I loved my G3 iMac. I was in elementary school around the time it came out and my father bought one for each of my sisters who went away to college and one for us at home. It was a fixture in our lives. From a user's perspective, the iMac G3 was the first computer that crossed the boundary from utility box to lifestyle machine.
The built in speakers were everything. I used to download music via Napster and play that music with my sisters over the land line. Computer speakers may have existed prior to the iMac but never were they highlighted as a core element of the computer's design.
I used to spend silly amounts of time in computer stores playing around with computers. I remember the time that the iMac G3 and G3 Tower started to hit the shelves and demo areas. It was a multi-sensory explosion. It's really, really hard to describe the impact that these computers had at the time.
Maybe the multi-sensory thing was the reason why the iMac experience is so deeply ingrained in my memory. It managed to touched on all five senses:
- Sight - it had bold, colorful design
- Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge
- Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac?
- Hearing - had great stereo speakers
- Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day!
I'll spare folks from more of this treacle because I don't want to completely re-write history. The computer wasn't perfect - it was terribly slow and tended to crash whenever my father would yell at me to stop using it.
The iMac G3 had plenty of hard edges. You couldn't see them because they were all on the bottom of the carrying handle, aka the side that you actually hold it from.
Apple fans do love to think Apple is first at everything.
My family had a multimedia PC, with prominent integrated speakers, released in 1994. Based on the bundled software, it was promoted as a business + education + leisure computer.
At least in my circles, PCs with speakers and a mixture of educational (like MS Encarta) and gaming software were common from 1996 or so.
> Apple fans do love to think Apple is first at everything.
This is what Apple fanboy haters always say, but is really the fact Apple say "I'm the first at everything I do"?
;)
--
I think if ever, Apple try to say "I'm the first that do this good", with some arrogance for sure. Is terrible that this arrogance is based on facts.
And in this case, I know that kind of compaq (and have at the time a much better clon), and G3 where a league above and beyond, not as much when iPhone get into the scene (where Apple could actually claim a true "First" as "the first real modern smartphone"), but certainly to be a class on its own.
The iMac wasn’t even the first all in one Mac with multimedia capability. That would’ve been the Performa 5200CD, my first computer, which came out in 1995.
That, of course, is an evolution from the Mac Colour Classic which came out in early 1993 and had a built in mono speaker, but no CD-ROM drive. This being an evolution from the B&W compact Macs dating back to the original from 1984.
The impact of the iMac is indisputably greater than all previous attempts at multimedia PCs. The iMac, and then iTunes, was instrumental to the digital music revolution.
Yup. It came out as Macster and it lived a much shorter life than it did on Windows.
I don’t remember what I did for a while after Napster shut down. I remember doing a ton of file sharing through Zip drives on school computers. It used to be so fun to exchange Zip disks containing our Napster collection and play them on school computers.
It's not that computers prior didn't have speakers, it's that they didn't seem like a core part of the computer — always some clunky add-on that sat there occupying desk space or unattractively needing to be hooked on to the side of a monitor.
Apple had been doing built-in speakers for quite some time, especially in their Performas, but those weren't really seen in homes.
But with the iMac, not only were there speakers built-in but they had great sound, were beautiful (as far as aesthetics go in the 90s), and didn't feel like an afterthought. No used-up desk space, no ugly earmuffs on the screen, just booming sound coming from the front of this gorgeous, lickable, candy-coloured wonder.
We can talk about who did what first in the manner of a check list but that's sorely missing the point. A product isn't just what it is but how it feels — for every sense.
There's a reason why Apple uses terms like 'magic' and 'delight'. Whilst people deride it as marketing nonsense, every other company fires up their photocopiers, it's big enough of a deal.
That was a fun feature, and dovetailed nicely with a Performa 6400 being both my family's first computer and first CD player. The sound produced by the speakers in the Apple Multiple Scan 15 paired with the Performa's subwoofer was pretty good as far as 90s consumer electronics go.
i had a waay different view on mac when i was younger and i could really not understand why anyone would like a mac at that age 8-15. It missed games and for me a computer that could not run games was just a typewriter.
> Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day!
Actually that was the main reason why I stayed on OS X 10.9 for quite a while. I liked the dang glossy buttons and progress bars! Had to update when I later needed then-current Xcode for my job. I don't regret though — by doing this I essentially skipped the buggy mess that 10.10 and 10.11 were. I had stable WiFi and nice UI while everyone around me was complaining.
Also the late 90's were such a different time aesthetically. You'd probably be lounging in your room on a blow up chair that strangely matched your iMac G3, writing in your paper journal, before you set up your LiveJournal in the evening and hung out on ICQ avoiding your physics homework. Oh to date oneself.
There were exceptions though. I unironically think the transparent graphite iMac and the transparent Apple Studio Display CRT still look good today in 2020.
I miss the y2k aesthetic, it was interesting and hopeful and weird. Right now all of our future leaning things feel more like despair than hope (cyberpunk as a genre is full of things to be avoided not things to hope for).
Yup, the future is looking pretty sinister these days. It’s all about tech being used to surveil and control people and parasitic companies commodifying the data they produce.
The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.
It's not at all surprising to see i2net and Tor growing, and people even putting Gopher servers and proxies back online.
Then again, I'm all about people putting information out there because they have something to share, not because their primary focus is "how can I monetize this?"
I can spend less on a VPS for a month than I can at a morning of Starbucks. I can do a whole lot more (and share a lot more) with the VPS. No expectation of making money from it either.
I still have mine. Well, it’s stuck in the office of a company I am no longer on good terms with. This made me start thinking about ways I could extract it!
LiveJournal wasn't actually launched until the spring of 1999, by which time ICQ was fading fast as the instant messenger of choice. Adoption of AIM and MSN Messenger was widespread, and many people used multi-protocol clients. (It was actually a golden age of instant messaging free of platforms and chat rooms.)
But yes, absolutely, all the chairs were inflatable. None of them survive. Actually that's how the standing desk was discovered.
There is hope! Matrix and its bridge ecosystem are growing and improving. Nova chat (no affiliation) are building their charged service on top of it. IIRC they also contribute to/sponsor the development of them.
The vast majority of the bridge work and maintenance is done single-handedly by tulir. It'd be awesome to see more capable individuals contributing :)
My bet is that having the French and German governments as paying clients will be a game-changer for Matrix. We've moved over to it internally, and I'm federating onto a couple of social channels; using Slack feels like chewing glass now, and if I could interact with my remaining Slack obligations from Element, I would.
Slack can be as hostile as they want, I welcome it in fact, because I want them to be unprofitable, hemorrhaging users, and eventually shut down. Best of all, there's only so much they can do in that department, while keeping all the bot integrations which are their only remaining (and fast eroding) edge.
Multiprotocol clients are a dead end. For a developers, it's a never-ending catch-up game against hostile adversary (original service is never happy with being used via third-party clients)
This is why I like the idea of plan 9 and file servers which provide a standard system wide interface to a thing such as a chat protocol. There is/was (cat and mouse) a discord file server which allows you to use any text handling interface such as a shell window or text editor as a chat client. There is also an IRC file server which does the same and acts as a bouncer giving you a persistent connection. So you can have a single acme window open writing code, chatting on irc and discord while checking email and composing an email. It's all text so treat is as such. Wild stuff.
I think most people would have better luck getting their friends on board with Matrix. Personally, I like XMPP more, but so far I've not found a client that gets as close to the discord experience as nearly all Matrix clients get.
I went back to IRC. Though there are channels which bridge IRC with matrix and/or discord (gross). That alows cantankerous users such as myself to interact with careless lusers ;-)
And eventually some of those lusers hop over, either out of necessity or because huge, featureful clients like Discord become distasteful to them. Of course, the real killer for me is voice/video and not text chat, and that I need something a bit more user friendly than Mumble for most of the people I talk to.
