I had a PowerBook G3 Pismo (with firewire) and it was just fantastic. Large screen for the day & extremely versatile due to plethora of peripherals. With a good battery in each bay and careful management of screen backlighting I could do >8hrs of real work on flights between Cape Town & Miami, which was impossible with a windows portable at the time.
I think its still somewhere in the loft….
I really liked the Color Classic, the colours were beautiful for the time. Thinking about it, the Mac desktops I’ve owned are the Mac Plus, Color Classic, iMac G3, eMac, various iMacs culminating in iMac 2020, which is in the process of being replaced by a MacBook Air. Along the way I’ve also had another MacBook Air and two Mac Minis which I’ve used as media servers.
And don’t forget to occasionally change out PRAM, etc. batteries, if present.
What he said. The SE/30 is still iconic.
Got mine in 1990 with System 6.3 and when System 7 arrived I was in heaven.
Then ResEdit . . . . . . .
Excuse me, I need a moment.
My favorite was a G3. It was an elegant computer and my cat’s favorite perch. She’d lie down on the top of the case in the Winter and use the curved handle as a head rest. I’d been using a PC or a few years (for my Mac challenged ex) and when we split, I told he to feel free to take the PC. It was so unstable I had to run 2 copies of Windows on different hard drives. When one tanked I switch to the other, reformat the drive and reinstall Windows. I went back to a Mac with the G3 and never looked back.
Related to this:
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, will be holding a Vintage Computer Festival on August 1 and 2.
I did like the G4 because of the way the monitor could be adjusted and with its separate speakers built in. But my real nostalgic Apple product was the Lisa as I had one on my desk when I worked for Apple.
I also had a Performa 6400 in the 90s and liked it a lot, though it was a stock configuration. But my all-time favorite Mac was my PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, which I bought in 1999 in Seattle and kept in my possession for over 20 years. Although it was not in daily use all that time, it served me very well for the years it was my daily driver. I had every expansion bay module made for it (floppy, extra bay batteries, Zip drive, expansion bay hard drive, DVD module, etc.) That computer was on the front seat of the U-Haul I drove cross country in 2000 when I moved back to the east coast. No GPS in those days, so each night in the motel I would access MapQuest and print out the route for the next days’ travel. That PowerBook was a real workhorse for me in its time!
The Cube, especially if it had an upgrade graphics card and CPU (which I believe is still my only experience with thermal paste).
For me it was a PowerBook 1400 which I purchased from the university book store in its cheapest configuration. I upgraded the passive matrix display to an active matrix (it needed to be sent out for this), upgraded the PPC 603E to a G3 (I forgot how it was attached) and upgraded both the ram and HD. With all of this, it became a very capable machine and I got years of use out of it.
While I understand (and support) the lack of the ability to upgrade the ram on M-series macs, it was very pleasant to have this capability when the constraints on component specs were much more relaxed than they are now.
A lot of these bring back fond memories. My first was a 512K Mac, but the one I really recall fondly is the Duo with its dock. I was an academic, and it allowed me to take my computer home with me, with part of the data. (The dock had a hard drive, too.)
I loved my Duo. Portable, but then you could stick it in a slot (and it would pull it in like a VCR tape) and then you had a desktop.
But I have to agree with many others here that the one I really remember using was my Wallstreet portable. Still have it in a box and had to fire it up to try to connect it to my old Newton (couldn’t get it to work). Love that machine and that you could swap drives and CD/DVD player and of course I had a Newer Tech battery to swap when I needed it.
My daughter would use it playing “KeyWack!” when she was a toddler.
I loved my IIci. It was my first personally owned Mac. I borrowed money from our profit sharing plan to buy it in late 1991: 9MB of RAM, 120MB hard drive, plus extra for the Extended Keyboard II. It came to about $3800. I had a 13" Apple RGB for it that a Mac tech support guy had left behind at my job—not sure how he explained it, but they were not interested in getting it back. The IIci pretty quickly cost me more money for more RAM, bigger hard drives, etc. I had ADB recording gizmos for it, and a PowerKey ADB smart power strip that turned on all connected peripherals (APS hard drives!) when the IIci was turned on.
