#9 Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh: 1997

Apple's Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was a limited-edition personal computer that was released in 1997 in celebration of the company's 20th birthday. Although its logic board was one of the only unique internal components, the exterior was designed to represent a state-of-the-art futuristic vision of where personal computing could go.

It was a metallic-colored computer designed with hard angular lines, not the soft and simple curves we've come to expect from Apple today. The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh looked futuristic and expensive, and it was at $9,000. But the design was a façade, a vanity project built for Apple's sake and not the customer's.

#8 iMac: 1998

Apple declared the 'i' in iMac to stand for "Internet"; it also represented the product's focus as a personal device like 'i' for "individual". Attention was given to the out-of-box experience: the user needed to go through only two steps to set up and connect to the Internet. "There's no step 3!" was the catch-phrase in a popular iMac commercial narrated by actor Jeff Goldblum.

"Apple was now breaking new ground in design and personal computing, distancing themselves from the staid world of Windows PCs," says graphic designer Yamaguma.

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