Twenty-seven years ago today, Steve Jobs went on stage at the Cupertino Flint Center to unveil the first new product since his return to Apple: the original iMac.
Today's apple would be almost unrecognizable for the people of 1998, but Apple still sells an iMac. It is literally the only product that Apple sells today that it also sold at that time. (Macbooks were PowerBooks and Pro Mac were Mac Power in 1998.) Of course, today's iMac is little like the original iMac G3. But keeping the name alive, Apple also Hoche's head to the Imac's unique spirit, a product that has helped to overthrow Apple's fortune and define computers of the next three decades.
It seems so picturesque and obvious now, but in 1998, the iMac was, if not revolutionary, at least rebellious and radical. At a time of PC Beiges, it was the color of water off Australia Bondi beach. At a time when the average computer had the shape of a pizza box or a minitower, attached to a CRT monitor via a fatty cable, the iMac was a clean autonomous unit.
Disk reader? Did not. The range of inherited ports (series, parallel, bad, SCSI) which had accumulated more than two decades of personal computer? Disappeared! Entirely! They were replaced by a single new connectivity specification: Universal Serial Bus … Yes, and we are still using USB all these years later.
Many of these decisions were clearly made by Steve Jobs, who considered that computers were retained by devotion to compatibility behind. And to the original Mac, Jobs was attached to the idea that a whole-in-one computer that you could pick up and move, and looked like a device, was going to be more attractive than a box and a monitor and a big wire waste.
He was right, in two notable ways. Of course, most of the computers sold today are laptops, not office computers, but they are fundamentally all in one that you can pick up and move – just radically. But the iMac continued to sell well, even at that time of laptops and tablets and smartphones. A few years ago, an iMac product manager told me how the IMAC company is still – they reside in all kinds of spaces, from hotel recording offices to school offices, including libraries, where it is more logical to have a desktop computer than a laptop. (If it was not true, Apple would have no motivation to maintain the iMac, not to mention giving him the Spiffy overhaul he received as part of his move to Apple Silicon.)
The iMac was also, from the start, inspired by laptops. In the 1990s, laptops were still considered less products. The high cost of miniaturization components and the construction of flat panel screens meant that laptops were Dear. And the low-power portable processors used in these laptops were undernourished compared to desktop computers. So you can get a laptop – and many of us have done so! – But they were a little more expensive and significantly slower than office computers.
Today's iMac always has the same spirit as the one that started everything.
Foundry
I don't want to say that Steve Jobs has seen the future, but he did it. To keep the iMac as small as possible (other than the enormous CRT of the first model), it was built with many pieces traditionally found only in laptops. Over the years, this process has continued. Office computers are not generally delivered with flat screens, but the iMac has done so. And with the arrival of the iMac G5, which has integrated into a single unit screen, the iMac has really reached its final shape: a screen powered by small components inspired by a laptop.
Today, the difference between office computers and laptops largely concerns the shape, not on the components inside. My MacBook Pro performs the same chip as in a Mac studio. The iMac chip is also in the MacBook Air. Office computers have become laptops and vice versa. The iMac was a large part of this transition.
Finally, I would be neglected if I did not touch the colorful energy of the iMac. This original Aigue -Marine Imac was shocking in the era of Beige boxes and launched a whole craze for translucent plastic in literally everything – printers with the grids of George Foreman. The next wave of iMac G3 has introduced several colors, so that you can choose the one that spoke to you, whether red or green, or blue.
Apple took what he learned there and, starting with the iPod Mini, adopted a rainbow of color options. You can always see it on the iPhone (although a few years, it does not seem to be what it was in the past) and more particularly In today's imacswhich come in seven different shades.
The truth is that the most influential products simply do not seem so impressive with hindsight, because they have literally redefined reality. The way to the iMac seems obvious with hindsight. But that had a huge impact on today's Mac, today's apple and really the world of technology today. The mind of the iMac lives – as the iMac himself does.
