Early Intel

The turn of the millennium found Apple riding the design-led momentum of the iMac G3 into a run of increasingly ambitious hardware: the Power Mac G4 Cube's silent, seamless cube; the Titanium PowerBook G4's then-shocking thinness; and the iMac G4's articulated 'lamp' arm, which put a flat panel on a swiveling neck years before anyone else thought to try it.

Mac OS X, first released in 2001, gave this hardware a modern Unix-based foundation to match its industrial design ambitions, replacing the classic Mac OS that had run, largely unchanged in spirit, since 1984. By 2005 Apple was a design-forward company with a genuinely modern operating system — everything was in place except the processor, which would change again within the year.