Vintage Prototype Macintosh Portable M5120 Shown Off in New Photos

[MacRumors]

It's always interesting to get a look back at Apple's past, especially when it comes to prototype devices that were never actually released to the public, so we thought we'd share some photos of a restored Macintosh Portable M5120, sent to us by Sonny Dickson.

Unlike the launch version of the Macintosh Portable, which was sold in the late 1980s in a beige color, this model is a prototype made from a clear plastic material. It's been restored and it is one of only six that are known to exist.

When it was released, the Macintosh Portable was priced at $7,300 and it was the first Mac powered by a battery. Despite the name, the Macintosh Portable weighed in at a whopping 16 pounds, but it was still more transportable than standard computers of the era.

There are no screws in the Macintosh Portable and it was designed to be taken apart with just the hands, a feat not possible with current laptop computers. It featured a 9.8-inch black and white active matrix LCD display, 9MB SRAM, a 1.44MB floppy disk drive, a typewriter-style keyboard, and a trackball setup that allowed the trackball to be positioned at either the left or the right.

A hinged design let the display be closed up over the keyboard when not in use, reminiscent of more modern laptop designs, and there's a built-in handle. The battery inside was a lead-acid battery, which, when the machines were launched, was able to last for approximately 8 to 10 hours.

Apple sold the Macintosh Portable alongside the Apple IIci, and it never really caught on due to its high price tag. After launching it in 1989, Apple made one followup version, the Macintosh Portable M5126, but it was discontinued just six months later, with Apple nixing the Portable line entirely in 1991.

After the Macintosh Portable was discontinued, Apple moved on to the PowerBook, which came out later that year.

Article Link: Vintage Prototype Macintosh Portable M5120 Shown Off in New Photos

 

[onespeedvelo]

16 pounds! but at least got all those ports unlike the modern generations! Those were the times!!

 

[yurc]

Keyboard was looks better and sturdier than current MBP lol. Any info about their keyboard? Can someone confirmed those keyboards using ALPS mechanical switches or just standard rubber dome?

 

[b13o0r12e3]

still got more battery life than my iPhone X

 

[Vjosullivan]

...

it was designed to be taken apart with just the hands, a feat not possible with current laptop computers.​

How times have changed.

 

[Chung123]

I believe Apple asked Sony to shrink the Macintosh Portable and it became the original Powerbook 100.

 

[FairlyKors]

That keyboard though... lol

 

[gkarris]

I went from Engineering to IT and the company used Macs, I worked on a lot of these, then the PowerBook 170's flooded in - a little easier to use and work with...

 

[justperry]

An iPhone weighs about a 1/40 of this and is *100.000 times as fast, how times have changed....


*If not more

 

[hogo]

That’s actually used to communicate with the neighboring dimension

 

[carrrrrlos]

This is so epic! Love how there’s - what looks like - a 9Volt battery plugged in and running it.

 

[guzhogi]

An iPhone weighs about a 1/40 of this and is *100.000 times as fast, how times have changed....


*If not more

My first computer was a Mac LC with 4 MB of RAM, 40 MB hard drive, and a Motorola 68020 CPU. Today, I can get a MicroSD card that can hold 10,000x as much information, easy 100x faster, but less than 1/100 the space of the hard drive.

 

[jdiamond]

Funny how things come around again! This is about the same weight as my old 17" MacBook Pro. And my current laptop only has 6MB of SRAM. And now MacBook Pros again cost $7,300! But, yeah, nothing can touch that old battery life.

 

[Pipper99]

I so wanted one of those back then.

 

[rick3000]

I like how even back then Apple though about the user experience by making the trackball work on the right or left.

 

[jdiamond]

Looks like this was the commercialized version:
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook/specs/mac_portable.html

And I love that it has that same sexy wedge shape found on the MacBook Air to make it seem even slimmer than it already was!

 

[GeneralChang]

Am I the only one that would absolutely 100% buy a modern iMac or MacBook with a translucent plastic case? Yeah? M'kay...

 

[jdiamond]

I was going to look at all the ports, but I was wrong - it seemed to have less ports than I thought.
Looks like it has: A DB-19 port for an external floppy drive, and HDI-15 port for an external monitor (NICE!), and ADB port (serial bus), a DB-25 SCSI (had a lot of those in the old days), a security lock, and a power adapter port. That seems like it, although you could daisy chain the SCSI and the ADB ports to attach a lot more to it.

 

[supergt]

No buy. Waiting for it to come out in midnight green

 

[konqerror]

16 pounds! but at least got all those ports unlike the modern generations! Those were the times!!

Not at all. All of those ports were device specific and, except for SCSI and ADB, you only got exactly one device per port. No equivalent to a USB hub.

Let's look at the ports. Most of them were Apple proprietary or at least Mac-specific: analog video, power, ADB, 2 Serial, Floppy. Only analog audio and SCSI was non-proprietary (and even then SCSI was rare in the PC world).

Except for video and power, most are handled by USB today, and all of them are replaced by USB-C. What is handled by one typical USB-C dock connection today, would be 5 separate cables (ADB, printer, modem, power, video)

 

[ios-dan]

I remember that machine. Used to call it the "Mac Luggable"

 

[swester]

Pretty awesome with that translucent case. But i'm pretty skeptical about that claim of running 8-10 hours off battery.

 

[k.alexander]

I just have one question, how in the world has that case not yellowed in the last 30 years?

 

[Windoes]

This is design!

 

[justperry]

I just have one question, how in the world has that case not yellowed in the last 30 years?

Maybe because it has been restored...

⬇︎⬇︎⬇︎

Unlike the launch version of the Macintosh Portable, which was sold in the late 1980s in a beige color, this model is a prototype made from a clear plastic material. It's been restored and it is one of only six that are known to exist.