The Best Vintage Mac Designs

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's talk about the best, the coolest, the weirdest vintage Mac designs, like this one.

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So when talking about vintage Macs and Mac design you really have to start with the original. The Mac from 1984. This set the stage for the whole first generation of Macs. It really was a very different design than computers of the time. The weirdest out of all the first generation of Macs definitely had to be this one. This looks like a Lisa, which was another computer developed by Apple at the same time that was a big failure. In fact it was such a failure that Apple was left with a bunch of hardware and they converted them to Macs and create the Macintosh XL. It was actually a Lisa using software emulation to become a Mac. This thing sold for $4,000 in 1985. It wasn't a huge hit but it allowed Apple to get rid of all this extra Lisa hardware.

Now out of all the first generation Macs this one is my favorite but probably because it was my first Mac. This was a Macintosh SE. It was 1987 and it was $2900. The school I went to, Drexel University, actually required all students to get one. This thing had two floppy drives. What you would usually do is put the operating system and one app on one floppy and then your data on another. So you'd boot-up from one floppy, have the app say a word processor you were going to use, then use that to edit files that were on the other floppy drive.

Now a lot of Apple's most interesting designs were also commercial failures. Take for instance the 1989 Macintosh Portable. This was pretty much a failure as a 16 lb portable computer that cost $7000 ($14000 in today's money.) But it did introduce features like LCD screen and the idea of a portably computer running on a battery. Apple was pretty early to this game and this was just the first in a long line of portably Macs many of which would be very successful.

The Mac portable was soon followed by the PowerBook series. My favorite out of all of those was the PowerBook 160 because this was my second Mac. I bought it in 1992 and it cost a little under $4000. It was interesting because it had a gray scale screen capable of sixteen different shades of gray. You could hook up an external monitor to it. It was actually really portable. I used to bring it to the school library. I remember being the first person there in the library to actually be working on a laptop computer.

Apple got pretty boring with their design in the mid 90's. But then in 1997 they came out with one of the weirdest Macs ever. This was the 20th anniversary Mac. It was an expensive machine, $7,500! But it got you this design unlike anything Apple produced before or since. It was actually a showcase to show what new technologies were coming up. So it had things like a color LCD screen, this built-in sound system. It had a built-in CD drive. You could tune in TV stations and FM stations with it. It also featured a trackpad as its main input device, not a mouse.

It was only a year later in 1998 that we got the iMac. The iMac was an extremely successful computer bringing the Mac back into the mainstream. The price was pretty reasonable. It was only $1300 for one of these. It was an all-in-one Mac just like the original. It's kind of funny because originally it was a very weird looking computer. But it was so popular that it became normal looking after a while. Now in 2019 if you see one around it's kind of weird looking again. Now I never had one of those original iMac. They were geared to consumers and I was using my Mac professionally.

So I was really happy when Apple adapted that design and came out with this version of the Power Mac G3. There was a beige box version of this computer first but eventually they came out with one called the Blue and White Power Mac G3. It was a really neat enclosure. As a matter of fact I like keeping it on top of my desk because I liked how it looked rather than hidden away underneath. There's also an All-in-One version of this. It basically looked like a beige iMac.

From 1997 to 2001 Apple produced a really cool looking set of MacBooks, the G3 MacBooks. They had interesting looking code names like Lumbar, Pismo, Wallstreet. They were this all black plastic design. Really neat. They felt really good to carry around. I owned one of these for years. It was a great portable computer.

Now no talk about vintage Macs is complete unless you mention the G4 Cube. It's basically a mid range Mac from 2000. The base model only cost about $1800. It kind of was a precursor to the MacMini. So perhaps my favorite Mac laptop of all time was this one. The G4 PowerBook made with titanium. It was plagued with issues. Titanium wasn't a great metal, as it turns out, for making laptops and they painted it. The paint wore off after time. The hinges on this thing were horrible and after a few years pretty much everybody that owned one the hinges broke or made it impossible to open and close. But the design set the stage for everything to come. From the titanium powerbook to today's MacBook Pro it's pretty much is a gentle evolution all the way from 2001 to today.

So let's finish up by talking about this one here. This is the G4 iMac. Originally known as simply the New iMac. It came out in 2002 and it had a design very different than the previous iMacs. It used a LCD screen here and had this handle here that made it easy to adjust and put the screen facing any direction that you want. Any angle you want and you could actually carry it by grabbing this. It had tons of ports. Very capable. It looked great and I can't bring myself to part with it even though I've given away or recycled Macs much newer than this one. I think I'll probably keep this one forever.

So which vintage Mac design is your favorite. Which ones did you own and which ones do you still have because you can't bring yourself to part with it. Let me know in the comments.