A photographic history of Apple products (pictures)

A new photography project and a just released book by Jonathan Zufi, "Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation," chronicles the life of Apple products in pictures. It's a beautiful look at everything Apple has ever made.

Zufi collected more than 500 products and took more than 150,000 photos for his project. The result is a simple, clean collection fit for any Apple fanatic. The book itself is 326 pages with more 650 photographs, but the Web site goes even deeper, displaying more than 3,500 photographs of iconic, classic, and rare Apple products.

In addition to the iPhones and MacBooks that are still around today, Zufi's collection also includes special limited release developer models and products which where made but cancelled before being widely released.

The Apple II Plus, seen here, was released in 1979 and retailed for $1,195. It shipped with 16KB, 32KB, or 48KB of main RAM, which was expandable to 64KB by means of the Language Card, an expansion card that could be installed.

Featuring a 20MHz ARM 610 processor, 4MB of ROM, 640K of SRAM, and infrared-beaming capabilities in a compact handheld case with a pressure-sensitive display, the original Newton MessagePad was one of the first handheld systems to attempt to recognize natural handwriting and use a basic form of artificial intelligence.

The business focused Apple Lisa featured a Motorola 68000 CPU, support for 2MB RAM, and support for external storage drives such as the Apple Profile.

The first external storage device built for the Apple II was the Apple Disk II, which increased the computer's capabilities with a floppy disk drive for storing up to 140K on each disk. The separate controller card allowed support for up to two drives per controller.

The StyleWriter II was Apple's consumer-focused inkjet printer which allowed at-home publishing with laser-quality printing at 360dpi and 39 TrueType fonts, including Times, Helvetica, Palatino, ITC Avant Garde Gothic, and Symbol.

Released in 1996, the Quicktake 200 was the third and final version of Quicktake digital cameras from Apple, a Fujifilm-built device with a resolution of 640x480 pixels maximum (0.3 MP).

The Apple Mouse IIe was the last mouse made for the Apple IIe. It used a DE9 connector, and was compatible with the Apple II, II+, Macintosh 128K, 512K, and Macintosh Plus.

The first gaming joystick made for the Apple II computers was the Apple IIe Joystick. This device was the next generation gaming/graphics control device which followed the Apple II and Apple IIe hand controllers.

The Apple VideoPhone Kit, released in 1997, allowed video conferencing over a 28,000bps modem, ISDN, or Ethernet connection, and came bundled with Netscape's CoolTalk audioconferencing software.

The Apple II Paddles were the first gaming controllers for the Apple II platform and required plugging the paddles directly into a 16-pin DIP socket on the motherboard.

The Newton 110 developer version, also known as the Clear Newton, was one of just around 100 of the devices made specifically for developers and given out at the 1994 Mac Developers conference.

The Newton 110 recognized printed or cursive handwriting, stored notes, and also recognized graphics and the inherent symmetry in objects.

The first Mac, the Macintosh 128K, was a computer was originally planned to be released with a Twiggy floppy disk drive, similar to the one used in the Apple Lisa 1 computer.

High error rates with the Twiggy disk drive though forced Apple to switch over to the 400K Sony 3.5-inch disk drive in the last two or three months before the Macintosh's scheduled release on January 24, 1984.

The black and white LCD Apple IIc Flat Panel Display for the Apple IIc had a resolution of 560x192 and used a DB-15 connector. It sold for $600.

The education oriented eMate 300 was a PDA based on the Newton platform, which used an ARM 710a RISC processor running at 25MHz, had 8MB ROM and 3MB RAM.

With a 480x320 backlit grayscale screen, the folding clamshell style also contained a keyboard, and the device also shipped with a stylus.

The Parallel Interface Board enabled a Lisa computer to accommodate peripherals like the Apple ProFile hard disk and the Apple Dot Matrix Printer.

The Macintosh Plus computer, the third model in the Macintosh line, launched in 1986 with a retail price of $2,600. The Mac Plus shipped with 1MB RAM, an external SCSI peripheral bus, and could run System 7.

The 800K drive stores more system programs and applications on a dual-sided 3.5-inch disk and still leaves space for data files. The 800K drive operates at twice the speed of the 400K drive.

The PowerBook 160, which was released in 1992, introduced grayscale video to the PowerBook line. It was also the first model to support an external monitor using Apple proprietary VID-14 connector, and it was the first to allow more than 8MB RAM.

Created in 1983, the Unifile Twiggy floppy drive was an innovative double-sided drive that had heads on opposite sides of the spindle. The Twiggy disks offered an extremely large capacity of over 800K.

Though the Unifile was announced by Apple, the program was canceled before it ever shipped. It was intended to Apple II and Apple III computers, but the Twiggy drive was only ever used in the Lisa I. Many of the drives were made, but then the product was canned and most of the units were destroyed.

Released in February 2004, the anodized aluminum iPod mini 6GB model was the second generation of the mini music player and had an 8 hour battery life.

The iPad, launched in April 2010, gave birth to an entire to category of device, the tablet. The iPad had a 9.7-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology at 1024x768-pixel resolution.