You probably already know the Macintosh Portable, Apple’s first Mac laptop released for $7,300 in 1989, which looked and weighed about as much as a small suitcase full of dark matter. No joke: you could ship an entire crate of MacBook Airs inside of one.
But can you believe that there was an even bigger, more unwieldy Mac laptop that preceded it? It wasn’t an official Cupertino joint, to be sure, but meet the Walkmac: a 1987 modded Mac SE with a working LCD screen and a battery pack.
CNET managed to get their hands on a vintage Colby Walkmac, a third-party modded Mac that continued to sell even after the Macintosh Portable was released because it had a faster processor and was even cheaper than the ‘real’ Mac laptop. It weighed about 13 pounds, shipped with a Motorola 68030 16MHz processor, had a cool 1MB of memory and cost around $6,000.
Eventually, the popularity of the first Mac laptop waned, not due to pressure from the official Macintosh Portable, but because Sony pressured Colby to change the name, fearing it was too close to ‘Walkman.’ To avoid a lawsuit, Colby complied, rechristening the WalkMac as the Colby SE30. It just didn’t have the same ring to it, and the Walkmac line faded into obscurity.
Source: CNET
