A personal list of the computers I've owned or used daily — from an IBM XT in 1985 to an Apple Silicon Mac Studio in 2026. These machines shaped how I work, think, and tinker.
I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to document these, but here we are. Each one meant something at the time — and looking back across nearly four decades of personal computing, the arc is remarkable. The IBM XT Model 286 I bought for home in 1987, when having a computer at home was genuinely unusual. The Mac SE/30, which felt like a rocket ship the day I unboxed it. The Sun Ultra 10 — finally a SPARC workstation that made sense on a desk, after the strange detour that was the Sun386i. The NEXTcube running Lotus Improv, which turned out to be the direct ancestor of macOS as we know it today. I still have the NEXTcube and the Ultra 10, both fully loaded, both sitting quietly doing nothing useful. And then the Mac Studio — Apple Silicon at its most refined, the machine I reach for every single day.
In 2026, most of these machines are firmly museum pieces, though a surprisingly active retro-computing community keeps many of them alive. Prices for well-preserved examples of the SE/30, NEXTcube, and even the original Bondi Blue iMac have risen sharply on the secondhand market over the past few years. What follows is a personal record, not a buyer's guide — though I've added notes on what each machine meant at the time and where it sits in history now.
2026 update
Since this article was first written, the computing landscape has shifted considerably. Apple's transition to its own silicon — begun with the M1 in late 2020 — is now fully mature. The M5 generation powers the current Mac lineup, and the performance-per-watt gains over that first-generation Intel era are extraordinary. My Mac Studio (M1 Ultra) remains genuinely fast for most workloads, though the newer variants have pulled ahead in sustained GPU and neural-engine tasks.
The retro-computing hobby has also grown substantially. Communities around 68k Macs, NeXT hardware, and early Sun workstations are more organised than ever, with active forums, modern replacement capacitor kits, and even FPGA-based recreations of classic chips. If you own an SE/30, the first thing you should do in 2026 is recap the logic board — the original surface-mount capacitors leak and cause catastrophic damage if left unattended.
The NEXTcube has also found a new generation of admirers, partly driven by renewed interest in NeXTSTEP's influence on the web (Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT machine) and partly because running a period-correct Lotus Improv session still feels like visiting the future that never quite happened.
IBM PC XT
Released: 1983
CPU: Intel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz
RAM: 128 KB – 640 KB
The machine that turned the IBM PC from an office curiosity into a platform. The XT added a built-in 10 MB hard drive — a genuine luxury in 1983 — and an expansion bus that third-party manufacturers rushed to fill. It established the architecture that dominated personal computing for the next decade and a half. DOS 2.0 shipped alongside it, introducing a hierarchical file system that most users had no idea how to use. Working examples are plentiful on the secondhand market even now; the 8088 is practically indestructible.
IBM PC XT Model 286
Released: 1986
CPU: Intel 80286 @ 6 MHz
RAM: 640 KB – 1 MB
This is the one I actually bought, in 1987, when home computers were still a novelty and spending that kind of money on one felt faintly reckless. The 286 was already being overshadowed by the AT and the incoming 386 by the time I got it, but it ran Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Borland Sidekick without complaint, which was just the job. IBM's decision to keep the XT chassis while slotting in a 286 was pragmatic rather than inspired, but it made the machine affordable. In retrospect, it was the last IBM PC I ever bought.
Apple Mac SE
Released: 1987
CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz
RAM: 1 MB – 4 MB
The SE was the first Mac to include an internal hard drive and an expansion slot, making it the point at which the original compact Mac form factor became genuinely practical. The 9-inch monochrome screen was sharp and the all-in-one design was ahead of its time — Apple wouldn't revisit that idea seriously until the iMac a decade later. The SE's FDHD variant added a high-density floppy drive that could read DOS disks, which was more useful than it sounds in a mixed-platform office.
Apple Mac SE/30
Released: 1989
CPU: Motorola 68030 @ 16 MHz
RAM: 1 MB – 128 MB
Widely regarded as the finest compact Mac ever made, and it's hard to argue. The 68030 at 16 MHz with a 68882 FPU, support for up to 128 MB of RAM, and a PDS expansion slot in the same compact body as the original 128K Mac — it was an extraordinary machine for 1989. It ran A/UX, Apple's BSD Unix, which made it genuinely useful as a workstation. In 2026, SE/30s command serious prices among collectors, and the capacitor-leakage problem means finding a fully working, already-recapped example is worth paying a premium for.
Apple Mac IIcx
Released: 1989
CPU: Motorola 68030 @ 16 MHz
RAM: 1 MB – 128 MB
The IIcx was the compact, affordable entry into the Mac II line — three NuBus slots instead of six, a smaller case, but the same 68030 muscle as its larger siblings. It was the machine that made colour Macs accessible to a wider professional audience. Desktop publishing, early digital imaging, and scientific software all ran well on it. The IIcx also introduced a tool-free case design that Apple's industrial design team was rightly proud of. A quiet workhorse that tends to be overlooked next to the SE/30, but deserves its place in the record.
