I can't speak to the quality of Apple's color printers, but most of their monochrome printers are pretty good.
The ones I would look closely at if you can are the Personal LaserWriter 300 and 320, and 4/600PS which use the same cartridges and probably engine maintenance parts as some of the smaller and flatter HP LaserJet 4M printers.
The next ones I recommend looking for are the really big LaserWriter Pro 600, 630, and 16/600PS, which use the same cartridges and engine maintenance parts as some of the larger HP LaserJet 4 printers.
Anecdotally, I had a 4/600PS and I liked it a lot, except mine jammed a lot and I didn't really have the wherewithal to fix it or even keep it at the time, so I passed it along or stored it and the place it was stored ended up having trouble, or we had to move, or something.
I have a LaserWriter Select 360 and I like it a lot, but its cartridges are a lot less common. If they're based on a normal engine, I don't happen to know which one it is.
And, I don't know off hand what the newer and older LaserWriters are based on, but I believe at least the older ones are also based on a pretty common engine or set of engines, which should make getting toner/drums/parts from HP/Canon/Xerox easy enough.
The Color StyleWriters varyingly use HP and Canon engines, and so they are probably about as good as anything else from the era.
If you aren't stuck on "from the era" specifically, Brother and Xerox have good printers that support AppleTalk.
Apple's own scanners from the era are, if I remember, considered good, but I haven't used one.
The bigger you go with a printer, the less likely it will be to have ever been paired with something like a performa, but the more likely you'll be to be able to use it with a modern computer, too. I believe the 16/600PS has Ethernet and can accept postscript print jobs over a pretty normal protocol, for example, so you could use it with a modern Mac/Linux/Windows computer. The Personal LaserWriter 320 won't have that particular benefit.
