November 22, 1987, Page 003013 The New York Times Archives PORTABLE computers are an increasingly common sight on airliners these days. Even so, I was amused on a recent flight to see a businessman sitting nearby hugging an Apple Macintosh to his chest like a baby. He was still hugging it and smiling vacantly as he wandered off the plane.

Now, we certainly don't mean to interfere in a situation that should clearly be discussed by the businessman and his therapist, but, hey, the Mac is not a portable computer. A Macintosh is about the same size and shape as a 20-pound frozen turkey, with a separate keyboard, a mouse and a power cord. That isn't much more than the Compaq Portable, but the lunchbox-shaped Portable is designed to go places. The Mac is not. The movies superstar for mac.

And neither machine comes close to being a laptop. Apple does not make a portable Macintosh. The company has reportedly concocted several prototypes, but officially it says no portable is in the works.

But that subspecies is necessary if Apple is to gain and keep a foothold in the business market, which is the cornerstone of its marketing strategy. The use of laptop and portable computers is rising significantly, especially in business, and until now the portable business has gone to makers of computers that are incompatible with the Mac. As a result, even the most enthusiastic Macintosh users have to choose between inconvenience and incompatibility if they want a machine to take on trips. For the time being, Apple has chosen the latter path and has officially authorized Dynamac Computer Products Inc.

(1536 Cole Boulevard, Suite 252, Golden, Colo. 80401, telephone 303-233-7626) to transform the Mac. Dynamac has just begun shipping an attractive, full-featured, heavy, expensive portable that is 100 percent compatible with the Macintosh.

That compatibility is assured because the machine is, in fact, a Macintosh - one that has been cannibalized, refitted, improved and repackaged in a sleek black case. At a recent demonstration, it was startling to see Macintosh software running, in a non-Macintosh case, on a gold-tinted screen instead of on the Mac's familiar black-and-white.

Also startling was the price: $4,995 for the Dynamac EL (the EL refers to the big electroluminescent screen technology that replaces the familiar Mac display), and $3,995 for the Dynamac GP (which uses a the gas plasma screen). The price for both models includes one megabyte of random access memory, one 800K floppy disk, a mouse and a high-speed port for peripherals known as SCSI, pronounced scuzzy. It also includes ports that accommodate an extra keyboard if you don't like the one that's built in; a printer; an external modem if you don't want the internal 1200-baud option; an external disk drive; an external speaker, and even an E-Machines large screen monitor. ALL those ports make the Dynamac portly, at about 18 pounds. That's too heavy for comfortable carrying, and only a few pounds lighter than the conventional Mac it is meant to supplement. (Even so, it is far easier to carry and far easier to slide under an airline seat.) But why so expensive? A similarly equipped Mac Plus costs a couple of thousand dollars less, so price per pound for the Dynamac's portability is high.

Is it worth it? To rich Mac enthusiasts and techno-trendies, and to executives who really need a Mac to go, the answer is yes. One of the early users of Dynamacs is TechSouth Inc. Of Atlanta, a subsidiary of BellSouth, which sees an advantage in merging the superior graphics abilities of the Mac with portability.

Using the Dynamac, TechSouth representatives can sell, design, proofread and correct Yellow Pages ads in a customer's office, cutting weeks off the normal design and production schedules. In its more advanced configurations - each Dynamac is custom-assembled from 45 possible options - the Dynamac is more than a Mac Plus. It can have as much as four megabytes of RAM (an extra $1,549), a 40-megabyte internal hard disk ($1,495), and a 300- to 1200-baud internal modem that automatically adjusts to both United States and European standards ($295).

Those options add about two pounds to the Dynamac. A 17-inch, high-resolution E-Machines monitor is also available, for $1,595, but it stays at home when the machine goes on the road.

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And there is also a battery option, but it must be pretty big if it can run a power-hungry electroluminescent or gas plasma screen, as well as a hard disk. This wealth of features arises from relatively humble beginnings. Each Dynamac begins life in Cupertino, Calif., as a factory- issue Mac Plus.

Apple has agreed to sell its Macs to Dynamac, but as complete units, not as stripped-down parts. Dynamac must pay for cases, screens and other components that it doesn't use. The factory Macs are unboxed and disassembled, with Apple's permission and under quality-control guidelines prescribed by Apple. From the Mac Plus, Dynamac saves only the main logic board, the keyboard, the mouse and the floppy disk drive.

Advertisement Dynamac's engineers then go to work, rebuilding the machine from the logic board up. By the time they are through, the word 'Apple' is nowhere to be seen. The Mac has been transformed into a strikingly handsome, briefcase-style, matte black unit, right down to the mouse. The most obvious difference is the screen, which is bigger than the Mac's by about half. It has a 640 by 400 picture element; the Mac's is 512 by 342. The GP version of Dynamac uses gas plasma technology, which offers resolution as good as that of the Mac.

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Gas plasma is also used by the high-end players in the portable arena, Toshiba and Compaq, machines based on the MS-DOS operating system that is the industry standard. Britt Blaser, a co-founder of Dynamac, said the cheaper and less power-hungry liquid crystal display, or LCD, technology that many MS-DOS laptops use 'simply does not hack it.' ' LCD screens lack the speed, resolution and brightness of the existing Macintosh screen. Blaser conceded that the Dynamac was not perfect. 'We'd like it to be vanishingly small, to fit on our wrist and run on a small atomic battery,' he said. 'That technology isn't here yet.'