This series of articles is a great peek into Mac history. My personal favorite is the iMac G4, another short lived but truly beautiful form factor. Sadly the it didn't scale up to larger display sizes because it was truly an amazing looking machine.
It didn't have the historical significance the original iMac did, but the look is timeless and just fantastic. I would still love to have one on my desk. If only that damned display were bigger than 15". I think it made it to 17", but still too small to be practical for dev work when 21-27 inch LCDs are now commonplace.
The eMac was also another good one along the same lines as the original iMac. At that point in time, the polycarbonate unibody was getting phased out and LCD displays were already getting cheaper to mass produce. It’s probably one of the last cathode ray tube Macs in existence.
I have an 2nd gen eMac sitting next to me. Just installed 10.5.8 yesterday. It was my main machine in the early 2000s.
Firewire connectivity for external hdds was magical. The screen is still nice. However the fan noise is and was always terrible. With some mods it became bearable.
Yup, I had an eMac I got my hands on. It was a truly great machine and that was probably one of the best CRTs ever made. It was Apple’s last CRT product as well.
True for the regular iMac, but the iMac Pro supports aftermarket VESA mount installation. If opting for such a setup, I recommend buying a higher quality third party mount kit, because the screws in the Apple kit are soft and break easily. The one I use is from HumanCentric (no affiliation).
What I miss the most is System 7-9. The architecture was of course outdated and needed to be scrapped (no protected memory, cooperative concurrency, etc). But what I miss is that the OS directory was meant to be accessible and modified by end users. To install a driver, all you had to do was to drag and drop the driver extension onto the extension folder and reboot, and the opposite to uninstall it. No complex command lines, things left behind that still affect the OS. You could do the same with application settings, fonts, etc.
This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).
Classic MacOS certainly had its flaws, but there has likely never been a more efficient mass-market general-purpose OS. In many ways, a ~400MHz G3 processor running classic MacOS feels faster and more responsive than a modern high-end workstation.
The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.
I agree. The metaphor for manipulating files, drivers etc has been the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor (maybe with the exception of BeOS but they just copied and made kinda better version of MacOS classic.
I recently bought a Powermac G4/553 DA model and it's really responsive with Classic. One of the last Classic-compatible models. But it feels really simple compared to any modern OS.
And something I've forgotten in 20 years since the last usage of Classic: There's no real multi-tasking. Uncompressing zip or sit packages basically blocks the whole OS until the work is done.
Oh and other things taken for granted nowadays I've forgotten: one can use _the same computer for other things when scanning photos_. Then even the fastest computer was blocked until the scanning was completed :D
I have a PowerMac G4 1.25 DP that boots Mac OS 9.2.2 natively from an SSD (using a SATA to PATA converter board.)
It absolutely screams (Photoshop 5.5 cold launches in about 1.5 seconds), and I'm not sure how much of this is pure nostalgia, but the look and feel of classic Platinum Mac OS is friendly in a way that's really hard to describe.
Of course this machine is only useful for opening all my old documents from the '90s, but I plan on keeping it in a working state for many years to come, if for no other reason than to let the nerds of the future get a taste of what computing was like before the internet destroyed everything.
> I agree. The metaphor for manipulating files, drivers etc has been the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor
And yet it has now been abandoned in favor of UNIX style "scatter and hide everything, but include an overengineered piece of software to manage it in very limited ways for the user".
I personally think that this is because developers once largely thought of their products as existing to enable users, whereas contemporary developers think of their products as herding or farming users.
> The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.
I submit that this observation also applies to Windows 9x.
Over-automation of the OS is what lead to this big mess we see. Truly simple interfaces and methods are bulldozed and replaced by massive Rube Goldberg contraptions which are supposed to make it "easy" for joe sixpack with a few clicks or taps. The reality is even johnny electron, genius programmer, now has hard time navigating the hellish maze of interconnected binaries full of black-box state when it inevitably collapses under its own weight.
If only it were possible to create a new OS. But sadly, any competitor to Linux would face an uphill battle from people asking the honest question "why not use Linux?"
