This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the Apple  MACINTOSH Portable computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message!

While working at Prometheus Products in the late 1980s, I designed an internal 1200 bps modem for the Mac Portable. Apple made a machine available to us, along with detailed engineering documention, expressly for this purpose.

With all due respect, this article needs a deep fact check against the Macintosh product timeline and performance comparisons.
e.g. the Macintosh Portable was introduced and discontinued several years before the Macintosh II. I suspect that some of the comparisons are being confused with the PowerBook product family.

i found this laptop to be of the upmost quality and not only exceeding but also shattering all my preexisting presumptions! great buy! what a steal! i am a flaming homosexual

Look where the Mac is today!!

Macintosh Portable Disk Eject in Space

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v$e_MfM4j09ME

Mac Portables are becoming rare, especially in working order. They can still be found once in a while on eBay in "as is" condition for under $50, to which you will need to add another $50 or so to rebuild the battery (you can buy the lead-acid cells which go in the battery), and you will need to find whatever parts are missing (AC adapter, hard drive, etc.). There is a hobbyist who buys, fixes and sells Portables on eBay.You pay a premium, but you get a working system with software & carry case. My sense is that the prices have bottomed out, and will rise from here on, though I wouldn't invest my retirement savings in old Macs.

The first Mac laptops were not made by Apple, they were made in Boulder, CO by Outbound. The big drawback to the Outbound, and the Atari Spectre as well, is they needed a set of Mac Plus or SE ROMs to run, so you had to buy and gut a Mac. This added a lot of cost, but in the case of the Outbound, when at home the portable could dock with the ROM-less Mac and use it as a second display screen.

I was tempted to buy a rather expensive Macintosh Portable off of Ebay, but did not know how much they are worth, and at what rate they are gaining value. If any one knows the answer to this it would be vary helpfull to me.

The Macintosh Portable was NOT "the first laptop computer with a GUI interface" as stated on the web page. The Atari Stacy laptop had a GUI interface (GEM by Digital Research) and was released befotre the Mac Portable. And in fact, if you plugged in a commercially available product called the Spectre GCR, it ran the MacOS as well. That's right, the first Mac laptop was not made by Apple at all, but rather by Atari. Which is fitting, since Steve Jobs worked at Atari (made Breakout) before working at Apple! :)

Can you show a screen shot of what the screen looks like? (It's O.K. if it dosn't work or you cant get a picture.)