Do you remember this one? It was pretty amazing when it came out. The Mac Portable was heavy, innovative, and mildly successful. The first portable to include a full keyboard, and trackball, the Portable also included a Lead Acid battery, providing 12 hours of battery life. Read the article at MLAgazine
Im surprised the mac portable didnt sink the girl on the float.
I was thinking the same thing, not to mention the fact that the display (like modern laptop displays) was unreadable in direct sunlight. And the battery would probably explode and spray acid all over you if you dunked it in the water.
Still wish laptops has track balls instead of the touch pads. I loved my old apple laptop. black and white screen and all.
They are much more precise than a stilly trackball.
Dekstop models even do scrolling.
http://www.cirque.com/products/easy.html
looks inovative for the time.
I happily used a Mac Portable for years they were truly great computers. I hardly ever used the battery, but it got lugged backwards and forwards between several locations. It had a bigger screen and more speed than a Mac SE, making it a very usable machine for office tasks and even light DTP.
There were smaller PC portables available back then, but I think the Mac Portable was a much more usable computer than any of them. A 286 running MS-DOS hardly compares with a Mac running System 7. WriteNow, Filemaker Pro, Excel, Illustrator, Pagemaker, all multitasking in an elegant GUI. Rather than text based apps running in a primitive single-tasking command line. It was worth carrying bit more weight to get a much better computer.
Even today a Mac Portable makes a very nice word processor.
Then it beat out the atari stacy by just a few days. They both came out in sept. 1989… The stacy was a killer laptop!
I remember… My first computer was an Atari 520ST with internal 3.5 360K drive! TOS/GEM was much better than DOS and Atari graphics and sounds… Wow, played my first Sierra games on it. Everybody (PC users) was jealous…
Those where the days…. We had a choice then, computing was fun. Today you don’t have that many «pratical» choice, PC or MAC… About the only choice left is for the OS and even so, if you’re not running Windows, you are a little bit left behind….
This MAC portable looks great even today. It was in many ways better than desktop MAC at the time. It did cost much more… As for the Stacy, it too had a so-so screen (green) and was technicaly inferior to the MAC. Only good for musician.
“Do not trust a computer that you cannot lift.”
Steve Jobs, 1984
That’s kind of funny, considering that the new G5 machines weigh an absolute ton (yes, I understand why and I think it’s just fine – if I could justify the cost, I’d have a dual G5 workstation).
just like gates ‘640kb should be enoguh for anyone’ quote
Yeah, but I guess Steve got around that because the Power Macs do still have handles. 🙂
ok, so apparently that quote is a fake. go figure
I am a Macintosh faithful who uses a G4 Sawtooth computer at home upgraded to 1.4 GHz with SATA and all the other fixin’s. I also have used two recent models of the Powerbook G4 series, the 12″ and the 15″. The latter is the reason for this posting…
Both G4 laptops have served me well and are fine examples of quality workmanship – with the exception of the displays. I say that, because in reading the article, it is very funny that it states that Apple shipped their ‘powerbook’ in 1986 with quite a few screen related issues and it was an internal policy to not fix a laptop with less than 6 dead pixels.
Out of the three powerbooks I have had in my lifetime, a Wallstreet and the two titaniums, both titantiums have had dead pixels – 2 on the 15″ and 1 on the 12″ and after paying 2K for the 15″ and 1.5K for the 12″ (both sold on eBay now), I have to say that Apple has a very ‘bad’ policy concerning their hardware.
I believe a company that has the utmost concern with how they are perceived should put a little more QA into their products – maybe a longer burn in period… I don’t know – all I know is for a laptop, I am using an HP DV1000 and the screen is magnificant and I don’t think I will use a Macintosh laptop again.
My two cents – I still love their desktops.
Bill
If I had properly formatted floppy’s it might even boot.
The floppy’s it had degraded beyond use, but it started the boot sequence. That and I think the battery is competely dead. Of course I can’t quite bring myself to take it apart to even see if it had a hard drive. It seems like sacrilege.
dead pixels…
i never really saw the point of worrying about them. sure they ain’t pretty and it ain’t perfect(coming from a person who oesn’t bend the spine of a book) but relly they aren’t that big a deal. I’ve got a table PC with a dead pixel and even with a warranty I don’t take it back since I know the benefit of that one pixel will never out match the loss of productivity by not having my tablet for 2 weeks. And frankly I forget about the pixel all the time so i rarely notice. now somewhere around a half-dozen and up i can see it being a functional impairment
I’ve got a table PC with a dead pixel and even with a warranty I don’t take it back since I know the benefit of that one pixel will never out match the loss of productivity by not having my tablet for 2 weeks.
I’m pretty sure that most manufacturers consider 2 or 3 dead pixels par for the course, and will not give you a new monitor if that’s the only thing wrong with it. Manufacturing pixel-perfect LCD’s is just plain difficult.
This cover was a “test image”.
If you comment on the girl, you are normal.
If you comment on the laptop, you are a geek.
If you comment on the girl and the laptop (any order), you are a Mac user.
