9 Massive Laptops That’ll Make Your Back Hurt

Even the biggest, heaviest laptop I own—a 17-inch workstation monster— can still easily fit in a backpack with enough room left for snacks. But over the course of portable computing history, there have been some computers that really stretch the definition of “mobile”.

So I wondered what the porkiest laptops (or computers meant to travel with you) were, and this is the list of impractical PCs I found.

9

The Osborne 1 (1981)—the First “Portable” Computer

Widely considered the first “true” portable computer, the Osborne 1 is a beast to carry at around 24lbs. Two floppy drives, a tiny 5-inch monochrome CRT, and a 4Mhz CPU with 64KB of RAM doesn’t sound like it should weigh a lot, but this is definitely a “luggable” by modern standards.

In today’s money, this is a computer that would cost over $6,000, and it was introduced at $1,795 which I think led to very few takers. Nonetheless, people who saw these were amazed, because you have to keep in mind just how big and bulky a computer was in 1981. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Osborne 1 is that the peak power draw is only 37W.

That means the biggest laptop battery you can legally take on a plane today could power it for about 2.5 hours, but, ironically, the Osborne 1 didn’t actually have an onboard battery. You still had to plug it into a wall socket, but at least you could take it with you “conveniently”.

8

Compaq Portable (1983)—a 28-Pound Suitcase PC

While the Osborne 1 was impressive, if you’re looking for a modern ancestor to today’s laptops, it’s going to be the 1983 Compaq portable.

You see, it wasn’t just one of the first portable computers, it was one of the first IBM-compatible computers. Inside is an Intel 8088 CPU, and it runs MS-DOS. So this computer would run all the same software as a desktop IBM PC with similar specs. That was a huge deal, even if this was still a “luggable” computer with no battery and weighed more than the Osborne 1 at a whopping 28lbs. The $2.995 (almost $10K today) introductory price did however lighten your wallet, which did balance things out.

7

IBM Portable PC 5155 (1984)—Big Blue’s Behemoth

While Compaq might have beat IBM itself to the punch with a portable IBM-compatible, the very next year Big Blue brought out what was essentially the same thing, but with a whole extra 2lbs of weight, with this enormous machine now tipping 30lbs on the scale. Love that amber screen though.

6

Toshiba T3200 (1987)—Desktop-Class Power in a Brick

Jumping just three years ahead to 1987 and look we have a clamshell laptop! It has a plasma screen, a powerful 80286 CPU, and a 40MB hard drive. This thing had the same performance as our home computer throughout the first half of the 1990s! Still no battery, so still technically a “luggable”, but it sure is starting to look like a laptop.

It was much smaller and lighter than the other luggables. At “only” 17.4lbs, it’s nearly half the weight of the IBM above, now that’s progress!

5

Macintosh Portable(1989)— Apple’s 16-Pound Monster

OK, let’s forget about the PC world for a second and ask where the heck Apple is in all this. After all, MacBooks are enormously popular and known for being some of the smallest and lightest machines on the market. So how did Apple fare here? Well, in 1989 Apple released the first ever battery-powered Mac (so not a luggable) and it weighed 16lbs, as much as the battery-less Toshiba.

It had a powerful Motorola 68000, one of the most influential CPUs of all time, a 9.9-inch 640×480 active matrix LCD screen, and a 40MB hard drive. Much of the weight must have been from the lead acid battery, and I wouldn’t actually want to have this on my lap, but it’s pretty incredible how far these portable machines came in just a few short years.

4

Dell XPS M2010 (2006)—a 20-Inch Fold-Out Titan

Cruising through the 90s, laptops just kept getting smaller and ligher, and there aren’t really any pariticularly notable big boys to mention. I had a very nice hand-me-down i386 Samsung sub-notebook in the late 90s, then a Compaq 486, and an IBM Thinkpad Pentium 133 in high school. All eminentaly portable, even by modern standards.

But in the 2000s we started getting some new contenders, and Dell’s 21lbs XPS M2010 takes the cake. This is more like a foldable iMac-like PC than a laptop. Sure, it’s a clamshell design, but one with a 20-inch screen. It’s like a return to luggable workstations of the 80s, but with much more modern specs of course.

The keyboard is detachable, and the optical drive pops out of the body vertically. This thing is wild and honestly I kind of want one.

3

Alienware 18 (2013)—Dual-GPU Gaming Juggernaut

I’ve only owned one Alienware laptop in my entire life so far, and it was large but nothing like this beast. The main claim to fame for the very chunky 2013 Alienware 18 is the dual-gpu setup. Back then it was possible to hook up two GPUs to run one application at (theoretically) twice the performance. These days, for various reasons, that doesn’t work anymore, but we might go back to dual-GPUs some day because time is a flat circle.

Another thing that’s a flat circle are your kneecaps thanks to the roughly 13lbs weight of this thing, according to its manual.

2

Asus ROG GX700 (2016)—a Liquid-Cooled “Laptop”

If your gaming laptop runs hot, what do you do? In ASUS’ case, you bolt on a water-cooling dock. The ROG GX700 was a bold experiment in liquid-cooled laptop design. On its own, the laptop weighed about 8 pounds, but with the cooling dock attached, it jumped to nearly 11 pounds.

The idea might not be as dumb as it sounds at first though. This early attempt was too big and bulky to be practical, but since then there have been several liquid-cooled laptops, and there’s a chance this might become a somewhat mainstream cooling solution as more people leave desktops behind and don’t want to compromise on plugged-in performance.

1

Acer Predator 21X (2017)—the Curved-Screen Gaming Beast

At almost 19lbs with a massive 21-inch screen, this was basically a portable gaming desktop. Notably, the screen is curved, which makes zero sense or difference at this screen size, but it does make for an interesting-looking laptop.

Sporting dual GTX 1080 GPUs, this is basically also the end of the dual-GPU era for gaming as it already didn’t work very well at this point, but maybe owners of this laptop had the last laugh, because it should still play current-generation console games of 2025 perfectly fine at its native 2560×1080 resolution. That makes its original list price of $8,999.99 seem just a little more reasonable.