The Mac Portable — an Apple Flop That Led to Great Things — Turns 30
Few Apple fans wanted the first portable Mac. But by failing, it showed the company how to build exactly the laptops that its customers craved.
By Harry McCracken
On September 20, 1989, Apple product chief Jean-Louis Gassée stood on a stage in Universal City, California, and unveiled a new computer, the Macintosh Portable. It was Apple’s first battery-powered Mac, and the goal, Gassée declared, was to build a portable Mac that was every bit as powerful and usable as the familiar desktop models: “No subset of applications, no Mac Jr., no compromise.”
As he promised, the Mac Portable was a really good Mac. Its most eye-grabbing feature was the screen. It measured 9.8″ — larger than the screen on a classic desktop Mac — and was a monochrome active-matrix LCD, which made it highly legible by the standards of the time, even though it wasn’t backlit. The computer used a lead-acid battery, which sounded like old technology even then but helped deliver marathon battery life: Apple claimed 10 hours on a charge vs. the two to three hours that was common at the time.
The machine had a complete set of ports and a full-sized, full-travel keyboard. You could put the…
