Every Mac I've known, ranked

10 Macs in 20 years

This week Apple has been celebrating 40 years of the Mac. The original Macintosh 128K was released on January 24th, 1984, revolutionising the consumer PC market with its all-in-one design and breakthrough graphical user interface.

Here's Tim Cook on Twitter:

Mac changed everything when it was introduced 40 years ago, and through the years it has done so again and again and again. Today’s Mac lineup is the best in the history of the personal computer, and it’s built on decades of revolutionary innovation. Happy birthday Mac!

Jason Snell also had a great article marking the occasion at The Verge:

This week, I asked Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, the same question I asked Jobs for the Mac’s 20th anniversary and Schiller for the Mac’s 30th: as Apple adds yet more platforms and priorities, what does the Mac’s future look like?

No surprise, Joswiak gave me pretty much the same answer: “The Mac is the foundation of Apple... and today 40 years later it remains a critical part of our business,” he said. “The Mac will always be part of Apple. It’s a product that runs deep within the company, and defines who we are.”

I've been a Mac user for two decades. Even though I prefer to use an iPad away from home most of the time, that's predicated on having the home comfort of a Mac to go back to. The Mac is always my personal computer. The way the iPhone works in synergy with the Mac is the reason I keep buying them instead of going all-in on better Android hardware. I always have a Windows PC around for games and various compatibility reasons, but it's not where I prefer to do my computing. I'm a Mac user.

That is not to say that every Mac is awesome, or that I've had a great time with all of them. I might only have been around for the latter half of the Mac's existence, but I've used and owned a whole bunch of Macs, and let's just say there have been ups and downs on the hardware side of things.

Today I'm going to rank all ten Macs I've ever owned or seriously used as a work machine. The ranking is based on nothing more than how I personally felt about each Mac at the time. Context is everything, and that context probably isn't all that relevant to anyone else, but I thought it might be fun to record my memories for the occasion.

10. 15" MacBook Pro, mid-2007