20 Macs for 2020

Stephen Hackett joins Jason to wrap up the series and discuss all the Macs that didn't make the list.

From November 20, 2020: Titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook Air, the original Macintosh, PowerBook 140/170, and iMac G3.

From August 31, 2020: The Macintosh Portable, Power Computing clones, iMac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube, iBook, Macintosh SE/30, and laying out pages at college newspapers.

From June 12, 2020: The Power Mac G5, PowerBook Duo, PowerBook 500 & 5300, Blue-and-White Power Mac G3, DayStar Genesis MP, Mac mini, Mac IIcx and IIci, and the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.

From November 20, 2020: Titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook Air, the original Macintosh, PowerBook 140/170, iMac G3, and to his great dismay, John learns Jason's final rankings.

From September 1, 2020: The Macintosh Portable, Power Computing clones, iMac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube, iBook, and Macintosh SE/30.

Two interviews with John Siracusa used for the 20 Macs for 2020 podcast, discussing the first nine entries in the series.

It was the late 90s and Apple was on the ropes. Steve Jobs knew the company needed a lifeline, fast. And 10 months after Jobs took back control of the company, he announced the product that would fund Apple's resurgence and change its future forever.

After the failure of the Macintosh Portable, Apple took a different approach to designing a laptop. The result helped tip the balance of power between humans and computers.

The first Mac followed in the Lisa's footsteps and had a lot of limitations--but it changed the course of the computer industry forever.

Apple's first attempt at the ultimate thin and light laptop was overpriced and underpowered. The second attempt resulted in the definitive Mac of the 2010s.

Apple's first metallic silver laptop set the company on a path that it's been on for two decades and counting, but it also proved that the company still had a lot to learn.

What's the best Mac of all time? It's an impossible question to answer. Yet three well-known Mac commentators all have the same answer.

After a lot of speculation, Steve Jobs finally filled in the Mac's fourth product quadrant with a consumer laptop that was one of a kind. But what's a "consumer laptop," really?

There may have never been a Mac more aligned with Steve Jobs's personal quirks than the Power Mac G4 Cube. It was a spectacular failure.

One of Apple's greatest design triumphs was meant to set the company up for the next decade. Instead, it became a false start--and a rejected design direction ended up being more functional, if less inspirational.

For a couple of years in the mid-90s, the Mac market was enthralled by a clonemaker with great deals and riotous marketing.

Thank goodness there are second chances, because Apple's first attempt to make a portable Macintosh was as inauspicious at it gets.

In an era where Apple liked to show concepts from its design lab in public, one weird Mac prototype somehow became a real product, and was unveiled at the end of the worst Apple keynote in history.

You know about the Macintosh, but do you know about the sequel? The Macintosh II was huge--literally. But its compact successors might be the pinnacle of late 80s/early 90s Apple design.

The popularity of the iPod led Apple to create a Mac designed specifically to tempt people to switch from Windows. It didn't go as planned, but the result was a Mac model that's been with us for fifteen years and counting.

One of the most important developments in the history of the Mac was not created in Cupertino, but by a Mac clonemaker in a tiny town in Georgia.

Professionals were dragged out of their beige towers by an iMac-inspired Power Mac that featured a drop-down door, big plastic handles, and a raft of new technologies.

Apple follows up its groundbreaking original PowerBooks with a new set of laptops that ushered in perhaps the ugliest period in Apple laptop history.

Apple had made numerous attempts to sell server hardware, including a strange non-Mac server that Steve Jobs likened to a bizarre dream. But in the early 2000s, Jobs decided to take another crack at it, and vowed that this time things would be different.

Jason Snell introduces 20 Macs for 2020, a project that will count down his list of the 20 most notable Macs of all time, one per week, with a little help from his friends.