Top 10 best and worst Macs of all time

1. 20th Anniversary Mac
Shaun Nichols: In 1997, Apple's executive team decided to celebrate the company's 20th birthday by producing an ultra high-end Mac that featured a cutting-edge design and a mind-blowing $9,000 price tag.

They probably should have spent their time figuring out a way to save the company instead.

Drastically overpriced for its specs, the 20th Anniversary Mac was an audacious flaunting of excess rarely seen outside Dubai these days. Not surprisingly, the line absolutely flopped and was dead within a year, though not before the price had dropped to less than a quarter of the original.

It is said that both Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs received a 20th Anniversary Mac on the model's release. Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that within a year Jobs returned to Apple and fired much of the management team.

Iain Thomson: You could almost see the thought processes in Gil Amelio's mind when he unveiled this model: 'The suckers are going to buy it.'

Thankfully even the most rabid Apple fanboy baulked at this hugely overpriced system. Apple deliberately produced only 12,000 and kept 200 of those back for spares. It was an ill-conceived idea from start to finish.

Most of all this system really angered those Apple enthusiasts who were fool enough to buy the first models. As Apple slashed the price again and again to try and shift stock they complained and, given that the buyers were the cream of Apple's market, they were bought off with gifts, adding further to the expense of the system.

If I saw one of these systems in the corner of the room and the user wasn't actually working at Apple I'd think they were gullible morons with more money than sense.

Honourable mention: Lisa
Iain Thomson: Technically the Lisa wasn't a Mac but, as it did have a GUI and a mouse, I've nominated it anyway.

Lisa was a monument to Steve Jobs's desire for quality. It was far ahead of any other system in its time, with good support for memory, a decent graphics package, the ability to multitask and a compact design that was functional for an office.

But it was also a monument to Jobs's vanity: if he built it customers would put aside petty economics and buy it. It was crushingly expensive, so much so that very few were sold.

It was also, to be frank, a rip-off of the Xerox Alto that Jobs and his team saw at Xerox PARC.

Shaun Nichols: It's a little hard to rip on the Lisa, as it's considered to be such a landmark product that a unit is on display at the Smithsonian.

Still, the Lisa is a stark reminder that even Steve Jobs can be too ambitious at times. No matter how good a product is, if you can't make it affordable to your target audience, it simply won't sell.

$10,000 for a home computer is far too much, especially in 1983. The Lisa should have been shelved and remodelled into a system that people could actually afford. Fortunately, that's exactly what the company did a year later.