Opinion On Saturday, January 24th, the Apple Macintosh turns 25. Over the short history of personal computing, no machine has inspired so much love and so much loathing, so many fanatical fans and so many frothing detractors.

And so many opinions. So very many opinions.

First, a disclosure: I'm a Mac fan, a fanboi, a Mactard, a Mac addict - depending upon your point of view.

And I have been since before Steve Jobs pulled the first one out of its carrying case 25 years ago. In the early weeks of 1984, when I was working at the Exploratorium, a museum of science and art in San Francisco, we obtained a schematic and drawing of the much-rumored Mac.

I remember poring over those stolen sheets taped above our office coffee machine, joined by a crowd of the museum's artists, scientists, designers, and techies. We were uniformly shocked at how different the Mac looked - different from both our expectations and our experience with previous computers.

And we were hooked.

Now, 25 years later, as I write this using BBEdit 9 on my eight-core Mac Pro, I'm still a Mac junkie.

Keep that in mind as you peruse my best and worst picks from the more than 300 Mac models Apple has released over the past 25 years.

Next page: The Five Best Macs of All Time

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