Filed under: Hardware, Portables, Odds and ends, Retro Mac, Apple History
A fond look at a blast from the past: the Mac Portable
An email this morning from Harry McCracken at Technologizer.com pointed the way to a trip down memory lane. Harry was letting us know that Technologizer blogger Benj Edwards had written a 20th anniversary teardown post about the first truly mobile Mac -- the Mac Portable.Why is this a trip down memory lane for me in particular? I actually owned one of these beasts for a few years. They were ridiculously expensive at the time -- US$7,300 for a 16 lb. (7.25 kg) monochrome screen machine with 1 MB of RAM, a floppy disk drive, and a 40 MB hard disk -- but since I was a developer at the time I was able to get a substantial discount and bought it for about $4,000.
I recall taking my Portable to meetings back in the day, and people were absolutely fascinated by it. Of course, about two years later it would be replaced by the much lighter (5.1 lb. / 2.3 kg) PowerBook 100, which was the first of what we consider to be the truly "laptop" Macs.
Definitely take a look at the Technologizer post if you get a chance. Benj does a step-by-step teardown, describes what you're seeing in each photo, and notes what items on the Portable made it such a technological wonder in the late 1980s. I won't spoil things for you, but be sure to look at the last page of the teardown for a comparison Edwards does between the Portable and the iPhone. We've come a long way in just 20 years.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael Khalili said 12:07PM on 9-21-2009
I wonder how much more computing power the iPhone has than that portable.
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Ryan Trevisol said 1:02PM on 9-21-2009
Wonder no more:
Processor: At least 37 times (600mhz 3gs vs 16 MHz)
Ram: 256x more (256 mb ram 3gs)
Capacity: 2000x more (32gb vs 16 mb)
Resolution: 0.32x (320x240 vs 600x400)
Pixels/Inch: 1.68x (114ppi vs 68ppi)
But you could probably copy and paste from the start with the mac portable.
guerro said 11:55AM on 9-22-2009
It was the Portable that was miniaturized by Sony and dubbed the PowerBook 100.
Ian said 12:10PM on 9-21-2009
I was given one of these a few years ago when we were cleaning out an old storage shed. The beast weighs a ton, but to my surprise actually booted up just fine. Certainly a blast from the past.
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SIP said 12:29PM on 9-21-2009
I have one of these, with working PSU and original Install disk set, sitting at the back of the wardrobe where it has become quite irksome for the Missus.
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univac said 1:12PM on 9-21-2009
Who remembers the Outbound?
The first Apple sanctioned Mac "clone" in a portable laptop form factor in 1989.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbound_Laptop
What made it really amazing is that it had a detachable wireless keyboard (wow!!) and a pointer device built-into the keyboard—a slidey cylinder thing.
I had a friend who had one and I got to use it occasionally. It was pretty incredible at the time.
The bummer was since Apple wouldn't license the Mac software ROM, Outbound had a limited agreement with Apple that allowed users to physically remove the ROM chip from a working Mac and put it into the Outbound.
Ah! If it were only that easy now...
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HandyMac said 4:45PM on 9-21-2009
I had one too; I paid $1200 for the final backlit model (the first ones were non-backlit, somewhat crippled in other ways) in 1991, when they were remaindered about the time the first PowerBooks came out. I really liked it; it was (of course) my first portable Mac, and first flat-panel display (a huge relief, the CRT in my SE had been killing my eyes), and I used it happily until the PowerBook 170 came within range; I've been a portable Mac user ever since. I also set up several clients with Portables, including one that traveled all over South America.
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Santa said 8:23PM on 9-21-2009
Since I am admittedly Apple addicted (OK, elderly Fanboy nowadays), I have pretty much owned all of their products at one time or another. Never had the Anniversary unit, but a few months ago a came across an external CD player. It was gray and sort of wedge shaped. The stand was removable, but I never got it to work. Which unit was that supposed to go with, I wonder.
When will MIcrosoft realize that Apple is just great and Microsoft will always just be average. Ballmer needs to retire, he really makes things worse for Microsoft.
