In the beginning, 1984 it was simple, you had the Macintosh 128K. The first Mac model with (at the time) a whopping 128K of RAM, twice that of the Commodore 64! When 1986 rolled around you had the Mac Plus, a full Megabyte of RAM that was expandable to 4. Then came the alphabet soup.

It all started with the initials. There was the SE, system expansion ( referring to it’s expansion slot).

          <--------------  Read the side note about the SE/30

Then the Mac II gave way to the IIx (an extended Mac II), the IIcx ( a compact extended Mac II) and the IIfx (a fast extended Mac II). Lost yet? Then there is the “i”, in IIci - compact with integrated video, and the IIsi - slim with integrated video.

Jumping to the Mac Quadra’s they take their name form the fourness of it’s ‘040’ processor. The Mac LC comes from low-cost color. The Centris? It was the center of the Mac lineup  and had that vague Ancient-Latin sound that Apple was leaning towards at the time.

Now throw in the numbering system! When Apple product numerology was introduced Mac purist wailed. They felt that Apple was beginning to turn Macs into the faceless, personality-free product ID numbers common in the IBM PC world. Apple reassured us that the numbers were only to help consumers understand the power and speed differences in the Mac line up.

At first the system was consistent, there was the PowerBooks; the weakest model (100) had the lowest number, and the fastest model (180 or 180c) had the highest. Same logic worked for the Performa lineup, the 600 was faster than the 400, and so on.

With the Quadras however it all fell apart, Apple couldn’t go much higher than the 950 without starting into four-digit numbers. So they backtracked with the release of the Quadra 800, which is actually faster than the 950 and the 840av of course is faster still!