Mac Format

Macintosh Portable

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L aunched in 1989, the Macintosh Portable was Apple’s first stab at the nascent laptop market, and it showed.

It had some pretty nifty features. With an impressive active matrix LCD display that was crisp and quick, and a clever trackball input device that could be switched to either side of the keyboard, it showed some touches of classic Apple flair.

Still, at 7.2kg it rather strained the definition of ‘portable’. There was also the issue of cost. At $7,300 for a model equipped with a hard drive (about £11,350 today), its princely price tag meant it wasn’t an option for those with faint hearts or light wallets.

There was another serious issue, though. It could only run on mains power if a battery was installed; if the battery could no longer hold a charge, you couldn’t run it on mains power at all. Consequent­ly, it’s nearly impossible to find a working, usable Macintosh Portable in the wild today.

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