Top 10 best Apple products of all time

2. iPhone
Iain Thomson: At the launch of Apple's iPhone the assembled journalists were all having the same collective thought: want. The public seems to have had the same reaction.

The iPhone was a revolution in design and has been copied by all the competition. I said in an interview at the launch that the phone would mean high end mobiles with keypads would become a thing of the past, something which is growing more evident.

The iPhone, when it launched, was actually quite poor. It didn't support 3G for a start, and the lack of multitasking is still a niggling flaw. But that didn't matter to the bulk of the buying public because it just looked so good. One Silicon Valley journalist actually used his early model to get dates with interested women, and was highly successful at it.

With the launch of the 3G model businesses started getting interested. Around 70 per cent of the Fortune 100 companies now support the platform internally, and in most cases IT administrators are saying that they are getting told to support the devices by senior management, who are iPhone users, rather than because of any superiority in applications.

Apple has sold over 40 million iPhones, making it the most commonly used Apple computing platform on the planet. Sales are still rising and Apple's move into the Chinese market is going to make those sales go through the roof.

Shaun Nichols: The hype cycle in the tech world refreshes at a pace that makes Moore's Law seem slow. What is a hot new gadget today will often be a woefully out-dated and forgotten relic in a few months.

It's pretty impressive then to think that the iPhone is still one of the most talked-about pieces of technology kit on the market a full three years after Steve Jobs introduced it at the Macworld Expo.

Like most of Apple's great products, the iPhone doesn't excel due to a laundry list of bells and whistles, but rather because of the way it integrates all of those features into the overall device.

Other phones may have more powerful hardware and more features and connections, but all of those add-ons don't always work well with the rest of the system and users can often disregard them. With the iPhone, most of the features work the same way and they all integrate with one another.

This is mostly due to Apple's obsessive control over partner access to its product, but you have to admit that the system works pretty well most of the time.

1. Mac OS X
Shaun Nichols: It's a bit weird to think about what Apple would be like without OS X. It's quite possible that there may not even be an Apple right now.

And we came very close to seeing that reality. Originally Apple had wanted to use BeOS as its operating system of choice, but talks broke down and instead it went with NeXT and Steve Jobs.

At its core, OS X is a Unix system, borrowing from a number of open-source technologies as well. On top of that sits the graphical user interface developed by NeXT and later Apple engineers. This allows the system to be easy to use and extremely stable and powerful. It also allows administrators with Unix experience to get in under the hood and poke around, something which has caused more than a few of those crusty old Mac-haters to become converts.

The 'Classic' Mac OS system that existed prior to OS X was beloved, but unquestionably flawed. The system had been designed to have a sleek, easy to use interface and the nuts and bolts of the system were built around that. This made the OS age horribly, and it was notoriously weak and unstable by the end of its development time.

OS X was designed the other way around. Jobs and his developers took the lessons they learned from the Mac and decided to construct a solid, reliable and powerful foundation for the OS and then build the interface based on that. It was the difference between designing a car for the chassis of a Ferrari versus that of a go-kart.

Iain Thomson: Much as I love BeOS for its funky media handling the move to NeXT was the right one.

OS X is one of the reasons I'm seriously tempted to make my next laptop an Apple system. It's the puppy's packet of an operating system: robust, flexible and as close to open source as you can get with an off-the-shelf product.

After Jobs was kicked out of his own company he went away, brooded and then came up with the NeXT product line. While the hardware behind that was overpriced tat, the operating system was pure gold, and gave Apple a much needed shot in the arm.

OS X also had the gift of timing. While Microsoft was struggling with the pathetic Windows Vista, Apple took the fight directly to its door with OS X. It must have been galling for Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to see Apple beating them at their own game, and OS X is still winning converts.

Could this be the operating system that puts Apple back on the road to beating Windows? Not really, there are too many other obstacles in the way. But it's a bravura performance, of that there's no doubt.