In your opinion, what is the Greateat Mac of All Time?

[Sarcany]

Three come to mind...

The IIfx because no Mac has inspired such techno-lust in me before or after.

The SE because it just worked with no tinkering, took everything from the plus and smoothed out all of the rough-edges. The SE paired with a LaserWriter was the epitome for DTP workstations well into the 1990s.

The LC because it fit so much in the little pizza-box and started the whole beige-box trend. I had the Apple II card in mine, plus added an expansion chassis which took it to 3 processor-direct slots and two more drive-bays. Had four operating systems running on mine simultaneously (DOS/ProDOS/Windows/Mac). We take it for granted that we can multi-task on the Mac. This machine took multi-tasking to the next-level.

[kahuna1342]

The one that I am typing this on right now... The 2012 15" unibody MacBook Pro with the "high-rez" matte screen. Quad core i7, upgraded to 16gb of RAM and a 2TB ssd. Runs Mojave, no problem at all. Anything similar in today's lineup would be somewhere in the $4K range

Second for me would be the blue & white G3 tower. At the time, a pretty revolutionary machine and super easy to work on or upgrade. Especially compared to all of the beige madeness (knuckle busters) from earlier.

[Mike Johnson]

The iMac. Why should I have to explain that?

[Article Accelerator]

pRICE cUBE wrote: In your opinion, what is the Greatest Mac of All Time?

Simple—the insanely powerful and capacious iMac Pro.

[Lux Interior]

PM 7600. It was the first Mac I had the was really powerful.

Probably helped the the PM 7200 (the WORST Mac of all time) was what I had before it.

[msglee]

Beige G3 Desktop


It was so easy to get your hands inside it.

For some unknown reason I still have it.

[archipirata]

Another vote for the Mac Pro 1.1

I ran mine for over 10 years as my primary workstation and it was still running fine when I had to finally upgrade due to software support obsolescence.

[tuqqer]

MacBook Air. Any of them.

The SSD was the technological invention I'd been waiting for since I first waited a minute for an app to open and 2 minutes for a Mac to start up.

[Lew Zealand]

The Plus (maybe 512k?) or the original iMac were the most important to the platform and the company.

But for me it was the 7500. Shipped with:
100MHz 601 ("G1" chip)
8MB RAM
500MB SCSI-1 HD
10bT Enet
2MB VRAM mobovideo

Upgraded it to:
1GHz G4
1GB RAM
PCI ATA/100 card w/4x300GB HDDs
PCI FW400 + USB2 + Gigabit Enet
PCI 128MB Radeon 9200 video

How many orders of magnitude more performance was wringable from this chassis with these upgrades (observed numbers, not theoretical):

Processor: 0.76
Memory size: 1.1
Storage space: 3.4
Storage speed: 0.8
Network speed: 0.9
Video speed: 1.6
VRAM: 1.8

Total: 10.36 orders of magnitude more capability in 2010 than when this machine was sold in 1995.

Good design.

Edit: I forgot something important. It shipped with System 7.5.3 and at the end it was running Mac OS 10.4.11. Not bad.

[S. Pupp]

Quadra 840AV, because of the fantastic audio/video performance.

It was awesome even when I bought it in 2000 for $20 or so.

With a SpigotPower input card, it could record excellent video with quality that put a Firewire Mac using a Canopus ADVC-100 to shame. Too bad that, unless you didn't mind 640X240 progressive video and a 2 GB file size limitation, you were stuck with a short interlaced jpeg file that nothing modern could read. Oh sure, you could convert it to Cinepak...if you could spare a few months' worth of processing per video clip.

The A/D audio conversion is said to have been better than Macs that followed it, thanks to its AT&T DSP chip.

Yes, my Mac SE/30 with an overclocked '040 beats some of its specs, but to me, the Quadra 840AV remains a magnificent beast. My intense guilt and regret about throwing it away when I got married is probably why our house is now filled with literally dozens of rescued legacy Macs.