? Certainly no feature film editing was going on with PCs or Macs, that's for sure!
But the best part was that Gil Amelio, the CEO at the time (and the third in like 36 months or something) ignored all of his lieutenants and shipped that PowerBook, even tho it had massive problems (and later, I think exploding batteries) but it shipped late so they couldn’t get it out on shelves to take advantage of the commercials and product placement.
But Amelio did get one to Whoopi Goldberg, who called about one for her nephew or something. Almost all of them were recalled, however. Amelio shared this story in his book as if he should be proud he got Whoopi Goldberg a broken computer.
Apple still does product placement in certain films and TV shows (not just Apple TV stuff) but tried to keep it on the downlow.
To anyone under 30 reading this: Yes, a fax. Yes, to a kid in the 90s this seemed like the kind of cool-ass tricks that were state of the art then and that I hoped one day would be accessible to me.
Mentioned therein: Apple won't allow their products to be used by bad guys. Hence the number of movies and TV shows where you can always tell the bad guy because they're the only person not using an Apple product.