Apple PowerBook 170
Released: 1991
CPU: Motorola 68030 @ 25 MHz
RAM: 2 MB – 8 MB
The PowerBook 170 was the top of the first PowerBook line, and it arrived fully formed in a way that made every competing laptop look like a rough draft. The trackball was centred below the keyboard, the palm rests were generous, and the active-matrix LCD screen was genuinely readable. Apple's laptop design language was set here and barely needed revision for years. The 170 cost a significant sum at launch — roughly the price of a decent used car — but it was the machine that made mobile professional computing real. Every modern laptop owes it something. The colouful official bag drew envious looks from the drab grey Toshiba and Compaq carrying colleagues at the time!
NeXTcube
Released: 1988
CPU: Motorola 68040 @ 25 MHz
RAM: 8 MB – 64 MB
Optional: NeXTdimension Intel i860 board
The direct ancestor of macOS. NeXTSTEP introduced Display PostScript, the Mach microkernel, Objective-C as the primary development language, and an object-oriented application framework that became Cocoa. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and server on a NeXTcube at CERN. Lotus Improv — a genuinely revolutionary rethinking of the spreadsheet that Microsoft's Excel eventually absorbed in watered-down form — ran only on NeXT. Mine has the NeXTdimension board for full colour. In 2026 it remains one of the most historically significant personal computers ever made, and one of the most satisfying to actually use.
Sun Ultra 10
Released: 1998
CPU: UltraSPARC IIi @ 300 MHz
RAM: 64 MB – 1 GB
After the eccentric Sun386i — an x86 machine running SunOS that never quite decided what it wanted to be — the Ultra 10 was a relief. A proper SPARC workstation at a price that made sense, running Solaris 7 and later Solaris 8 with genuine stability. It had a Creator3D graphics card in mine, which made OpenGL work feel effortless at the time. Sun's decline and Oracle's eventual acquisition means Solaris is now a niche interest, but the Ultra 10 represents the high-water mark of the Unix workstation era before Linux and commodity x86 hardware swept everything else aside. Still boots. Still runs.
Bondi Blue iMac G3
Released: 1998
CPU: PowerPC G3 @ 233 MHz
RAM: 32 MB – 256 MB
The machine that saved Apple — not an exaggeration. The original Bondi Blue iMac arrived eighteen months after Steve Jobs returned and announced, in effect, that Apple was done apologising for being different. Jony Ive's translucent teal design was unlike anything else on a shop floor in 1998, and it sold in enormous numbers to people who had never bought a Mac before. It dropped the floppy drive (controversial at the time, obviously correct in retrospect) and pushed USB as the sole expansion interface. In 2026, working G3 iMacs are popular display pieces; the CRT screens have aged gracefully and the colours remain genuinely striking.
Mac Pro 2013 ("Trash Can")
Released: 2013
CPU: Intel Xeon E5
RAM: 12 GB – 64 GB
A genuinely bold design that turned out to be a dead end. The cylindrical Mac Pro was thermally constrained by its own elegance — the unified thermal core couldn't accommodate the GPU upgrades that professional users needed, and Apple quietly acknowledged as much. It soldiered on with almost no updates until the modular 2019 Mac Pro arrived. By then, the "trash can" nickname had stuck. As an object it remains beautiful; as a professional tool it was a cautionary tale about prioritising form over expandability. Mine was my main machine for longer than I'd like to admit before the Studio replaced it.
Mac Studio (M1 Ultra, 2022)
Released: 2022
Chip: Apple M1 Ultra
RAM: 64 GB – 128 GB unified memory
The Mac Studio arrived in early 2022 — not 2020 as previously noted — and the M1 Ultra configuration remains one of the most capable desktop computers Apple has ever shipped. The unified memory architecture means the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine share a single high-bandwidth pool, which changes how the machine handles large media files, machine-learning inference, and complex renders. It's quiet, small, and fast in a way that still feels slightly implausible. By 2026, M3 and M4 Ultra Mac Studios are available with meaningfully more memory bandwidth and improved Neural Engine throughput, but the M1 Ultra is far from obsolete. It's still my daily machine and I have no pressing reason to change that.
Looking back from 2026
Laid out like this, the progression is striking. From 128 KB of RAM on the XT to 128 GB of unified memory on the Mac Studio — a million-fold increase over roughly thirty-five years. From a 4.77 MHz 8088 to an M1 Ultra with dozens of high-performance cores. The raw numbers are almost meaningless without context, but the experience of sitting down at each of these machines and feeling what was possible at that moment is something I remember clearly.
What the list also shows is that the machines I remember most fondly weren't always the fastest or the most powerful of their era. The NEXTcube was never a commercial success. The SE/30 was already being superseded when I was using it heavily. The PowerBook 170 cost a fortune and had a battery life measured in optimism. But each one represented a genuine idea about what a computer could be — and that, more than the specifications, is what makes them worth remembering.
The retro-computing community in 2026 is doing excellent work keeping these machines alive. If you have an old Mac, a NeXT, or a Sun workstation in storage, it's worth investigating what's available in terms of modern recap kits, SSD adapters, and network cards before assuming the machine is beyond saving. Many of them aren't.
I think my favourite might have been the SE/30. It was so expensive and an Apple Mac was an unusual computer for someone at Sun Microsystems to order. I had to get sign off from the head of the UK organisation. I convinced him it could run Unix and he signed the order begrudgingly!
