Apple IIe

Whoever says there aren't games for apple hardware, never played Oregon Trail!

while a stock g4 cube has limited uses these days, you can get some serious upgrades for it. i've seen some with dual 1.8 g4/1.5gb ram/120gb hdd and modern-ish graphics cards (gf 6200/ati 9800) and these have some serious beef! even my lowly 1.2ghz cube with rage128 feels smooth as silk, although it doesnt have QE or CI

don't know if its the best, but i love the intel imac. its beautifully designed (all in the monitor, magnetic remote holder), isight camera, and can be upgraded to be an extremely fast computer.

The TAM's got to be it...

It might just've been a 5500 in a different case with an LCD attached to it, and it might have cost $10,000, but it was the precursor for all the clean, stylish looking Macs that were to follow, especially reminiscent of today's machines like the black MacBook and aluminium machines.

Finally some one who agrees with me. I like the G4 Cube n all, but I guess this started the whole iMac thing.

Dont kick me if they had LCD iMacs before this, I actually dont know if they did or didnt.

No more explanation needed .

I'd have to say the Mac 128k. It's the one that started it all.

My 2cents:

* Most revolutionary within Apple - Toss up between 1st Gen MAC or Newton (for breaking how the user interracts with machine.)
* Most revolutionary within industry - iPod + iTunes. Bring digital to the masses. (even your mom can do it...)
* Best selling - iPod again (no company, outside of Apple, has 60 percent market share of a commercially licensed technology.)
* Most technically advanced for the day - Newton
* Best industrial design - Apple ][ series . I kicked one down the hall and it booted okay.
* Best reviews - Tiger
* Best overall quality - Mac Mini (now if only we could get electricity to go wireless...)
* Best OS for the time - OsX, open source for the masses? (well almost.)

The best Mac ever???

The one(s) you currently own.

I always liked the Apple IIgs. But for Macs, I also liked the Performa 5200s. Anyway, I liked the iMac G4 the most. If they brought back that design, with an Intel CPU, it'd be sweet.

I'd like a return to the coloured days. They do iPods in pink, orange, green. . . Why not computers? I miss th clamshells - I needa more powerful box, so I wouldn't get one now. . . but a clamshell Macbook? Oh HELL yes!

For general purposes, I will say Mac SE. The Mac were in offices, classrooms everywhere. No Mac has invaded into MS territory that deep ever!

Best performance/value? I vote for a LC III w/ a Daystar card, the cheapest Mac you could get at the time while performance exceed any Quadra.

Most powerful Mac? I will say Mac II series, they were doing things no computer (in near price range) could do at the time. Photo editing, Pre-press solutions, Sonic solutions, Premiere... you name it! Mac at that time was simply magic.

if you want color, you could get one of those protective shells and spraypaint it, that's what im doing

what about the poor pippin? actually this idea was too far ahead of it's time. from what i heard (i know one of the people who worked on it) steve killed it -did not want a cheap mac out in the wild so it was limited on purpose.

but a poor seller.

Apple ][ would be the most revolutionary.

G5s don't do it for me. I mean they are just fast powerful G3s. What's the point of a fast powerful mac anyway? It's not like you can get any software that actually uses the power. Old macs were small, clever, efficient. Little jewels.

The best macs are the 512k - which is what the original was meant to be but for the price of RAM in 1984. I've still got mine and I'm never chucking it away. It was truly revolutionary - the manual actually explains the concept behind scroll bars, such was their novelty.
I like the Plus, too - still got one of those too.

The powerbook 180 - genius design, lovely screen (16 greys - wow!) and System 7.1, the best operating system Apple made until OSX. The original bondi blue iMac - the first PowerPC mac that didn't suck, though the OS is just a terrible bloated slow ugly version of System 7. The one that saved Apple. Finally the blue and white G3. ooh how I wanted one of those. The next legendary mac is still to come.

The Mac IIci that I had was fab too - really liked that - very powerful in its day, very expandable, and System 7.1 of course. The Mac classic I had was cute but silly. The color Classics were really nice though, especially when modded to G4s and forced to run OSX!

The newest mac I have is a PowerMac 7600 which I absolutely hate. It's rubbish. It was rubbish when it was new.

