2003 Power Mac G5

Usually we’d expect a “one more thing” moment to arrive right at the tail end of a Stevenote. Not so the introduction of the Power Mac G5. Jobs deemed it so important, he unveiled it halfway through his keynote at the 2003 WWDC event, then dedicated the rest of his talk to it.

Unfortunately for Jobs and Co., the cat was out of the bag before the event itself, because Apple accidentally leaked the G5 specs on its own website about a week before the show. Oops.

Despite the “premature specification,” as Jobs called it, there was plenty to talk about. It was the world’s fastest personal computer, he said. It contained the world’s first 64-bit desktop processor, which was also the world’s fastest desktop processor, running at 2GHz. Oh, and it had massive branch prediction logic. “I know what it does,” quipped Jobs. “It predicts branches.”

The machine would ship with up to 8GB of RAM. It had “one of the hottest graphics chips around,” the Radeon 9600 Pro in the higher-end models, or nVidia GeForce FX5200 Ultra GPUs in the lower-end models.

Despite all the power — and nine fans to keep things cool — the Power Mac G5 was twice as quiet as the Power Mac G4, running at 35dBA at room temperature.

But the crowning glory of the presentation? That could only be the moment when Jobs unveiled the G5 in person. And this was no ordinary unveiling: The lights dimmed, the spotlight shone, and the G5 rose majestically out of the stage floor.

So far, so amazing. But to top it all: handles. “We’re the only folks that put handles on things,” Jobs said. “Our pro customers love them.” Given everything else in the G5, there was plenty more to love, too. It still holds up as a design classic.