Macintosh Portable

The Macintosh Portable is a portable computer that was designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to October 1991. It is the first battery-powered Macintosh, which garnered significant excitement from critics, but sales to customers were quite low. It featured a fast, sharp, and expensive monochrome active matrix LCD screen in a hinged design that covered the keyboard when the machine was not in use. The Portable was one of the early consumer laptops to employ an active matrix panel—only the most expensive of the initial PowerBook line, the PowerBook 170, had such a panel. The machine was designed to deliver high performance, at the cost of increased price and weight. The Portable was discontinued in October 1991.

Macintosh Portable

Manufacturer	Apple Computer, Inc.
Type	Portable computer
Release date	September 20, 1989 (1989-09-20)
Introductory price	(with hard drive) US$7,300 (equivalent to $17,900 in 2023)
Discontinued	October 21, 1991 (1991-10-21)
Operating system	System 6.0.4 - 7.5.5
CPU	Motorola 68000 @ 16 MHz
Memory	1 MB SRAM (expandable to 9 MB), 256 KB ROM
Storage	1.44 MB double-sided floppy drive, 40 MB 3.5″ Conner hard drive
Display	9.8″ black and white active matrix LCD screen
Graphics	640 × 400 pixel, 1-bit
Input	keyboard, trackball
Power	6V 5Ahr lead-acid battery pack, AC Charger
Dimensions	4.05″ × 15.25″ × 14.43″
Mass	16 lb (7.3 kg)
Predecessor	Macintosh Plus (Macintosh SE)
Successor	PowerBook 100 PowerBook 140/170

The Portable has features similar to the Atari STacy, a version of the Atari ST computer with a built in keyboard and monitor. Macintosh Portable can run Macintosh System 6.0.4 through System 7.5.5.

Background

By the late 1980s, Macintosh users yearned for a portable version of their computer. Don Crabb titled his February 1989 column in BYTE "Hey Apple, I Need a Laptop". While third-party Macintosh conversions such as Dynamac and Colby existed, they were very expensive, and some are as heavy as or heavier than Apple's compact Macs; Crabb's column's subtitle was "The time has come for a portable mac that doesn't strain your arms or your credit line".

Hardware

The Macintosh Portable's pointer is a built-in trackball that can be removed and located on either side of the keyboard, and can also be replaced with a numeric keypad if a mouse is being used. There were three drive configurations available for Macintosh Portable. A Portable could ship with one floppy drive, with two floppy drives, or with a hard drive and a floppy drive. The floppy drive is 1.44 MB. Most Macintosh Portable units came with a hard drive, a custom-engineered Conner CP-3045 (known by Apple as "Hard Disk 40SC"). It holds 40 MB of data, consumes less power compared to most hard drives of its time, and has a proprietary SCSI connector; adapters that allow standard SCSI drives to be used on the Portable exist, but they are expensive. At 16 pounds (7.2 kilograms) and 4 inches (10 centimetres) thick, the Portable is a heavy and bulky portable computer. The main contributor to the Portable's weight and bulk was its lead-acid battery.

Display issues

Despite the dramatic improvement in terms of ergonomics offered by the responsiveness, sharpness, and uniformity of its active matrix panel, one of the primary drawbacks of the Portable was poor readability in low-light situations. Consequently, in February 1991, Apple introduced a backlit Macintosh Portable (model M5126). The backlight feature was a welcomed improvement, but it reduced the battery life by about a half. An upgrade kit was also offered for the earlier model as well, which plugged into the ROM expansion slot. The Portable used expensive SRAM memory in an effort to maximize battery life and to provide an "instant on" low-power sleep mode. In the newer backlit Portable, Apple changed SRAM memory to the less expensive (but more power-hungry) pseudo-SRAM, which reduced the total RAM expansion to 8 MB, and lowered the price.

Battery issues

The lead-acid battery pack on the non-backlit Portable offered up to ten hours of usage time, and the Portable draws the same amount of power when turned off, and when in sleep mode. The Portable, unlike many later portable computers from Apple and other manufacturers, will not boot without the battery pack installed. This is due to the relatively low power output of the included AC charger, 1.5A @ 7.5 V, which is insufficient to spin up the hard disk, which has an initial startup current draw requirement of 2-3 Amps. The battery pack must be installed and have sufficient charge to provide the additional current required during hard disk startup. Once booted and running, the total power required to run the computer drops below 1.5A and the Portable can continue to run on the AC charger alone. Several popular unauthorized workarounds were devised to allow the Portable to boot without a battery pack installed, including using an AC power supply from the PowerBook 100 series, which provides higher output.

The battery packs are no longer manufactured and it is very rare to find one that will hold a charge and allow the computer to start. As with other lead-acid batteries, such as automotive batteries, the sealed lead-acid (SLA) cells used in the Portable's battery pack sulfated and eventually failed if they were left for an extended time in a fully discharged state, such as when the computer was stored for a period of months or longer. It is possible to repack the battery with new cells, or use alternative 6 V batteries. There were three "X" size cylindrical sealed lead-acid cells inside the battery pack, manufactured by Gates Energy Products (now EnerSys); the same cells were also used in Quantum 1 battery packs for photographic flash use. The battery pack can be rebuilt with new EnerSys "Cyclon" brand batteries, using either three part number 0800-0004 single cells of 2V each, or using one 6V monobloc part number 0809-0012.

Development

There is some indication that Apple executives at the time, particularly, Jean-Louis Gassée, were aware of the design problems concerning the Macintosh Portable. These problems, combined with supply issues of the newly developed active matrix screen, caused numerous delays in launching the computer. While it cannot be determined what the initial internal intended launch date was, an AppleDesign illustration depicts prototypes dated 1986. Initial officially announced launch dates indicated that the Macintosh Portable would be available by June 1988. The Macintosh Portable itself also suggests a lengthy development time with a silkscreen date stamp of 1987 on the production keyboard PCB, indicating a close-to-final design was likely to have been determined by then. The computer, however would not be launched for over two years, with the final launch date being September 20, 1989.

Reception

The Macintosh Portable product launch was held at the Universal Amphitheater in Universal City, California at an estimated cost of $1 million with over 5,000 guests. The press reaction was mixed, with many praising the clear LCD screen, but most shunning the computer due to its size, weight and high cost, with the Los Angeles Times stating "It’s too big, too heavy and too expensive." Others noted that the computer seemed behind the times compared to competing laptops, stating that "This machine would have been OK 12 months or 18 months ago. But not today."

Apple had forecast first year sales of 50,000 units. However, the computer only generated lackluster sales of 10,000 units in its first quarter on the market. Apple then reduced the price of the Macintosh Portable by $1,000 in 1990, just 7 months after launch. The company discontinued the computer in 1991 with the launch of its replacement, the PowerBook series.

Timeline

Timeline of portable Macintoshes
See also: List of Mac models

External links

• Mac Portable profile on Low End Mac
• More pictures of a Mac Portable
• "Macintosh Portable: Technical Specifications". Apple, Inc. July 26, 2017. Retrieved September 21, 2022.
• "Macintosh Portable, 360-degree model", Russian Vintage Laptop Museum (museum), April 6, 2017