The last time I tried to boot it up, it was no longer working. A few years ago, I took it to an e-recycling event, and I left feeling like I had abandoned a puppy.
I bought a PowerMac 7600 in 1997, along with a 20" Apple MultipleScan monitor (75 lbs). I was also very fond of that one.
Adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $9,000 in today’s dollars! Or, enough to buy a Pro Display XDR-nano texture ($6,000), a set of 
Wheels ($700) for the display, and 120 Polishing Cloths ($19 each) with enough left over for a couple of burritos. Yowsa!
After I had been longing for the Powerbook Ti, that was just unattainable for a student, I got a PowerBook G4 12" after I had started my first job. It was my first Mac and I bought it for the looks and curiosity on the Mac OS X, but I was blown away by the software package that came with it. iPhoto, iMovie and above all iTunes. I mean, I had been using Winamp before that.
It was really cumbersome to do things like connect to Internet via the Bluetooth on my mobile phone as well as playing odd video formats, but it seemed possible to do anything with the computer if you were willing to dig into it. It was the computer that made me hooked on Mac.
That PowerMac was a worthy successor. The Outrigger case always seemed to me to be a, at the time, modern replacement for the IIci case. Functional, elegant, efficient, and yet easy access to all components. So much nicer than the 7100 case (derived from the IIvi/IIvx) that I never liked (the painted thin metal always made it feel a bit cheap to me) — amazing to believe the 7100 case was released at the same time as the genius 6100. I loved my PowerMac 7600. 
Yes! That was a big chunk of change. Luckily, since I borrowed from our company’s profit sharing plan, I was paying myself back, with interest. The payment came out of my paycheck, IIRC. I think the IIfx that I craved was around $9,000 at the time. I remember paying $425 for an APS 730MB external drive back then, also.
I loved that Outrigger design. I still have one, but am sad to report that since I booted it up once within the past year, it has refused to boot again. And some of the plastic parts have become extremely brittle. The piece you see in the middle shot above, over on the left covering the PCI slots, fell apart from very mild handling. And the little front power button’s internal bits have also snapped.
The 7600 system was pretty much what I had put together for work in 1995 when I was finally able to upgrade: we got a 7500 and a 20" MultipleScan monitor (and a Nikon flatbed scanner with SCSI that cost something like $1200). That monitor had a fatal flaw: someone at Apple foolishly decided that the video cable should be permanently attached. When that cable went bad, not much could be done, except maybe trying to lug it to Tekserve. You’d think that even at that point, putting a port back there would have been a far more sensible choice than hard-wiring the cable.
Aesthetically I thought the look of the “desk lamp” iMac G4 with articulating neck was very nice, especially with the 17" screen. However, its optical tray often crashed into your keyboard on tight workspaces unless it was low profile, and they were difficult to disassemble.
IMHO the winner is the Pismo G3 series, as the thinner, lighter follow up to the Wallstreet with a range of chip upgrades (and some aftermarket ones). Such versatility with the twin removable bays and the first Mac laptop with USB and Firewire while retaining things like Ethernet and a 56K dial-up modem. I remember one of LucasFilm’s VFX team saying their PBG3 rendered frames of Star Wars-The Phantom Menace while on a beach in Hawaii.
It is worth noting the full 180-degree opening of the Powerbook Ti G4 screen, but they tended to weaken and break far more easily than most of today’s models. I still miss having that wide-opening lid. It could be propped near vertical on an easel. Closest thing to a large tablet with keyboard, sans touch screen.
The G4 Cube was nifty, but the “touch” power button was a terrible idea. Random electrical/energy in the area could turn them on or off including nearby electrical storms or simply bumping the table. We had some power on/off instantly when a worker activated their CB radio in the next building. Most people resorted to applying various pieces of paper/tape or anti-static bag between the outer case and the interior sensor.
G4 Cube was sort of a precursor to the modern mini, in a way, with a case that hinted at the “bullet” Mac Pro (slide-off outer cover revealing components on all sides).
I’m also nostalgic for the Macs I wanted but couldn’t afford or get. The 20th Century Mac, the Cube (for sure…) and many, many Mac Pros…