I actually think it would be possible to use Linux as a core and build a reasonable userland on top of it, just like MacOS did with Darwin. But it would be a boatload of work.
Yeah, like those. But my dream is an OS that is usable for non-hackers while preserving the Linux ethos of leaving the user with ownership of their machine. That does not currently exist AFAIK.
I don't see that ever happening, because too many just keep rebooting UNIX instead, as seen by all GNU/Linux based phone attempts.
And the companies that have the power to drive it into newer territories, like Google, don't care about providing yet another UNIX clone, just reducing the kernel development costs.
Had Inferno been a success, I bet we would also see blog posts on how to dump Limbo, replace ACME with vim, and have the GNU userland on it.
I remember the times of rebooting with extensions disabled because something got corrupted. Can't remember the key combo to hold down during boot to do this. I just remember iteratively dragging half of the extensions out of the folder to find the culprit. I also remember my 4 year old daughter counting the extensions displayed along the bottom to know how much longer it was going to be before she could play her games.
I seem to remember that when programming this OS; your app was responsible for almost everything; including things like animating the close button when you detected a user clicked on it; and also the slightest mistake you made would crash the entire computer. So the simplicity was only surface deep.
I realize I wasn't the target market for these iMacs, but I had one, and I -hated it-.
I worked at a retail store and at the time, we got 25 iMacs in. Almost every single one of them came back. People just didn't know what to do with them.
I got one on discount, $699 I believe. Twice as much as the Celeron 300 eMachines that we had at the time.
It wasn't very fast. It didn't have any expandability. The screen was terrible. 14/15" and it had a horrible dot pitch. You could run 800x600 but it would give you a headache.
I returned it, and got the next hardware revision. It wasn't much better. It did, however, have a 6MB ATI video card in it so I could play some Quake.
The screen was so limiting when it came to real work. The keyboard was passable but the mouse was awful.
Later on, I stuck a pair of 128GB chips in it, and the biggest IDE HD I could find at the time (Maxtor 80GB?). It helped a little bit. But once I installed OS X, it was crippled. My friends PowerBook G3 Pismo was quite a bit faster but still too slow. It was a weird generation of Apple product where you got left behind almost as soon as it came out.
About 10 years later, in 2009, I got another iMac (the newest model at the time), and completely fell in love with it.
I hear you about those things being outdated quickly. I bought a Wallstreet Powerbook G3 back in '99 or so because it was a cool RISC laptop AND it was promised to run this amazing upcoming UNIX-based Mac OS X. When OS X came out, of course it ran...but it was an absolute dog on these machines. IIRC Apple never bothered to write optimized OS X video card drivers for these "old" machines, they just charged forward with the new stuff. The experience was definitely enough for me to swear off buying new Apple products for at least a decade (although OS X did eventually win me back).
My understanding is that these old systems were slow because the window system was a compositing window system, and old hardware doesn’t keep up well with it. Using a compositing window manager has a lot of advantages, though, which is why most modern window managers work that way.
Windows Vista also introduced a compositing window manager IIRC, and it was also horribly slow on old systems.
The Wallstreet was weird for another reason: it was an Old World ROM. You (typically) had to boot at least partially into Classic before chaining into OS X or Linux. I seem to recall using XPostFacto to get 10.3 installed on it, which might cause been a bit better than the official max of 10.2?
Yeah they were slow and had limitations but on the other hand G3 iMacs were the cheapest DV-video-editing setups for schools and other lowend usage. Editing with them felt really good compared to some P3/K6 PCs I and my friend had. And of course the editing experience was a lot more easier with iMovie than with some ~~pirated~~loaned Premiere.
The G3 era was still when Mac hardware was extremely expensive for what you got. The premium has come down a lot over the past couple decades (not counting a certain set of wheels, of course).
I bought my first laptop in 2000. They had a titanium powerbook g4 close by. It was an order of magnitude more expensive. (I think about 8500 DM / 4300 Eur vs 1100 DM / 600 Eur). My laptop was garbage, of course, but the other one was a few months of my salary at that time.