I wrongly remembered the Apple Portable as the first laptop that has the keyboard close to the screen, with room por the hands/trackpad.
Do anybody remembers/knows which Apple model was the first to have that layout and if it was a “laptop-first”?
Thanks in advance.
“I was thinking the same thing, not to mention the fact that the display (like modern laptop displays) was unreadable in direct sunlight.”
That post is complete damning evidence that the poster never used the Mac Portable. The Mac Portable screen was ahead of its time. While most LCDs then were passive matrix with all of the attendant artifacts, the Mac Portable used an active-matrix LCD that was always crisp and sharp. Partly because it was a 1-bit active matrix display, the Mac Portable LCD is also one of those where direct sunlight makes it more readable, like the old Palm Pilot 1-bit displays.
I carried a Mac Portable home from work once in a while, it was owned by my corporate masters at the time. It weighed about the same as a classic Mac and the only reason it was easier to take home was it was sort of flat, instead of cubic like a Mac SE.
I forgot to add that the screen was so nice that if the light was bright enough, you did not need to turn on the backlight.
“Im surprised the mac portable didnt sink the girl on the float” – Mark.
Plastic mock-up model?
I remember at least two professional-level FPS gamers who used trackballs for control (instead of the more common mouse). I’ve never heard of *any* who used trackpads.
Interesting that the article mentions the original model didn’t *have* a backlight – it wasn’t introduced till 1991. Presumably, you used a later model with a better screen and a backlight.
Interesting that the article mentions the original model didn’t *have* a backlight – it wasn’t introduced till 1991. Presumably, you used a later model with a better screen and a backlight.
The article mentions that it used the same active matrix screen but added backlighting in 1991. That was because in poor lighting conditions, the screen didn’t view very well (duh). As long as you had good light the screen performed beautifully.
What I wonder is if the user who commented on the poor sunlight performance was wearing polarized sunglasses. Looking at LCD’s with polarized sunglasses produces a very interesting, but not desirable, affect on the display.
I would never pay for a laptop with dead pixels.
I’d simply cancel the credit card payment, and dump it back where i bought it.
I don’t care about the manufacturer’s ‘returns policy’, I don’t care what they consider ‘reasonable’ – I don’t care how difficult it is to manufacture TFT panels that work properly, but if you can’t make them ‘perfectly’ economically, then just don’t sell them.
Even 1 dead pixel is an irritating distraction, and there no way i will pay ‘new’ price for a broken piece of equipment.
knock $300 off the price for every dead pixel on the display and I might feel better about it, but frankly i’d rather pay the extra $$$ (or stick with a different display technology) than put up with dead pixels.
The Mac Portable definitely worked well in direct sunlight. In fact it needed a decent amount of light if you didn’t have the backlit version. I aimed a desk lamp towards the screen when using it indoors so that it was nice and readable.
You are right, the mac portable, like the Newton, Palm Pilot, and early Gameboy Advances, had a screen that worked great in bright light.
I was just tossing old papers out of the basement the other day & was looking at the flyer for this portable, didn’t think anyone would remember it. At the time, this machine was ridiculed for its weight but Apple learned from it.
As for pixels, until 2yrs ago I was also convinced that all LCD panels would have dead pixels after seeing so many Mac notebooks with them, but somewhere along the line the quality did improve. My last 5yr old PC book had 1 dead pixel, but all the models I see now are defect free, ie they get laser repaired or something.
Is Apple still selling any dead pixel displays ???
now i see where cp2020 got its imagery for some of the computers
thats in fact one apple item i would like to take a closer look at (reason may be that it reminds me of a amiga with a attached screen
and i must say that i belive a trackball is a better solution then a trackpad. and if you want scrolling, get a trackball with a buildt-in wheel
(if something like that exist)
“Yeah, but I guess Steve got around that because the Power Macs do still have handles. :-)”
You apparently have never carried a G5 very far. The word “handles” need to be replaced by the phrase “flat worthless as handles but work great as flat blunt pain inducing devises”
The handles on a G5 are more show then anything else, it’s fine for grabbing hold of it to drag it out from under your desk, or maybe move it around in a room. But try carrying one very far, it’s a no go.
Having carried it a decent way when taking it back to the apple store to see what’s wrong with it by the top handles, I will never do that again. In the end the correct way to carry one is just like any other computer. Pick it up and hold it from the bottom and lean against your chest, or with one on a top handle one on the bottom.
I found the steve jobs comment to be very amusing. A G5 is very heavy, which is fine, as long as you never move it. And who ever designed the handles needs to be kicked. Handles should be round at the very least, the best handle shape is a rounded triangle, but the design of the G5 as is wouldn’t work for that.
The only desktop i can think of that the handle worked well, was an aptiva I
had, it was light enough, and the right shape, you could carry it with one arm at your side, and being an aptiva you could throw the thing across the room like a shot put and it would be fine.
you can’t repair dead pixels in displays. The suppliers who have a policy of not shipping screens with dead pixels just don’t accept screens with dead pixels (and the screen manufacturers probably charge them extra).
