Twenty -seven years ago Today, Steve Jobs entered the scene of the Flint Center in Cupertino to reveal the first new product since his return to Apple: The Original IMAC.
Today’s apple would be hardly recognizable to the population of 1998, but Apple is still selling an iMac. It is literally the only product that Apple sells today, as it also sold in that era. (MacBooks were Powerbooks and Mac Pros was Power Macs back in 1998.) Of course, today’s iMac is similar to the original G3 iMac. But by keeping the name alive, Apple also nods to the unique spirit of the iMac, a product that helped turn Apple’s fortunes and define computers for the next three decades.
It seems so picturesque and obvious now, but in 1998, iMac, if not revolutionary, was at least rebellious and radical. In an era of beige PCs, it was the color of the water at Australia’s Bondi beach. In an era where the average computer was shaped like a pizza box or a minitower, tied to a CRT screen via a fat cable, iMac was a clean independent device.
Diskett drive? Didn’t have one. Array of Legacy Ports (Serial, Parallel, ADB, SCSI), which had built up over two decades of personal computing? Away! Quite! They were replaced with a single new connection specification: Universal Serial Bus… Jepp, and we still use USB all these years later.
Many of these decisions were clearly made by Steve Jobs, who believed that computers were held back by a devotion to backward compatibility. And all the way back to the original Mac, Jobs was committed to the idea that an all-in-one computer that you could pick up and move around, and looked like a device would be more appealing than a box and a screen and a big mess of wires.
He was right in a few remarkable ways. Of course, most computers sold today, laptops, are not desktops, but they are basically all-in-them that you can pick up and move around-just radically. But the iMac has continued to sell well, even in this era with laptops and tablets and smartphones. A couple of years ago, an iMac product manager told me how big the iMac business still lives in all sorts of rooms, from hotel checking to offices to schools to libraries where it makes more sense to have a desktop computer than a laptop. (If that wasn’t true, Apple would have no motivation to keep the iMac going, so much less give it the spiffy redesign it received as part of its move to Apple Silicon.)
IMac has also been from the very beginning Inspired of laptops. Back in the 1990s, laptops were always seen as smaller products. The high cost of miniaturization of components and the building of flat screen screens meant that laptops were animal. And the low effect, portable processors used in these laptops were underpowered compared to desktops. So you could get a laptop – and many of us did! – But they were quite a little more expensive and noticeably slower than desktops.
Today’s iMac still carries the same spirit as the one that started it all.
Foundry
I wouldn’t say that Steve Jobs saw the future, but he did. To keep the iMac as small as possible (except for the huge CRT on the first model) it was built with a lot of parts traditionally only found in laptops. Over the years, this process continued. Desktop computers generally did not come with flat screens, but iMac did. And with the arrival of the G5 iMac, which integrated into a screen like a single device, the iMac really reached its final shape: a screen driven by small, laptop inspired components.
Today, the difference between desktops and laptops is pretty much about shape, not about the components inside. My MacBook Pro is running the same chip that is in a Mac study. IMac’s chip is also in the MacBook Air. Desktops have become laptops, and vice versa. IMac was a big part of this transition.
Finally, I would be abandoned if I didn’t touch the IMAC’s colorful energy. The original Aquamarine iMac was shocking in the era with beige boxes and kicked a whole craze after transparent plastic in literally everything – from printers to George Foreman Grills. The next wave of the G3 iMacs introduced more colors so you could choose the one that spoke to you, whether red or green or blue.
Apple took what it learned there, and starting with the iPod Mini, embraced a rainbow with color settings. You can still see it on iPhone (though some years it seems not to be what it once was) and especially In today’s iMacsThere are seven different shades.
The truth is that the most influential products just don’t seem so impressive in afterwards because they literally redefined reality. The IMAC path seems obvious in the rearview mirror. But it had a huge impact on today’s Mac, Today’s Apple, and really the whole technology world today. The IMAC spirit lives it – like the iMac itself.