Apple has four machines on ‘25 Greatest PCs’ list
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 14, 2006 at 7:56am
For the anniversary of the IBM PC, there sure are a lot of Apple systems on PC World’s “25 Greatest PCs of All Time” list. In fact, the Apple II from 1977 topped the list.
Here’s what PC World had to say (in part) about the Apple II: “The Apple II wasn’t the first personal computer, or the most advanced one, or even the best-selling model of its age. But in many ways it was The Machine That Changed Everything. On all four of our criteria—Innovation, Impact, Industrial Design, and Intangibles—it was such a huge winner that it ended up as our Greatest PC of All Time.”
Other Apple systems on the list were:
Number 4—The Macintosh Plus (1986): “The $2599 Mac Plus had the same Motorola 68000 processor as the original Mac, but it came with a roomy 1MB of RAM and was upgradeable to 4MB of RAM. It supported the brand-new 800KB double-sided floppy-disk format, and was the first Mac with a SCSI port for fast data transfer to and from an external hard drive. Like earlier Macs, its cute beige all-in-one case housed a monochrome 512-by-342-pixel display and the 3.5-inch floppy drive. It also came with matching beige input devices: a sturdy keyboard with a numeric keypad connected by a coiled cord, and a boxy, rectangular mouse.”
Number 10—PowerBook 100 (1991): “Along with the higher-end PowerBook 140 and 170, the $2500 100 sported two features that the rest of the industry quickly cribbed. First, the company pushed the keyboard back toward the screen hinge, freeing up space for a wrist-rest area that made typing more comfortable. And in the center of that wrist rest sat a nice, large trackball, the best mobile pointing device of its era. (At the time, folks who ran Windows on portable computers were still futzing with unwieldy clip-on trackballs.) Those were just two of the more striking innovations in a slick laptop design that, according to Jim Carlton’s book Apple, took the company from last place to first in laptop sales.
Number 19—iMac (second generation, 2002): “The first-generation iMac of 1997 may have been the machine that told the world that Apple, and its recently returned cofounder Steve Jobs, were back. But its second-generation successor was a vastly different, far more inventive computer. And even though it didn’t turn out to be an influential one, it remains a high point in PC design history. With its dome-shaped base and its flat-panel screen that ‘floated’ on a swivel arm, this iMac was, quite literally, like no computer that came before it.”
Number 23—eMate 300 (1997): “The $799 eMate was idiosyncratic in virtually every way a computer can be idiosyncratic, starting with its target audience: schoolkids. It ran an operating system designed for PDAs (Apple’s Newton OS). It didn’t have a hard drive, but it did have pen input. It looked vaguely like a notebook, but its industrial design—with a green, curvy case that looked like it had sprung from the mind of science-fiction illustrator H.R. Giger-—was utterly unique.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Babe Says:
Without these innovative machines, the PC revolution would have been a lot less...well, revolutionary. So we decided to celebrate the IBM PC’s 25th birthday by identifying the 25 PCs that have mattered most--from any manufacturer, and from any era.
Posted on August 14, 2006