Apple's Mac through the years (pictures)

Thirty years ago, Apple released the Macintosh, and the company was never the same.

The model pictured here is actually the Macintosh 512k, which nearly identical to the original Macintosh introduced in January 1984, but with an increase in memory from the 128K shipped on the original model, earning it the nickname "Fat Mac."

The Macintosh Plus made its debut in 1986 with 1MB of memory and a SCSI (small computer system interface) port for adding peripherals like hard drives or printers. Note the color change on this particular model from the Macintosh 512k's beige to gray.

The next evolution to the Macintosh form factor was the Macintosh SE, which brought dual floppy disk drives to the Mac and dropped that phone cord port on the lower front panel in 1987.

A later revision to this design, the SE/30, was voted as the "Best Mac Ever" by a panel of Macworld contributors.

The Macintosh II series, introduced in 1987, dropped the all-in-one monitor and computer design in favor of a desktop look. Shown here is the IIx model, which cost $7,800 in 1988 with 1MB of RAM.

Apple's first attempt at a notebook was not a commercial success, but it is noteworthy for its historical significance to the company. The Macintosh Portable came out in 1989 weighing in at almost 16 pounds. It cost about $400 a pound.

Apple decided to get back into the low-cost computer market around 1990, hence the introduction of the LC line. This is the LC II, which ushered in an era of smaller chassis for Apple and would eventually be replicated under the Performa brand later in the decade.

The company didn't take its eye off the high-end market, however, introducing the Quadra series in 1991. One notable feature on this Quadra 700 was the introduction of an Ethernet jack, which would come to be the standard for cable networking.

Portable computing inside Apple got a little more serious with the introduction of the PowerBook 100 series. This model, the PowerBook 170, was the high-end version of Apple's first PowerBook models introduced in late 1991, and much easier to tote than the Macintosh Portable at around 7 pounds.

PowerBooks got even smaller in 1992 with the introduction of the PowerBook Duo series (the 210 model is shown here). These notebooks weighed just 4 pounds and used docking stations in order to eliminate as many ports as possible from the notebooks themselves. Former Apple employee and current blogger Chuq Van Rospach called this model one of his favorite Macs of all time.

Long before Apple experimented with Apple TV as a hobby, it introduced Macintosh TV as an attempt to blend a computer and a television. It didn't work out so well after being introduced in October 1993 which, coincidentally or not, was around the time Apple's market share started to head south for a decade.

Introduced in 1994, the Power Macintosh 6100 was the first Mac to use a PowerPC chip in the first historic processor architecture switch Apple would make in 25 years of the Mac. It was designed as a high-end desktop to replace the Quadra and set the stage for a decade of computers designed around the PowerPC architecture.

Just before Steve Jobs returned to Apple to rescue the struggling company, Gil Amelio unveiled this Mac to celebrate Apple's 20th anniversary as a company in 1997. Few were made, and at $9,000 to start, few were sold. Apple eventually dropped the price more in line with the rest of the Macintosh lineup and sales picked up, but this computer appeared to be more about design than profit.

Perhaps the most significant computer introduced by Apple during the 1990s, the original iMac all-in-one design made its debut in 1998 alongside a beaming Steve Jobs. The multicolored design, introduction of USB ports, and emphasis on simplicity brought a lot of buzz back to Apple, and this model set the stage for the company's desktop computing design strategy that persists today.

Jobs' design influence was clearly being felt as the 1990s came to a close, with this Power Macintosh G3 Blue and White replacing a very drab model of the same name as Apple's high-end desktop product. The side of this machine swung down for easy access to the innards of the system.

This colorful design, clearly inspired by the original iMac, was Apple's consumer laptop product for 1999: the iBook 3G. It resembles later student-laptop designs such as the XO Laptop and Intel's Classmate PC and came with integrated wireless networking, which would eventually become ubiquitous but was a rare thing in 1999.

In 2000, Apple introduced one of its most distinctive designs ever: the Power Mac G4 Cube. "Cube," for short, was one of the more beloved and bedeviled Macs ever made. It had a huge following among many Mac fans but was plagued by faint lines on the exterior that some felt were cracks and others felt were blemishes. Apple discontinued the Cube in 2001 after noting that buyers seemed to prefer the slightly cheaper Power Mac G4 minitower.

Apple's design philosophy started to change around 2001, when it shifted away from multicolor hues with the introduction of the PowerBook G4. Various metals were introduced as the basis for the chassis, with the titanium PowerBook arriving first, followed by this aluminum model.

At the same time, Apple eschewed multicolor designs in the consumer desktop category with the introduction of the white plastic iMac G4 in January 2002.

This model also introduced the concept of a flat-panel display atop a flexible arm and base, which held the electronics.

This striking design holds the most powerful computer Apple had ever made at the point it was introduced in 2003. That design was required, however, because of the significant heat thrown off by the G5 processor.

Apple and IBM were unable to crank the G5 processor up to 3GHz as Jobs had promised, setting the stage for Apple's second great architecture shift.

Apple's attempt at minimalism surfaced with the Mac Mini in 2005, a small spare box sold with no peripherals for just $499.

The Mac Mini has never been a huge seller, but it is a favorite of Mac hobbyists who like to modify their machines or use them as home-entertainment servers.

The modern era of the Mac officially began in January 2006, when Apple introduced its first Intel-based computer. The iMac (Intel) was essentially the same design as the iMac G5, which dropped the flexible arm from the iMac G4 in favor of an all-in-one design in which the circuitry was placed directly behind the display.

Apple's thinnest and lightest notebook ever, the MacBook Air was introduced in January 2008 inside a manilla envelope. In order to get it that small, Apple had to make some concessions on design, such as the lack of a CD drive and just two USB ports, but it also introduced a new gesture-based trackpad that borrowed ideas from the iPhone.

The 2008 version of Apple's MacBook lineup was based on a new unibody design cut from a single block of aluminum. Also noteworthy is the single-button trackpad, in which the trackpad itself is the mouse button.

The dynamic design revision of the Apple Mac Pro, which went on sale at the end of 2013, has been compared to many things.

The basic model of the distinctive workstation includes a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with a 10MB memory cache, 12GB of 1866MHz DDR3 error-correcting memory, dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics chips with 2GB of video memory each, and a 256GB SSD whose flash memory is connected via the PCI Express bus for faster performance than ordinary SATA-connected SSDs.