I bought a Powermac 12" a few years later, but the price was much more reasonable then. Loved that machine.
The og iMac most certainly helped turn Apple around, but I have mixed emotions using it to develop on ('cause I was an intern and that's what we had). Most of my bad memories come from that damn CRT screen. We are so much better off not using those anymore. Also, it was just not fast enough for real work, and that damn puck mouse. At home (erm, dorm room), I had the latest, greatest G4 tower! which cost far too much for any 18 year old to need to own, but that thing ripped compared to whatever dull Pentium 233 I had previously had.
...except Apple couldn't ship with the original clock speed because G4 Macs were their own g/d drama.
That Macbook G3 - the black one with the removable bays you could put in a battery (or two!) and hot-swap a CD drive in? One of the first ones they touted as being really thin (and probably at least 2x as thick as the current rev?) chef's kiss. That was the first computer that I thought was damn sexy, followed by the Ti Powerbook G4 when that came out.
I can't wait to get my hands on an M1 to feel 1/100th of the excitement I did 20 odd years ago, but it'll feel much more utilitarian, which I'm quite fine with. Better things I guess to do now than pine over laptops. The keyboard better be up to snuff. Even with my humongous hands, I can hum along on those 2015 Macbook chiclet keys.
Apple mice have always sucked. The Magic Mouse is usable but before that you had their bizarre one button “unibrow mouse” dogma. It’s a case where they stuck to the guns and were wrong. Mice are useful with more buttons.
Their trackpads on the other hand are fantastic. I use a Magic Trackpad a my desk and have become totally accustomed to those instead of mice.
This is basically true, but in the annals of Apple mice which suck, the hockey puck iMac mouse stands alone.
It remains a popular study in design circles for how to be hostile to your users, because a perfectly round mouse doesn't fit a human hand, and it's pointlessly difficult to orient the blasted thing.
“i love how apple released a computer that came in four hundred neon colors, hit it big, and then made the exact same gray laptop for 15 years straight”
Confession: the iMac G3 remains one of my favorite computer designs from Apple (with a slight preference toward the later slot-loading models, which smoothed out some rough edges in the original design).
Yes, they’re all cheap plastic and it’s not even close to a “modern” aesthetic these days, but there’s something visually appealing and kind of quirky about the candy-colored translucent plastic and smooth curves of the G3 design that the sterile aluminum rectangles Apple currently produces lack.
In some of those photos you can see the ethernet port. What I remember of the time period is that most consumer machines didn't have an ethernet port. I bought quite a few PCI and ISA ethernet cards back in the day for this reason.
It's easy to forget now that this feature was a little radical for a consumer machine. Modem sure, but ethernet? Consumer broadband was still on its way.
> Is the ethernet port present because this machine has no capacity for expansion cards?
It was relatively common for Macs to have ethernet before that point, whether or not they had expansion slots. I remember the PowerMac 6100 from 1994 had ethernet, although it required a dongle since 10baseT hadn’t taken over the world yet. I think prior to the iMac, there were a couple models that you could buy without ethernet, on the budget end.
What I remember from this era was that networking was much easier to deal with on a Mac, until Windows XP (and 2000) addressed some of the issues.
According to Wikipedia[1], the original clamshell colorful iBook with the molded handle came out with WiFi in 1999.
As a Linux user/sysadmin, I bought my first Mac in 2002, when I quit my job to go back to college, needed a laptop, and didn't want to deal with Linux on a laptop. I reasoned I "might as well" get something with Windows on it, since being able to easily play DVDs and use Office would come in handy.
I had an "aha" moment when I realized "wait a second, if all I want is Office and a DVD player, I guess I could get a Mac?" OS X had been released about a year before, which of course meant the Mac appealed to me more than Windows for the first time.
It's not an exaggeration to say I knew at that time, at age 21, that Apple was about to blow up, because when I brought my new G3 iBook Mac in to work at my tech job, EVERYBODY wanted to see it and play with it, especially the greybeards.
