Macintosh Portable

The Macintosh Portable was Apple Inc.'s first attempt at making a battery-powered portable Macintosh personal computer that held the power of a desktop Macintosh. It was also the first commercial off-the-shelf portable computer used in space and the first to send an email from space, in 1991 aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-43.
Released on September 20, 1989, it was received with excitement from most critics but with very poor sales to consumers. Seemingly no expense was spared in the construction of the machine. It featured a black and white active-matrix LCD screen in a hinged cover that covered the keyboard when the machine was not in use. The mouse function was handled by a built-in trackball that could be removed and located on either side of the keyboard. It used expensive SRAM in an effort to maximize battery life and to provide an "instant on" low power sleep mode.
The machine was architecturally similar to the Macintosh SE, despite using the 68HC000, a low-power version of the Motorola 68000, running at 16 megahertz (MHz) on a 16 MHz bus. The Portable came with 1 megabyte (MB) of RAM soldered on the motherboard and was expandable to 5 MB using the single RAM expansion slot, or 9 MB using the single PDS expansion slot which, due to strict FCC regulations, was not developed for use with any other expansion cards such as the popular Ethernet card for the SE. It also had a single ROM expansion slot which would accommodate up to 4 MB, though the Portable itself used a 256 K ROM based on the SE's. Weighing in at 15.8 lb (7.2 kg), due in large part to the sealed lead-acid batteries used, the machine was widely considered more of a "luggable" than a portable. Compared to the PowerBook series introduced a few years later, the Portable lacked the ergonomic layout that set the trend for all future laptops.
Introductory price: $6,500