Random Apple Memory
The cool (for its time) Macintosh Portable. Plus, what to expect next issue…
At 16-17 lbs, depending on configuration, the 1989 Macintosh Portable was not what we might now think of as portable. In fact, it weighed the same as Apple’s contemporary Macintosh SE desktop models.
But it matched them in other respects, too. Its 9.8-inch 640x400 monochrome LCD was bigger and had more pixels than the SE’s CRT, and the performance of its 16MHz 68HC000 processor sat between the SE and the brand new SE/30. If the bulky chassis weighed about the same as the equivalent volume of actual bricks, that was partly because of a huge lead-acid cell – essentially a car battery – that kept it going for up to 12 hours. Over the next decade, notebook users would learn to put up with just a quarter of that.
Hartmut Esslinger’s “Snow White” design, with its pale plastics and sleek ribbing, brought elegance to what could have been a clunky specification. Eight ports on the back included a full-size SCSI connector for daisy-chains of external hard drives, an unlikely mobile accessory.
Behind the neatly enclosed hinge, a rear cover popped off without screws to expose a tidy modular arrangement of upgradable components. And in an echo of the original Macintosh 128k, the inside of the baseplate bore the engraved signatures of the engineering team.
The base configuration, at $6,500, came with a single floppy drive; add the optional hard disk and modem and you’d break $7,000 – that would be $14,000 today, adjusted for inflation. And that wasn’t exceptional for its time. As noted by
MacUser magazine at the time, this was “by far the most complex piece of machinery” Apple had ever sold. Just as importantly, as the cover photo of a swimsuit model floating beside her Mac Portable conveyed, it was the coolest.