1977 – 1992retired
Atari 7800
“It played your old 2600 games before it was cool. Rest easy, pioneer.”
“Heavy, pricey, glorious — it carried the desktop into the backpack.”
The Macintosh Portable was the first battery-powered portable computer from Apple, sold from September 1989 to October 1991. It was among the first consumer laptops with an active-matrix LCD, praised for its crisp image and fast response time. People loved it because it promised desktop-class performance you could actually carry.
That commitment to desktop-class muscle came at a cost: a relatively high price and weight, and though reviews were favorable, it sold poorly. Apple retired it in October 1991. What it left behind was proof that a portable could be genuinely great — even if it took two hands and a healthy budget to love.
Spotted something wrong? Every fact on this page traces to a dated source. Fixes make the graveyard better for everyone.
“It played your old 2600 games before it was cool. Rest easy, pioneer.”
“It saw right through you, and we loved it for that.”
“Killed not by weak sales, but by one family's peanut butter grudge”