Here’s a post that probably only I will care about—or even read. MacWorld asks me the provocative and difficult-to-answer question: what is the best Mac computer ever? Andy Ihnatko has the funniest, and possibly the best, answer to that question. But I’m not sure it’s true for me. So, a brief tour of my Macs, former and current.

But I have to begin with a dilemma: did I originally own a Mac Plus (512k), or a Mac SE? One floppy drive or two? I no longer remember, despite the hundreds of hours I spent creating a hypertext version of Dante’s Inferno on Hypercard (well, I started it, but never finished). I bought it when I was at King St. in Santa Cruz, so it was Fall of 1988 at the earliest, but it could have been as late as 1989. I remember my LaCie hard drive (was it as large as 20 Megabytes?!), and everyone said the desktop icon looked like a swastika. Anyone out there remember—two drives or one?

After that, I upgraded to some sort of Performa (a Performa 638CD it appears, now that I’ve pored over some Wikipedia). This was one of two crappy, non-Steve Jobs Macs that I owned. The Performa had a television receiver installed as part of the default configuration, so that was when I first played around with video capture. It was a color screen, and I know exactly when I bought it. It was summer of 1994 (which means that first Mac lasted for at least 5 years), the summer after I’d moved to Berkeley and was staying at the Biasin’s house at the top of the Berkeley hills. It arrived broken, a typical sign of a non-Steve Jobs Mac. (To their credit, they came out the next morning and repaired it on the spot, and I never had any more trouble with it).

And then, for my first long trip to Italy (1996?), I bought—with Jeremy’s employee discount—a PowerBook 5300 series, or in the immortal words of Wikipedia, a computer “widely considered to be Apple’s worst product of the time period.” But it was a color laptop! Unimaginable! I don’t recall the exact model number, but other than running Mac OS, it was not a nice computer. A clunky, unattractive box that I ran Earthlink off of (Earthlink could get you on line in the US and in Italy at the time—or was it CompuServe? I think it was CompuServe.) I sold it to John of John and Belle shortly before they moved to Indonesia. It was widely referred to as the HindenBook for its unfortunate tendency to burst into flames. I sort of wish it had.

But then! Oh, but then. Steve Jobs returned and everything changed. Suddenly Apple was making computers that rocked and that looked amazing. Such as the fantastic computer I finished my dissertation on, and which I still have. It emerged from the bat cave, and worked as beautifully as it looked: the PowerBook G3, Wallstreet series. For the first time ever, I bought not the cheapest bottom-of-the-line Mac, but the most expensive and nicest. The 14” screen still looks great today. I haven’t gotten around to installing OS X on it, but maybe someday. It did eventually sometimes go all pixelated, and had some sort of display issue—reading the Wiki entry on it, I’m thinking it may have had heat issues, which was a common problem for Wallstreet PowerBooks.

In the meantime, Lilya had been Jonesing for an iMac—not so much for herself, since she was still all-PC back then (although that was about to change), but as a decorative item for the house. My Wallstreet PowerBook kept having its occasional display problems, and I wanted another computer in case it departed this world. I obliged with a blue iMac optimized for video—it could play DVDs! Who had heard of or imagined such a thing back in 2001? It was “indigo,” and it is sitting on Sasha’s desk back in Champaign, running OS X, and being annoying about connecting to our home WiFi network.

Then we got jobs, and the university, naturally, bought us new computers. This is when Lilya had a change of heart—became a “switcher,” as Apple says today. So we both bought “Quicksilver” PowerMacs, the item that persuaded Lilya to switch in Fall of 2001.

I’d never had a top-end desktop mac, and this guy moved along pretty quickly compared to that iMac I had sitting at home. It lasted until about 2007, when I fell in love with the unibody iMac. I got it with the wireless (BlueTooth) keyboard and mouse. A terrible mistake, by the way—unless you feel like constantly have your mouse and keyboard run out of battery power, and waiting six or seven hours while you recharge their batteries. That’s what’s in my office right now and I’ve got no complaints.

But what to do about a reliable laptop? Enter the iBook. My iBook was—unlike my Hindenbook—absolutely perfect. It was the right size, shape, and feel—everything was just so. And I believe Michael still has it somewhere today.

There were only two three things wrong with the iBook. 1) it eventually needed an expensive repair, having the video cable replaced—lots of consumers had this problem, but Apple never recognized it as a manufacturing defect; 2) the screen was small, just 12 inches, and most importantly; 3) Lilya was going to get a nicer laptop than me, the PowerBook. It sported a spiffy all-aluminum enclosure and a 15 inch screen, not to mention dedicated graphics, and a faster processor. Well, that wasn’t about to stand! I immediately ordered the same PowerBook, but with DVD burning capabilities, and the illuminated keyboard. Lilya’s point was that the PowerBook was necessary because it would match her PowerMac—all silver (further enhanced by the acquisition of the RAZR phones in matching silver).

Those PowerBooks lasted a good while, but they were starting to show their age even a year ago. And with research funds burning a hole in my pocket, it was time to… downgrade? With Apple’s latest revisions to their laptop lines, there was hardly any difference between the MacBook (formerly iBook) and the MacBook Pro (formerly the PowerBook). And I could shed a pound and half by going down to the MacBook, as well as getting all that new Apple multitouch trackpad goodness. So here’s the 2008 (late) MacBook, which replaced my PowerBook (whose hard drive failed within three days of the arrival of the new MacBook):

And of these ten Macs, which is my favorite? I’m torn between my Wallstreet PowerBook and my iBook. The Wallstreet PowerBook was the coolest; the iBook was the perfect combination of power and portability. Who knows? In time, this unibody aluminum MacBook may take the prize. It’s odd—I got a good five years of use out of my PowerBook 15”, and it never had a glitch until after it was replaced. By all accounts, it’s a great computer. But it never had that sense of gadget joy that those two computers had.