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Dan said 12:26AM on 9-22-2009
That's somewhere north of 175 Macintosh models since 1984, you know... ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models
Rick Ewing said 5:18PM on 9-21-2009
When I was working for Apple 20 years ago, I had one of the original non-backlit versions. The portable was maligned for being too heavy but if you look at it, the Portable was the final act of original portable designs that dated back to the Osborne 1. But the Portable was also class leading in a few respects and was in many ways the missing link between older designs and true laptops. First was that not only did it have a battery but the battery lasted most of the workday (OK, it was a large, heavy lead-acid cell, but you could replace it!). It literally took 20 years for Apple to make another product with that kind of battery life. The active-matrix screen was new for any "laptop" as passive twist screens were more cost effective. Apple wouldn't revisit the technology until the Powerbook 180 and today we take the technology for granted. It had the option of a hard drive, which was a big deal since many desktop computers of the day were only then getting them. It had a trackball which meant you could do the Apple interface without having to carry a separate mouse. Like all Macs of the day, it had built in wired networking (Appletalk). And it was pretty rugged. At Apple, somebody accidentally ran over one with their Jeep. The case was cracked but the unit survived.
The Portable was designed to fill a small niche of buyers and to solve the problem of people hauling SEs, Classics and SE/30s in travel bags. But the high price, heavy chunky design and non-back lit screen kept it from being a winner in the marketplace. When the first true laptops, the Powerbook 100 and 140s would appear in October 1991, many of the innovations of the Portable found their way into those products, and the Portable was forgotten.
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Dan said 12:28AM on 9-22-2009
The Mac Portable was a great machine in its day, with some innovative features. It also had its fair share of albatrosses, too. It made the cover of a 1989 BYTE magazine and was duly reviewed.
The BYTE reviewer, while admiring its capabilities, also had to point out that it was less of a portable and more of a 'transportable'! A sly swipe at its weight with noticeable heft. And then there was the battery life issue to contend with, too...
It was a ground-breaking machine for the time, even if it wasn't around for that long. Fortunately, Apple learned from their goofs with the Portable and brought us the venerable Powerbooks and later MacBooks.
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Santa said 2:51AM on 9-22-2009
Yep, I remember. My excuse was that I had a store buying and selling used (and sometime new) Apple equipment of all kinds, including peripherals. Apples, Macs etc.
While I owned them I got to play with them, update them or just use them for parts. Repair rate was low, I made my money with the Windows stuff, junky and always in need of repair.
I closed shop in 2000, but still now own 4 very recent Macbook Pros, 24" and 30" monitors and an iMac and some other Apple stuff, incl. 3 iPhones. I just feel comfortable having Apple around me. I am not trying to show off, just expressing my preference.
Hoyt L Kesterson II said 1:49AM on 9-22-2009
I had one of these "rush shipped" to me on the day they were released so I could take it to Europe. I fondly called it the luggable. It had fairly good battery life; I could work most of a Europe-to-Dallas flight. Where ever I took it people would comment that it was too big and too heavy. When I saw them again, it was not unusual to see that they had purchase one also.
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Bones3D said 2:54AM on 9-22-2009
The early generation PowerBooks weren't exactly perfect either. One machine I had constantly needed to have the daughter card re-seated. (Not unlike the ill-fated Apple III desktop which needed to be occasionally "dropped" to knock the processor back into place every so often...)
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Alan said 12:44PM on 9-23-2009
I worked at ComputerLand in the 1980's-90's. I was our only Apple-certified tech, so I got to work with a lot of their early products. The portable was a great, rugged machine, with a great keyboard and long battery life.
In contrast, it was a behemoth compared to the Compaq LTE and NEC Ultralite that we were also selling at the time. But, it was the only Apple-made portable product available. It really just suffered from poor timing, as luggables like the Compaq Portable and the IBM PC Convertible were on their way out.
They were easy to work on. Once, we had a run of them with bad system boards, and I got to the point I could swap everything out while the customer waited.
Sadly, we lost our Apple dealership in the bad ol' 1990's.
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