I desperately wanted to buy Apple stock then, but I held off, since it would be on borrowed money. I don't regret it, because it was the right decision, but it sure would have paid off :)
Oh anyway, back to the story. My iBook came with wifi, and I paid a handsome $300 for the Airport Extreme base station (the "snow" 2nd gen model, not the graphite 1st gen).
Interestingly, both the AEBS and the iBook used the same PCMCIA wifi card inside, so many years later, when the iBook's card got flaky, I just swapped in the one from the AEBS I wasn't using anymore, and it worked great.
Not many people in the dorms in 2002 had WiFi-- in fact, almost nobody I can remember did. my dorm room with wireless access point faced an outdoor gathering/picnic area, so during a fire alarm one time, I took my laptop with me and was surfing the internet while everyone else figured out what to do with themselves.
For me, Apple wasn't interesting until Mac OS X on the PowerPC G4 arrived on the scene in the early 2000s.
However, there definitely is a lot of validity to the statement that the iMac G3 saved Apple in the late 1990s. When asked about Apple Computer at the time, Michael Dell (founder of Dell) said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."
Alongside the big cuts to their product lineup, the sales of the iMac G3 (which was being designed before Steve Jobs returned to Apple) was what kept them afloat until they could come out with the iPod and Mac OS X.
I do remember helping a friend buy an iMac G3 back then. It was painfully slow for certain things, and still ran ancient MacOS, but it was good enough computer for what they needed (Internet, word processing, listening to music).
Agreed. It was the combination of the new direction for the machines, and OS X. I just made a post about my first Mac, but TL;DR, OS X came out in 2001 and I didn't buy my first machine 'till late 2002, and even then, having a Mac was very unusual and, I thought, would be looked down on by tech people -- nobody had one, and I didn't THINK anyone was interested in them. Turned out, the interest in my new machine was a lot higher than I had expected. But, again, this is 5 years after the lollipop iMacs.
Off topic but imagine if they took a M series chip and relaunched the Cube. A G4 power Mac cube but with a M2 or M3. That or the Pixar lamp looking iMac. PC design back in the day at Apple was much more novel and whimsical. I want them to bring that back. And my wallet does, too.
I'll buy the next desktop machine. My 5k 27" iMac (2015) is getting a bit long in the tooth, and I have a 2nd 27" 4k display next to it for more real estate. The M1 Air is a revelation. The current Mac Pro is just WAY too expensive.
Whatever Apple releases as the "awesome" desktop machine, whether "M2" Mini Pro, a true Mac Pro that's not $5000, it'll be on my desk with an ultrawide.
And yeah, I never had a sunflower iMac, but THAT was cool.
I loved the aesthetic of the Cube, but I feel like Apple has basically created Cube replacements. The Mac Mini is basically a G4 Cube, just smaller. If you're looking for the same dimensions as a Cube, the trashcan Mac Pro had nearly identical dimensions as a Cube, but as a cylinder.
I think it's likely that we'll see something similar to a Cube or trashcan Mac Pro in the future with M series chips. Apple was able to pack 130W Xeon chips into the trashcan Mac Pro. Seems reasonable to think that a Pro-class M series chip could fit within that power/thermal range. The new Mac Pros are 205W which probably necessitated moving away from the trashcan size. Given that the highest-end Mac Pro is around 2.5x faster than a Mac Mini while the Mac Mini is only around 10 watts, it seems like there's a lot of room for Apple to create a Mac Pro without dialing up the heat too much.
I guess I'm wondering: did you like the cube, but not the trashcan?
I very vividly remember the trip to Microcenter to buy that iMac in 1998 with my dad - we set it up on the floor. There were two games included - MDK and Nanosaur
I would inherit that computer a few years later and spent I spent lot of time on it, mostly playing games and making pixel art.
Ha! I want to say one was somewhere on that Mountain View chunk of the 101 - a mall complex with AMC theaters, can't find it on the map anymore.
