BEST CLOTHS FOR MAC DUSPLAYS PORTABLE
The Mac Portable keyboard is classic ALPS perfection. It was modeled on the standard Mac keyboards of the period, and was truly desktop class, with clacky ALPS keyswitches offering a lot of key travel. The Mac Portable’s keyboard was also really good. (Later Apple offered a variant with a backlight, and a kit to add a backlight to older models, but it really ate into the computer’s battery life.) Unfortunately, it didn’t have a backlight, so while you could travel with the Mac Portable, you could only use it in a well-lit room. Yes, the Portable’s display was black-and-white, but that was par for the course back then. There was none of that on the Mac Portable. The ghosting effect created a little ghost image of your cursor that would follow the real cursor around the screen as you moved it. Most importantly, they refreshed the screen immediately, eliminating an unfortunate effect called “ghosting” that was found on cheaper passive-matrix LCDs. Active-matrix LCDs were crisp and readable, basically the E Ink of their day. Years later, when I used an early PowerBook, this trick was still the name of the game. (If you could load everything into RAM and keep the hard drive from spinning up, you could hit the high side of this total. That lead-acid battery weighed a ton, but thanks to it and the power-management techniques Apple built into the Mac Portable-including the Mac’s first sleep mode-it got somewhere between six and twelve hours of battery life.
(It also cost $7,300, or more than $15,000 in today’s dollars!) It was more portable than my SE in its carrying case, but not by much. It was immediately dubbed a “luggable” in the press. At the press launch event for the product, Apple was careful to refer to it as a portable, not as a laptop-because (truth in advertising) this thing was not going to sit on anyone’s lap. All the ports.Īs a result, the thing was enormous-15 inches by 15 inches, and four inches thick (tapering to two inches at the narrow end), and weighed 16 pounds. There was also a lead-acid battery, a full-sized keyboard, a trackball, and a 640×400 active-matrix LCD screen.
Apple essentially jammed an entire Mac SE, including pretty much every port-yes, even the enormous floppy and SCSI ports-into a polycarbonate enclosure. Webster summoned up the courage to write that the Mac Portable “certainly isn’t a failure.” Damned with the faintest of praise.įrom an engineering standpoint, the Mac Portable is fascinating. If this seems like criticism that comes from the privileged position of being an observer three decades in the future, I’ll point out that in the Mac Portable’s launch cover story in Macworld, writer Bruce F. In many ways, it illustrated all the decisions that a company like Apple had to make in those days when it came to building a portable computer-and many of those decisions were simply the wrong ones. The Macintosh Portable was groundbreaking, while also being a colossal misfire. There were early portable computers available that ran all sorts of operating systems, but for the Mac, the padded carrying case was as portable as things got until the fall of 1989, when Apple introduced a Mac that was slightly more amenable to be moved from place to place than my Mac SE-the Macintosh Portable. The luxury! It made my 17-pound Mac SE a “portable” computer. When I was in college, I bought a big padded case that was designed to fit any classic Mac, so I could carry my computer home with me for holidays. Mobility in computing meant putting your files on a disk and taking the disk to a different (but compatible) computer. In the 1980s, using a computer was all about sitting at a desk. 20 Macs for 2020: #11 – Macintosh Portable
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