The beige fades

Beige gave way to black. Intel's hot, fast NetBurst-era Pentium 4 ran into a thermal wall and gave AMD an opening; Athlon 64 brought 64-bit computing to the mass market and forced Intel's hand. By 2006 the Core 2 Duo restored Intel's lead by abandoning NetBurst entirely. Laptops outsold desktops in the US in 2008. Then in 2007 a phone with a capacitive touchscreen quietly redefined what 'personal computing' meant.

• 
  2000

  Intel Pentium 4

  Intel · Pentium 4 @ 1.4 – 3.8 GHz (NetBurst microarchitecture)

  Intel bet on a long, narrow pipeline that could be clocked very high.

• 
  2002

  Apple iMac G4

  Apple · PowerPC G4 @ 700 MHz – 1.25 GHz

  A hemispherical white base with the LCD floating on a chrome arm.

• 
  2003

  AMD Athlon 64

  AMD · Athlon 64 / FX, Socket 754 / 939, 1.8 – 2.6 GHz

  AMD beat Intel to consumer 64-bit and forced Intel to license its x86-64 instruction set (rebranded EM64T, later Intel 64).

• 
  2006

  Intel Core 2 Duo

  Intel · Core 2 Duo, LGA 775, 1.86 – 3.33 GHz

  Intel scrapped NetBurst and built Core out of the efficient laptop Pentium M lineage.