I got one about a year ago, a friend of mine found it on a store. It was excelent condition, only the bad was dirty. Unfortunately i’m unable to make it boot, it gives me the sad mac with a random error code that I can’t find it on the web. If anyone knows something that can help, please mail me. I’m an old computer fan and i’d love to have this baby working.
Even so, I was impressed by it’s weight(!) and the amazing screen. It’s an old model without backlight and yes, direct sunlight is ok.
Btw, there were some models without a trackball, instead they had cursor keys.
Nope. Trackpads suck. Have you ever even used a trackball?
I’m surprised to see a link to the MLAgazine here! I know the guy who started it and I never expected it to take off like it has. But anyway, 12 hours battery life! That’s like 1/2 a day? ^_-
Story #1: A Friend of mine who lives in Manhattan ran out and bought a Macintosh Portable right after the PowerBook was released. Why? Because she was afraid of carrying around a seven pound portable–someone would push her over, grab it, and run off. Nobody is going to easily run off with a 17 pound “portable”.
(Visual image: Mugger runs up, pushes the lady, grabs the portable–THUD–and has to drag this thing off…)
Story #2: When Apple first introduced the PowerBook, the presenter started off with a line about how Apple had finally found the best market for the Macintosh Portable. Cut to a video of the Space Shuttle taking off.
That’s right! The Macintosh Portable was the first Macintosh–in fact, the first commercial portable computer–in space back on STS-43. The mission also featured another first: The First E-Mail from space via–you guessed it–AppleLink.
The best part of the video, though, was the dream that everybody had with the original Macs. This was the floppy disk drive that could shoot a disk across the room. Remember that the floppy drives on the old Macs had no button to push (difficult to do in zero gravity), so when you chose “Eject” from the “Special” menu, foosh! Out came the disk sailing gently across the flight deck.
Anyway, the Macintosh Portable was a fun machine for it’s time…
The best handle I’ve seen on a mass-produced desktop was the handle on the top-front of the IBM IntelliStation Z Pro (the original PPro-powered model 6899, of which I own two):
http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner/istation.jpg
There’s also a recessed gripping area in the top-back which works well with the handle to let you pick the servers up with very little effort.
Those cases were a wonderful design…
yes it’s funny that gates said that considering that ram is so cheap because microsoft needed more of it for win 95 so they bought micron stock and crashed / commoditized the ram market by overproducing it.
Forget the “portable” computer, check out that sweet cordless phone.
I had one like that that would ring whenever a car drove by (EMI from the spark plugs would be picked by the phone.)
yes it’s funny that gates said that considering that ram is so cheap because microsoft needed more of it for win 95 so they bought micron stock and crashed / commoditized the ram market by overproducing it.
Firstly, there’s a great deal of conjecture as to whether or not he ever *did* say it.
Secondly, the timeframe in which he was supposed to have said it was way back in the very early ’80s (1981 IIRC) when RAM was not only very expensive, but 64k of it was considered quite adequate. So saying ten times that amount “should be enough”, given the RAM prices of the day (64 kilobytes was something like US$300, or over US$600 in today’s money), the projected lifetime of the system they were making (a few years) and the programming practices of the day (conserve as much RAM as possible) would have been fairly reasonable, really.
Yeah, that handle is a lot like the aptivas. My GL300 had some cup/lip thing that worked out, but not as good as that handle.
forgive my poorly constructed sentence which you have taken the wrong way:
Yes it’s funny that gates said that, considering that [NOW] ram is so cheap because microsoft needed more of it for win 95 [when it came out in 1995.] So, they bought Micron stock [a major producer of RAM] and crashed / commoditized the ram market [which was VERY much a monopolized market at the time and several people have since gone to jail for price fixing,] by overproducing it [In 1995-1999.]
Win 95 was terrible on late era 486 computers with mostly 4mb maybe some with 8mb ram. I paid 350$ for 16MB of 72pin 70NS FPM ram SIMMS in 1995 before the japanese ram-producing monopoly broke (thanks to, ironically, Microsoft.)
They could have just coded the OS from the ground up to be efficient, but they were already 4 years late with win95, as win 3.11 was released in 1991, and NT 3.51 was still in the works until late 1993 or 1994, forget which.
Funny, at the time the only experience I ever had with linux was a random run-in with a dude who worked for the dad of a friend of mine maintaining computers at a car dealership. I now know it was a command line version of slackware (this was around 1992.) I marveled at “ls” over DOS’s DIR commands. It looked like it would kicked MS-DOS’ butt and so did Novell DOS 7.0 heavily advertised in ComputerSHopper, when it was a massive, tall magazine full of adds and not biased editorial crap. UNTIL:
I found out it couldn’t play oregon trail, and Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry or King’s quest, so I wasn’t interested.
That argument still holds for me quite a bit: I can’t play most games I like natively on a linux based system so I can’t make a complete switch over, though I use open source apps for everything else like Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, the Gimp, Mplayer, openoffice.org.
12 years later and the games argument still holds for me…