Games were a touchy subject - they were hard to come by, MDK, Nanosaur and Warcraft and later Baldur's Gate were my top choices growing up. Along with a few Zip disks with a bunch of older MacOS9 and MacOS8 games!
> In [the place of SCSI, ADB, and serial] was a new connection standard that had been introduced on the PC side, but not yet embraced: the Universal Serial Bus, or USB. To be fair, while Apple killed off three ports that had defined the Mac for more than a decade, it replaced them with a standard that’s still kicking more than two decades later. (Marvel for a moment about the fact that I can take an original iMac keyboard and plug it into an M1 Mac Mini and… it’ll just work!)
Typing this from an M1 MacBook Air, I had to laugh and do a double take that they had to specify an M1 Mac Mini, since it's the only one with a USB type-A port :) But yeah, the longevity of USB-A is amazing.
I wonder if the Nintendo releases of a variety of gameboy consoles in transparent/colored plastics prior to the iMac was any influence at all. Certainly they gained popularity with the release of the transparent purple gameboy colors.
Other aspects of Nintendo’s design ended up in Apple’s products. Supposedly, the design of the Game Boy link cable was the inspiration for the FireWire cable.
There were a few earlier translucent Apple devices though, like the eMate 300. My guess is that the suppliers for plastics in the 1980s and 1990s added better translucent plastics to their catalog, and that’s where people got ideas. Other manufacturers did it even earlier than Nintendo and Apple, like the transparent case landline telephones from the 1980s.
The iMac looks so beautiful and modern even today. Whenever I see one I want to buy it. If I had the time it would make an amazing case for an electronics project too.
I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When the iMac came out, my opinion was the same as yours -- absolutely beautiful design. Unfortunately, everyone copied the look (often quite badly), and now the original iMac looks tacky and dated to me.
It’s a nice design but the original iMac broke new ground. Personally I didn’t like it at the time, it drew too much attention to its plasticiness for my taste.
Whereas something like a Silicon Graphics workstation looked out of this world cool.
The first iMac that got me excited was the Sunflower.
That was the foot in the door in our house. My wife saw the ad where the Mac stuck out its "tongue" at the window shopper and said "I want that". She used that for years until switching to a Macbook. It was a nice little computer.
Less common but still a personal favorite is the eMac a family friend sold us for $100 because they didn't want it anymore. I thought it would be fun to play around with, and I was right. It ended up being so much fun that I stopped using my FreeBSD desktop and switched to Macs.
The original iMac was nice indeed (bought an iMac DV for my gf back then). But it was nothing compared to the original 9 inch b/w Mac/Mac SE relative to other computers at the time. Also, I liked the no-fan "toaster" G4 with its iconic flat screen display very much (a friend of mine prolonged its life with an aftermarket CPU/GPU upgrade kit) and remember the unpacking experience of my 15 inch G4 PowerBook, which got me excited like a child getting his first home computer, and generated that special smile on my face.
I got a second generation one about a year ago, free from someone I know who was going to pitch it. It's basically identical to the first models, just a slightly faster CPU. I used it two or three times to access an old multimedia CD-ROM I still have before it locked up, the hard drive dead. I doubt I'll ever get it fixed, and unless I find someone to take it I'll end up bringing it to Apple since they have a free recycling program. I kind of dread doing that because the thing is heavy. Really heavy. It weighs more than the combined weight of all the other Apple devices I have around:
The Imac was bad so many ways: blurry screen, icons too small due to the screen being too small for the OS , overpriced, slow speed, hockey puck mouse, no floppy . Even the Powermacs from 1995 were better than than Imac. I bought a PC instead and stopped buying macs from that point on.
The thick CRT case reminded me, again, of the unveiling of the current iMac design in 2012. Phil turning the computer to demonstrate its thinness, to an obviously very carefully selected angle so the bulge remained just out of sight.
It still feels a bit pointless, but what do I know.