The Hackintosh I'm typing this on is rather fab though. Using OSX has made me seriously tempted by a new Intel Mac Mini.

Best: PowerMac Dual G4 500MHz
Worst: iBook 14' G3 800MHz

Just because there isn't any software that you use that would use the power of a G5, it doesn't mean there isn't any software that does.

I agree with you there ;). I really cant talk much about any pre OS X Macs because I thought OS 9 and down sucked compared to Windows. Id say the best modern mac is the MacBook Pro.

I've used both and you're definitely right about the iBook 14".

The Powermac though - it's among the best but I don't think it's THE best especially from a design standpoint

i like my ibook g3 900mhz, it shipped with 10.2 and it ran 10.4 descently. (for the record i liked 10.2 the best)

very nice said
you have my respect

_________________________________/

G5 my favourite too.
that is the best,the most powerful and the machine with the best case ever from Cupertino .

~R

I'll always remember my Mac IIfx. Didn't own it(way out of my budget) but had one at the office. Insanely fast! (at that time anyway) I did however own a Performa 630 with an Apple TV Tuner card.

Not a Mac, the original Newton Messagepad was great fun. We used to write our names on it and the OMP would tell us what it thought of us. Handwriting recognition at that point in time was hilarious.

The greatest Mac in my office has to be the lone PowerMac 7600 that is still running System 7.5.1 & our invoicing system written by yours truly in 4th Dimension 3.5. I'll take pictures if you don't believe me!

Edit:
Having just wrote all that & reading through some of your posts, I feel old. You guys are talking about G3s & G4s and here I am babbling about 68030s & 040s & PPC604s & Sys 7.5. I think I'll take a nap now.

Nice. "If it aint broke, dont fix it"

I was a fan of the cake box macs. I had a IIVX, and centris 650 (same case style) which were pretty okay but both a bit slow. Then a beige g3 which still runs. Nice design on both cases as far as accessibility for upgrades went. The older case though was much more solidly built... real metal on the inside and out.

Besides those, the mac Pluses we had in school were simply bulletproof - except for one time. I was playing a game once (Stratego I think), and noticed there was smoke emitting from the top of the computer. It smoked for what seemed like a long time before the computer stopped responding. Honest to god.

apple ][


=D we have one at school (its public school okay?) (Well... it is now )

The best Mac in History is coming out next year. This has been the case since 1985 and will continue to be so until Apple are no more...

i dig that philosophy

#1 - Mac IIFX - Back in the day when MacWorld magazine was more than 1/2" thick. The most'est of the most'est. Bad ass computer that walked around with a pack of smokes rolled up in it's sleeve.

#2 - Quadra 840AV - Wicked fast Mac with lots of "above and beyond" innovations like a real DSP and built-in video capture.

I'd have to say the first Mac (GUI, compact, ment for masses) and by extension :-) the Mac Plus, maybe the SE. Apple sold a lot of them. That was THE computer revolution. GUI for the masses.

The G3 blue and whites. They were so much faster then the 604s. Brought in real video editing, firewire.

For me it was the Lisa, which I suppose wasn't a Mac per se but it was the Apple forerunner of all things Macintosh. It was the first time I'd seen a GUI or in fact a machine with a hard drive (whopping 10MB) and it just worked, perfectly. That nylon mesh stretched tightly over the surface of the screen was interesting, it cut down glare but it made it a bitch to clean. The first day I used it I had no idea it had a hard drive so I stuffed in one of the original program diskettes - come to think of it, that was the first time I'd seen 3.5" floppies too - and got a bollocking off the department admin for risking damaging the only 'virgin' copy of the software. Then we got an Atari ST with GEM and colour but the resolution sucked and it had no HDD so the Lisa was still my favourite. Oh, now I'm really showing my age



I guess this picture is of the 5.25" twin floppy version.

Greatest Mac in History? Hopefully the ones that will be introduced this October

my best was the ole Apple 2GS or II gs

I would have to say after considerable thought that the Mac Pro 2.66 gHz Quad Xeon. I didn't think saying a new computer would be a good idea for the best but the Processor to Memory to Bus to PCI to Cache ratios are the baddest since the G4 Dual 533 digital audio, which had the best, but you can run Window Vista or XP and 10.4 which is incredible not to mention every month you can spend $340 a month for 4 GB (2 GB pairs) for 4 months and have 16 GB of ram (or 32 GB OWC says with 8 GB.). That's like the sickest "after you get it lasts for 8 years) computer I can think of.

