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· Announcement

Macintosh IIci and Macintosh Portable

Apple announced two products on 20 September 1989: Macintosh IIci and Macintosh Portable.

It was the 5th of 6 dated moments the archive holds for 1989, 50 days after the previous one, 1 August 1989.

Macintosh IIci product photograph

Ben Boldt at English Wikipedia · Public domain

What Apple announced

Macintosh IIci

Mac · Mac II · discontinued 20 February 1993

The Macintosh IIci is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to February 1993. It is a more powerful version of the Macintosh IIcx, released earlier that year, and shares the same compact case design. With three NuBus expansion slots and a Processor Direct Slot, the IIci also improved upon the IIcx's 16 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU and 68882 FPU, replacing them with 25 MHz versions of these chips.

The Macintosh Quadra 700 was introduced at the end of 1991 as Apple's mainstream workstation product to replace the IIci, albeit at a significantly higher price point: by this time, Apple authorized resellers were offering entry-level IIci systems for US$4,000 or less, whereas the Quadra 700 entered the market above US$6,000. Because of this, Apple continued to sell the IIci until early 1993 when it was succeeded by the Centris 650 while the Quadra 700 was replaced by the Quadra 800.

Macintosh Portable

Mac · Portable · discontinued 11 February 1991

The Macintosh Portable is the first battery-powered portable computer, designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from September 1989 to October 1991. It was among the first consumer laptop computers to use an active-matrix liquid-crystal display (LCD), which was praised for its crisp image quality and fast response time. The Macintosh Portable was designed to deliver desktop-class performance, resulting in a relatively high price and weight. Although it received favorable reviews, it sold poorly.

Also in 1989

Sources

  1. Macintosh IIci · Wikipedia
  2. Macintosh Portable · Wikipedia

Dates on this page are announcement dates, not shipping dates. Product summaries are drawn from the linked articles, and specification claims in them are the publisher’s, not independent testing. Photograph credits and licences are listed in full on the image credits page.