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From Mac Portable to MacBook Pro: 20 years of Apple laptops

Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the first portable Macintosh computer, the aptly-named Macintosh Portable. While it was indeed portable, it was anything but svelte. Apple’s first non-desktop Mac weighed in at nearly 16lb and was a beast at 4″ thick, 15.25″ wide and 14.8″ deep. While the 9.8″ 1-bit, 640×400 display is quaint by today’s standards, it was active-matrix, an expensive rarity in the days of passive matrix portable computers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t backlit.

The Portable sold for a whopping $6,500 when it was launched in September 1989, and it’s hardly surprising that it was never a top-seller. The hardware was modest, even by contemporary standards. It rocked a 16MHz 68000 CPU and shipped with 1MB of RAM, as well as a 40MB hard drive. It was updated in February 1991 with a backlit display, but Apple snuffed out the Portable line in October of that year when it launched its first PowerBook, the PowerBook 100.

In recognition of the 20-year anniversary of the Macintosh Portable, let’s look back at some of the superstars of Apple’s laptop lineup—as well as a couple of duds that should never have made it out of Cupertino.