From 2000-2001 and on till now: Aqua. Mac OS X, the best desktop OS up until now.
Mac OS X prior to Tiger was really fairly lacking. Panther wasn't bad, but Jaguar was pretty buggy/borderline and 10.0 was sort of a joke. They were all pretty slow, too. They also dropped a lot of features from Mac OS 9.
A GUI so vastly superior to whatsoever else that one had to be blind or hopelessly tasteless to buy another Windows OS -operated thing.
*facepalm*
Mac sales didn't really take off until the switch to Intel.
From 1997-'98 and on (replaced by MacBook Pro): PowerBooks (G3, later - G4). Logic board (and other components set up to self-destroy once the guarantee was over, and extremely slow even by the standards of the time, but still beautiful design and an excellent OS).
What on Earth are you talking about?
#1 they were
extremely fast-- they were basically just laptop versions of the desktop machines... two exceptions being the somewhat odd 250 MHz and 292 MHz variants running on an 83 MHz bus instead of a 66 MHz bus (same XPC106 Grackle memory/bus chip, just clocked higher).
And none of the components "set up to self-destroy..."? They still have many of these on eBay fully functional. Mac OS 8.0 sucked, by the way. Buggy as hell, and other than a facelift, wasn't much of a step in the right direction from 7.6.1. 8.1 was much better and introduced the HFS+ filing system.
From 1998 on: iMacs. Various iterations through the years, but all the pinnacle of design of their respective production era.
How so... and by the way, the iMac used the same logic board as the PowerBook G3s >_>
From 1999 and on (replaced by Mac Pros later): the Power Mac.
2002 - 2005: eMacs.
How was the eMac an innovation? They basically just took the iMac G4 and put a CRT in it. It was education-only.
1999 and on: iBooks. Apple Cinema Displays.
2003 - 2006: iSight
Again, how is this innovation? The 22" $4,000 ACD was nice, I guess, but they didn't make it themselves. iBooks? Mkay.... iSight was just a webcam..
2001 and on: iPod. I do lament the demise of the MiniDisk, but fact is iPod was still rather revolutionary, or at least better than its direct competition.
The iPod wasn't the first HDD-based MP3 player. I'll agree though it revolutionized the way we listen to music.
Speakers. Mkay.
Definitely cool, made a nice prop in Dark Angel, but was a huge flop. All the power of a Power Mac, some of the expandability, and a higher price tag.
2006-2007: iPod HiFi (alas, discontinued a year after its inception).
Apple's name for WiFi. How is this.... you know what, never mind.
Finally, 2007: iPhone (at the time quite revolutionary, but now outdated. Ever overpriced. Lacking in hardware and software features).
2007 was not ten years ago.
from then on, I see little innovation. Yes, Intel Processors (2006 and on) - a considerable jump forward in my book (PPCs were crawlers).
PowerPCs were screamers for over a decade, they just didn't keep pace (IBM's fault, not Apple's, obviously).
You can actually pretty much thank the PowerPC G4 for making SIMD go mainstream.
Intel didn't catch up in speed until the Core architecture was introduced, especially the Core 2. The Pentium 4 was a bit of a joke towards the end.