Peter Cohen goes back in time (OK, not really!) to revisit his favorites of 30 years of Macintosh.
My personal favorite? No question, it’s the Macintosh IIci. I remember it well. Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of Macintosh development. He wore a fashionable diamond earring, and I believe he took personal pride in rolling out this particular model. Of all the Macs, either before or since, I found it the easiest to take apart and put back together. It was just so well designed.
I am awash with nostalgia. Sniff.
My favorite wasn’t my first. It was my PowerBook 520c. I still remember ordering it from MacConnection, still remember my favorite applications (TouchBase/DateBook Pro), and still remember the businesses I started with it. Good times. #justenoughismore.
The iMac I have today.
My favorite was the G4 Cube, such a unique looking computer! I still have mine which I’ve since repurposed into a Hackintosh.
Besides that I’d say my 15″ rMBP I have today, so compact, beautiful screen, powerful and fast!
The Power Mac 7500 was my favorite. Open the case without any tools, then swing out parts of the innards on hinges, gaining easy access to RAM, drives, PCI slots, etc. One of the most upgradeable Macs ever and the one I personally upgraded the most (followed closely by the Power Mac G4).
My 17-inch G4 iMac. Slow, yes. Woefully lacking in RAM. Optical drive now redundant. But beautiful. I still miss that sweet machine.
For me, it’s a tie between the Mac LC and the Quadra 650.
The llci was my first Mac and will always have a special place in my heart. It was the computer that first introduced me to the web.
JLG was never CEO of apple.
Agree with this. The first generation iMac changed the whole world of computer design. After this, it was no longer beige boxes with sharp edges.
I actually kind of miss the colorful designs. These days everything is black, white or silver color. Only place you seem to find any variety is in gaming cases and it tends to be mostly about neon lights.
I would love if Apple made a new wave of Mac Minis colored plastic shells.
Historically, my IIsi.
In practice, “the newest one I own”, all the time.
I’ve long been tempted to turn a “dead” Cube (or in my case, a space internal chassis for my live one) into an ITX-based Intel machine…
My first Mac I bought myself, PowerMac 6500!
I have to say my current Mac, a MacBook Air.
There are things I liked in previous models, but they always came with a heavy cost. My Centris 610 and PowerBook 540 were both beautiful machines, but poorly built. My Titanium PowerBook G4 made my hands itch badly. My mini overheated. My iMac was underpowered and couldn’t take enough RAM.
This MacBook Air is just gorgeous.
My second favourite is my previous laptop, the original unibody MacBook (subsequent models with “Pro”), but it had some build problems too. Ditto the 12″ PowerBook G4 it replaced.
Yup, good catch. Fixed!
easy: SE/30
My favorite Mac is probably my Mac Pro 1,1. It was the computer I bought when I decided to ditch Windows for good. I owned a Powerbook prior to that. Windows was getting worse, and OS X was getting better. It was time to completely jump ship. After 6 years of use I replaced it with an iMac. It’s a great computer, but it lacks the ease of taking it apart the Mac Pro did — especially for routine dust cleaning.
I, however, have fond memories of my father’s decked-out Macintosh II. It’s where I cut my teeth with computer graphics using Aldus Freehand 1.0 and eventually Photoshop 1.0. I enjoyed a lot of the games out for it then, especially Prince of Persia. When I was in the second grade my mother came up to the school to check me out so I could repair the computer, and she was laughed at by the people in the office (this was before schools became day prisons for children). I had to go to my father’s office to open the computer up and take the floppy disk apart because someone managed to shove two floppies in there.
PowerBook Duo 2300c with Dock.
My favorite old Macs at work were a really nice IIfx in a lab and a Iici on my desk back in 1990. The IIfx also had Apple’s A/UX on it, which was their early attempt at Unix.
At my home office around 1996, I really enjoyed my 7500 a lot. That was the first Mac I purchased as part of a startup business and it paid for itself over and over. I sunk a lot of upgrades and peripherals into that one over several years.
These days, I’m a Mac Mini fan, having purchased about 6 over the last 8 or 9 years. I have two on my desk (one for my workstation, one as a home office server) and one at a colocation center these days. Great little systems.
Agree on the G4 Cube. It’s a thing of engineering beauty.
I upgraded mine with an SSD, and it still pulls its weight very well.
Wow Jim are we on the same page. I’ve owned 24 Macs, starting with the Apple II. Hands down the IIci was a trusty awesome warhorse! My 2009 MacPro isn’t far behind though, what a bulletproof beast this thing has been. See you at NAMM!
the aluminum disperses heat and allows for less fan, less noisy computer designs.