One of its marketing highlights was the promise of a PowerPC upgrade to its CPU and PC Card (PCMCIA) expansion.

[citation needed] The strong demand for its ground-breaking design and Apple's incorrect market prediction that customers would wait for the fully PowerPC PowerBooks resulted in shortages early on.

The PC Card Cage was also released, allowing Macintosh users to add PCMCIA capability to their laptops for the first time.

Newer Technology introduced a 167 MHz model that outperformed the fastest PowerBook 5300, the $6,800 5300ce, at a time when problems with that line became a real issue to Apple.

Newer Technology stated they could not produce more of the 183 MHz upgrades because the supply of connectors was exhausted.

The 550c differed from the four two-tone grey models in a few other key respects as well, including a larger active-matrix color screen, a combined Latin/Kana keyboard, and a full 68040 processor.

Due to a bug with the new combined printer/modem port, the driver had to be upgraded to 2.5.5, and the Chooser was replaced in the GV install.

[a][4] Most laptops had grayscale displays, mono speakers with only 8-bit audio out, and insufficient battery life, and some had side-mounted snap-on track balls.

With the built-in Ethernet (via a versatile AAUI transceiver), SCSI port (forerunner of today’s FireWire) and ADB (similar to USB), it had all the features of desktops at that time, making them the first[citation needed] viable desktop replacement laptops.