It consisted of a central unit containing the motherboard, monochrome display and a floppy disk drive.

The Apricot Portable was contained inside a hard charcoal gray carrying case and consisted of two main parts: the central unit (with built-in monitor) and the keyboard.

[4] The mouse and the keyboard were both battery-powered, but the computer itself did not run on batteries and needed to be plugged into a wall outlet.

[3] The Apricot Portable contained a variety of features including a built-in disk drive, a speech recognition system, and a software bundle.

[2] A single double-sided 720 KB 3.5" floppy disk drive was built into the right-hand side of the enclosure.

Like other Apricot computers, it could be started up from a CP/M-86 or Concurrent CP/M boot disc, and would then run CP/M-86 software in single- or multi-user mode.

[7] In addition, a GUI program called "Activity" was provided as a more convenient way to manipulate the file system with the keyboard or the optional mouse.

It presented an icon-based interface reminiscent of the Apple Macintosh, allowing the user to manage files, format disks, create new icons, keyboard layouts and characters.