90s Mac

The 1990s were the Mac's most sprawling decade, and also its most chaotic. Apple pushed the Macintosh into nearly every price point and form factor imaginable — the budget LC line for schools, the PowerBook for the road, the Quadra for professionals, the Performa for confused retail shoppers — while also making the historic switch from Motorola's 68k chips to the PowerPC architecture in 1994.

That same decade also brought the company closest to collapse, as an overwhelming and overlapping product lineup diluted the brand and confused buyers. The 1997 return of Steve Jobs and the 'Beige' Power Mac G3 that followed set the stage for a dramatic turnaround, one that would fully arrive with a very different-looking machine the following year.