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At the Worldwide Developers Conference in May, 1999, Steve Jobs unveiled the second iteration of Apple's G3 Series PowerBooks - the alimmed-down Lombard, and a couple of weeks later I posted this The Road Warrior opinion piece commenting on the new machine. As I noted in the first paragraph, laptops still had a fair way to go before they matched and then surpassed desktop Macs in sales, although that threshold would be passed just a few years later.
I never did own a Lombard, although one of my offspring did, but I've had three PowerBook G3 Pismos, which share the Lombard's form factor. The Lombard was a bit of a transitional machine, being the first PowerBook with "New World" ROM and USB and the last to support SCSI. Ultimately, its successor, the Pismo, proved to be a much more successful computer, but the Lombard pioneered a new era in Apple laptop engineering, and served many of its owners well.
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When it was released the Lombard was certainly a nice machine, but mostly because it was a smaller, lighter, Wall Street. It was not much of an advance in any other area. Over time the Lombard suffered widespread cache failures that turned reasonable performers into slugs and making the Lombard a machine to avoid.
The Pismo brought forth serious 100MH bus speeds, Rage128 graphics and a forward looking 1GB RAM limit. Charles would agree that it’s the Pismo that has withstood the test of time, not the Lombard.