For all the criticism over FireWire, 3G, matte screens and Blu-ray, the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros represent the culmination of two decades of hits and misses, starts and stops, leaps and stumbles for Apple notebooks, all wrapped in packages that never fail to turn heads. From multi-colored handles to upside-down logos, slide-in docks and illuminated keyboards, Apple’s portables have been nothing less than an evolution of blood, sweat, tears (and a few blueberries).

And we’ve sifted through them all to bring you the best and worst of the lot:

Titanium PowerBook
Though Apple had already used its “Pro. Go. Woah.” teaser to ramp interest in the 1998 event to unveil the iMac, it easily could have recycled the slogan three years later when it took the wraps off the Titanium PowerBook G4. A release that’s just as stunning today as it was in 2001, the Titanium PowerBook G4 was unlike any portable the industry had ever seen -- all wrapped around a 15.2-inch mega-wide display, speedy chip and an inch-think body that weighed just five pounds. The cherry on top? Steve finally got the logo right.

IceBook
If it looked juvenile before, the super-sleek Titanium PowerBook G4 made the Blueberry iBook look downright foolish. So when, on May 1, 2001, Steve invited the media masses to a special event, an iBook redressing was widely anticipated -- but few were prepared for what Steve pulled out of his hat. As radical a departure from the fruit-flavored offerings as OS X or the sunflower iMac, the IceBook, as it quickly came to be known, marked a serious shift in Apple’s consumer strategy and ushered in the clean, crisp, white lines that would soon be synonymous with the In Crowd.

Pismo
A fitting sendoff to the PowerBook G3, the Pismo looked a lot like the Lombard it replaced, but closer inspection revealed a host of improvements that left the former model in its dust. With cues from the iBook, Pismo implemented the cost-saving, streamlined unified motherboard architecture, with a 400 or 500MHz processor and 100MHz front-side bus. FireWire? Check. AGP graphics? Check. Airport? Check. Expansion bay? Check. Still cool 10 years later? Check.

eMate 300
Better known as the PDA That Never Stood a Chance, the eMate was a stripped-down, retooled Newton built exclusively for students and teachers. With a near-30-hour battery; 480x320 resolution, backlit, touch-screen display; serial and IrDA ports; full-sized keyboard; and Newton OS 2.1, all housed in a tough, translucent-blue clamshell case with an $800 price tag, the eMate was a revelation that came at precisely the wrong time -- about four months before Steve Jobs regained his position as Supreme Ruler.

PowerBook Duo
Did somebody say subnotebook? Smaller than a sheet of looseleaf paper, and lighter than any MacBook, iBook, PowerBook or MacBook Pro (save the Air, which bests it by about a pound), the PowerBook Duo lasted for seven revisions (210, 230, 250, 270c, 280, 280c, and 2300c) and was just slightly ahead of its time. It wasn’t easy to to create a laptop in 1992 that can barely be replicated in 2008, so Apple was forced to sacrifice some in the Duo: the trackball’s diameter was reduced, the keyboard was trimmed by about 10 percent, and expansion (much like the Air) was dwindled down to a sole serial port and an optional 14.4k Express Modem. Unfortunately, the bezel around the screen was a bit too 1985, but the real charm of the Duo was its docking station, a full-sized sleeve with its own floppy drive, hard drive, expansion bays and L2 cache, and a body sturdy enough to support a full-sized CRT display. Now imagine if you could slide your MacBook into the side of your Cinema Display...

Next, the five worst Laptops to emerge from Cupertino.

Macintosh Portable
More Trapper Keeper than notebook, the Macintosh Portable was perhaps the least lap-friendly laptop ever made. Released in late 1989 with enough firepower to take on the industry’s heaviest hitters, Apple’s first mobile Mac put the "desktop" in “desktop replacement.” For one, it weighed 16 pounds. For another, its active-matrix screen was nearly impossible to use in low light, but the real trouble was its lead-acid battery (not unlike the one under the hood of your Honda). Packing a whopping 10-12 hours of juice, the Macintosh Portable’s battery was the computer’s sole source of power, so once it drained it needed to be properly recharged before it would even consider booting. Did we mention it cost $6,500? (It does look pretty cool ejecting floppy discs in space, though.)

15-inch Aluminum PowerBook
When Steve Jobs took the wraps off its largest and smallest PowerBooks at the San Francisco Mac Expo in 2003, there was one question on everyone’s lips: What about the middle? With illuminated keys, a slick, aluminum body, FireWire 800, built-in Bluetooth and Airport Extreme, the “world’s first 17-inch notebook” had everything a power user could want — but all that screen real estate (not to mention the $3,300 price tag) was just a bit too Papa Bear for most users. Unfortunately the once-proud 15-inch Titanium PowerBook languished on shelves until September awaiting its inevitable aluminum redressing, which was nothing more than the model that should have been released nine months earlier (with a spotty display).

PowerBook 5300
The first of the new-generation PowerPC notebooks that would eventually yield some timeless creations, the PowerBook 5300 was little more than a growing pain. A major step forward from its predecessor, the 5300 featured a sleep-swappable bay for floppy or Zip drives, but not the more-popular CD-ROM. The super-fast PowerPC 603e was crippled by the lack of a Level 2 cache, cases were prone to cracking, and the battery, while fairly robust at around 4 hours, had a nasty habit of bursting into flames. Even a guest spot in “Independence Day” couldn’t save this one.

 
PowerBook 150
The last Apple notebook to include a trackball, the PowerBook 150 seemed like a natural progression over the 145B (seriously, who named these things?). With an extra 8 MHz of processing power, 36MB of RAM and a lower price point (thanks to a passive matrix display), the 150 came out of the gate looking exactly like its predecessor -- but with one slight difference: ADB. In fact, the PowerBook 150 had so few ports, it didn’t even need a rear door, which were all the rage in 1994. The 150 shipped with just a single serial printer port, making it real hard to connect any peripheral devices that weren’t designed to print. Critics of today’s FireWire-less MacBook’s might relate -- but imagine if Apple left off the USB ports, too.

iBook
While the iBook, released in 1999 as a portable version of the wildly popular iMac, served Apple well, the fruit-flavored notebook may possibly be Jonathan Ive’s worst conceptual design ever. With equal parts toilet seat, suitcase and clam, the iBook had a funny sort of charm that did little to reflect the personality of the user (unless, of course, they happened to be running away with the circus). The iBook looked more like a Playskool product than a Cupertino one, especially when appearing on a shelf next to a Wall Street or Lombard PowerBook. Somehow, Steve convinced enough people that they needed a Tangerine or Key Lime laptop, which may go down as his greatest achievement.