I just realized that I didn't say what my favorite Mac was when I posted last month. I'm going to have to go with the first Dual G4s (Dual 450 and Dual 500). The G4s had very efficient multiprocessing - often running things more than twice as fast as the same MHz single processor systems. They could use up to 2GB of RAM, had lots of room for hard drives, and had gigabit ethernet. I got my Dual 450 when they first came out, and I used it until I sold it two months ago (it was running OS X Server, and was still quite quick and very stable after 7 years).

Well todays Mac's are really just high-quality x86 PC hardware underneath.

I'd say the most revolutionary Mac was the first one released in 1984. It was vastly superior to any IBM PC on the market at that time. The only disadvantages it had were lack of color display and overally expensive price tag: $2495 in 1984.

Of corse the amazing twentieth anniversary macintosh

My vote would have to go to the early PowerMac G4s. Expandable (with CPU upgrades, memory, cards, etc), reliable, and visually appealing compared to the beige boxes that dominated at the time.

20th Anniversary mac by far, it was 1997 when it was released. It was way ahead of its time.

The next one.

Ditto. Still one running in grandpa's basement running an original 19" monitor for 3D cad work with Ashlar Vellum.

All the Nubus slots made this thing incredibly expandable.

P.S. The Apple II was great but not a Mac.

All Apple Computers are so amazingly ahead of their time, it's hard to pick one...

I'd say the iMac G3, because it was the first lovable computer. I still have one and I still love it.

Haha, now this looks more like an old oscilloscope. Anyway, I am surprised that more people haven't picked the Pismo. If i remember correctly, it was one of the -- if not the -- first laptop to include a DVD-ROM drive. Two extensible bays. It was the first notebook to include FireWire in place of SCSI. It had that G4 logic board in it, that's a first. Weighing in at 6 lbs. beat anything on the market at the time. Super easy installation of hard drive and memory, right under the keyboard, which was somewhat revolutionary considering that not a single Pro Mac laptop since then has had a very easy hard drive installation. In fact, it hasn't been considered user replaceable and continues to void the warranty since the TiBook. The MacBooks are the next evolution in that process, by the way (amazing).

But as much as I have liked most of my previous Macs, that Pismo was near perfect. I still miss working on it.

Click to view attachment

EDIT: Oh, I forgot -- it also was the first internally wireless capable laptop, wasn't it? It had the capability for 802.11b with a built in airport card.

i have to agree 100%

Mine dangit..... well atleast I know this mac has been as great to me as any mac could be.

IMO the new iMac is one of the greatest (although not necessarily the greatest), since it is a major step towards using recyclable materials (Apple was notorious once for its enviro-unfriendlyness, even wtih Al Gore). Now it uses Aluminum and Glass, which can be melted down to make new macs with!

Furthermore, it is the first Mac to use an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor!

I love it.


Also, the iMac G5 - iMac Core 2 Duo (up to July 2007) were the same case. Gets boring.

for me is the powerbook duo 250 a great laptop (my first laptop, i got it from my mum when i was 7 who worked @ apple and got 5 macs for free)
but now i have the new imac, and that is the greatest mac in history me thinks, because it has an awesome new design, is made of recyclable materials and can run both mac os x and xp (which is very good for the switchers, but also for the mac users who like to play a game that isn't avaible for os x))

the 12" powerbook g4.
now outdated, it really meant a lot to the pros out there who wanted portability.
And I love mine to death!

But in first place is the Bondi Blue iMac G3. I don't even have to say anything about it: it was so revolutionary!

Otherwise, I would say the Macbook. It is the sole reason that people are switching to Mac OS X, and I see so many around campus! It is one of the best notebooks on the market today.

-Urbz

Although the Beige G3's started to get Apples heart beating again ... without a doubt it had to be the "Bondi Blue" iMac G3/233 that really got the pulse racing.

Apart from that my fav Mac's have got to be either the Quadra 840av or the 7100/80av - yeah I know they pre-historic by today's standards ... but boy in their time

I think the Imac really did it for Apple. Even more the mid g4 series Imacs with the round base. I love that design.