I got my start as a developer on one of the summer 2000 "DV" CRT iMac models, first with REALBasic with OS 9 and then with the developer disc bundled with OS X 10.0, setting me on my path to my current career. Great little machine, if a bit underpowered.
A trip down memory lane for sure! I can't help but feel that a list for 2020 has to include the Macbooks with the M1 chip. Personally, the difference between my mid-2017 Macbook Pro and my M1 Macbook Air has been astronomical. The battery life alone will "save" Apple.
My first Mac was a white Intel iMac in 2007, but the original iMac first Mac I really noticed as something to be interested in. The radical forward looking design choices, including up to date ports combined with the RISC internals and the promise of a new Unix/NEXT based OS on the horizon (which took a while) made Apple interesting again.
It took almost 10 years before I finally took the plunge, but whenever I looked at getting a new PC from then on, I seriously considered getting a Mac.
I don't think they've lost their design skills -- a lot of their stuff still has good-to-great industrial design. I think their failing is that at some point in the early 2000s, Jony Ive declared war on whimsy, relentlessly stamping out even the most minor bits of fun in the pursuit of the simplest forms possible.
I'm not sure how this changes now that Ive isn't present; while I'd like to be cautiously optimistic, current design head Alan Dye has been there since 2006 and may have internalized a lot of that anti-whimsy. Based on Big Sur's UX, he seems to unfortunately share Ive's "form over function" failing.
Laptop design took over, and since key goals are strength, thinness, and lightness, and since the market is now global, and anything too weird would annoy at least some customers, there isn't much of an opportunity to do anything outstandingly creative.
For example - you could anodise unique swirly coloured patterns into the aluminium. You could coat parts with a mirror chrome finish. You could make and sell your own Apple rubber bumpers in a series of interesting textures, including nice renewable materials like bamboo. But at least as many people would hate those as love them, which is why Apple will always play safe, and the bumpers will be left to after-market.
Space Gray, Silver and Alu-Gold are timid design choices, and the muted blues/greens/etc on the new iPhones look pretty mediocre IMO. But they're cheap, practical, and relatively durable, so I doubt Tim Cook's Apple is going to move beyond them any time soon.
I was in one of the first waves of AppleCare representatives at the then-brand new call center in Elk Grove, CA. We had an iMac as our workstation. There was a lot of "eat your own dog food" going on and I loved it. It was really exciting for me to see Apple start to rebound like it did. I have a lot of happy memories there and I love to see the older machines still bringing joy to people.
I'm still kicking myself for not buying stock when I could.
Not really. Even in his first tenure with Apple, Steve Jobs held Sony in high regard as a sort of blueprint for Apple.
This idea of the consumer electronics leader, that Sony was in the 80s with the Walkman etc, inspired Jobs long before he founded NeXT. Apple was "Apple Inc." instead of "Apple Computer Inc." in Steve's head for a very long time.
Having been around for quite some time, it appears to me that the OS X generation is completely unaware of how Apple used to be like, and whatever "openness" they had during the critical business years was just for survival, nothing else.
> OS X generation is completely unaware of how Apple used to be like
I think they would be more accurate being referred to as iPod and iPhone Generation. The vast majority of people today only came to know Apple ( and Mac ) only after using those products.
The built in speakers were everything. I used to download music via Napster and play that music with my sisters over the land line. Computer speakers may have existed prior to the iMac but never were they highlighted as a core element of the computer's design.
I used to spend silly amounts of time in computer stores playing around with computers. I remember the time that the iMac G3 and G3 Tower started to hit the shelves and demo areas. It was a multi-sensory explosion. It's really, really hard to describe the impact that these computers had at the time.
Maybe the multi-sensory thing was the reason why the iMac experience is so deeply ingrained in my memory. It managed to touched on all five senses:
- Sight - it had bold, colorful design
- Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge
- Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac?
- Hearing - had great stereo speakers
- Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day!
I'll spare folks from more of this treacle because I don't want to completely re-write history. The computer wasn't perfect - it was terribly slow and tended to crash whenever my father would yell at me to stop using it.