Laptops were a thing well before 1995. Mine was a 486, I don't remember seeing any laptops before 386s but they existed and Apple had laptop/notebook machines in the pre-PPC era as well. But $3000-5000 was totally normal for laptops till the late 1990s.

Technically they were already "notebooks" in 1995. Everything today counts as a Notebook I think if you consider the original definitions. Something like the "Macintosh Portable" would have been a "laptop" but not a "notebook" by the old school definitions. Modern definitions basically say a laptop is a big huge notebook with fans and optical drive whereas a "notebook" is basically an Ultrabook.

In the 80s laptop and luggable were different things. The entire computer didn't fit into the screen + keyboard portions of a clamshell.

When I went to college (for CS) in 1995 it was rare to have a personal laptop, slightly less rare to have a desktop PC. By 1997 all the incoming freshman at the school had IBM Thinkpads.

Laptops that look like today's laptops were well established by 1995. I still have a Compaq I got in 96 that still runs Windows 2000. I bought my first laptop in Akihabra in 1989, before they were widely available outside Japan. It also looked like today's laptops (was roughly the size of a notebook, uniform thickness, much thicker than its width/height), which was I recall a new thing that year. But long before that there was a gradual progression towards that "genesis-laptop" stage. There were "luggable" PCs that used display technology that wasn't LCD (gas discharge?). I remember those used by field personnel back to around 1986.

My dad was a b2b salesman and his company gave him a compaq portable ~1990 [1]. They weren't super common yet, but businesses were starting to use them. I loved when he brought it home because it was way better for games than the pc we had.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/154861345205?hash=item240e7499b5:g:...

(not the seller, just the best example a short search could find)

The Compaq "Portable" released March 1983; 39 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable

http://www.markrichards.com/Core_MemoryCollection/coreview/c...

If you relax laptop to mean functionally portable, then reasonable commercial variations existed since the early 80s. Not with a clam-shell form factor, but designed to travel with you. By late 80s you had things that looked a bit like current laptops, e.g. NEC ultralight.

I had an Apple PowerBook 520c in 1994. The "c" was for "color", they still had a greyscale version! One of the best laptops I've ever owned actually. It was the first laptop (from any manufacturer I think) with a trackpad.

Then you don't know about the PowerBook 5300, arguably one of the worst computers ever made. We had one and though it never did set on fire, it was pretty crappy.