30 years of Apple's Macintosh lineup

The Macintosh Plus didn’t change the look and feel of the Macintosh, but it made it a lot more powerful. The Plus came with more ROM and more RAM, plus offered more expansion — and barely increased the price.

It was expandable and powerful, but the best thing the Macintosh II had going for it was that it could power a color display. 16.7 million glorious colors, if you installed the right graphics card. There was just nothing like it.

It almost looked more like a laptop than a desktop, a bold move that made the comparatively light — only 15.8 pounds — Macintosh Portable both slow and awkward to use. At $6,500, it was more impressive than it was practical. Much more.

The Mac Portable was more like a prototype, but the PowerBook 100 was a truly viable product. It was five pounds, had a keyboard and trackball, and gave Apple a line of laptops to go along with its desktops.

The Classic wasn’t much different from the Mac Plus, and it was a bit behind the times, but at $999 it was the first sub-$1,000 Mac. It was the closest thing yet to Apple’s dream of getting Macs to everyone.

1993 was a big year for the Mac lineup, as Apple made devices for every price and use it could think of in an effort to boost its flagging sales. The Macintosh TV may have been the craziest: it came with a TV tuner card and a CD-ROM drive, in a great-looking black case. Apple only made 10,000 before discontinuing it — apparently TV was a hobby then too.

By the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the focus of the Mac had shifted. It was about power, and capability — and that started with the Power Mac G3, the fastest Mac ever made.

When Apple turned 20, it made the weirdest Mac ever. The 20th Anniversary Macintosh was as much as $10,000, had a totally unique shape, and came with integrated TV, FM radio, and a separate subwoofer. If you bought one, a man in a tuxedo would bring it to your house and set it up for you.

With the iMac, Apple made its first computer for the internet. Its multi-colored, curved case was as good-looking as a computer had ever been, and came with a high-end modem and processor. And it had USB ports. Two USB ports.

After the remarkable success of the iMac, Apple shrunk the formula into the iBook. It was colorful, powerful, and thanks to an oddly over-promoted handle the 6.6-pound body was easy to carry around. And did I mention it had a handle?

It wasn’t a huge spec change, or really a new idea for how the Mac could work. But the blue PowerMac G3, and then the G4, released later in 1999, looked awesome.

The iPod made most of Apple’s headlines in 2001, but the PowerBook G4 was a dramatic change the same year. With a new, one-inch thick titanium body, a low-power chip, and a 15.2-inch screen, it was the first Apple laptop to look like its MacBooks still do today.

Apple finally moved the entirety of its all-in-one into its display with the iMac G5, as it added a 64-bit G5 processor to the equation as well. It came with displays as large as 20 inches, and the transparent white mouse and keyboard so many people still remember.

Apple had high-end and consumer-friendly machines, but the Mac mini gave it a real option in the low-end market.

With the MacBook and MacBook Pro, Apple fully made the switch to Intel processors. It also unified its many product names and ideas into a single family, and made sure every one of its computers had Mac in the title.

Steve Jobs pulled it out of an envelope, just to prove the point — after 24 years of slimming down the PowerBooks, and the iBooks, the MacBook Air was the result. It was incredibly expensive, before becoming Apple’s entry-level laptop years later, and it was underpowered next to the MacBook and MacBook Pro. But it was *thin,* and it drove competitors back to the drawing board.

The most recently overhauled of Apple’s Macs, the new Mac Pro is smaller, lighter, and more powerful than virtually any professional machine it’s ever made. Apple bet on Thunderbolt as a tool for expansion, and brought an entirely new design language to its desktops.