There was a river of stories about the iMac’s 20 year anniversary yesterday. Start off with Jim Dalrymple’s nostalgic look back.
Another piece I really enjoyed was Jason Snell’s The original iMac: 20 years since Apple changed its fate.
It’s hard to believe today that a Steve Jobs product presentation would be met with indifference, but there was a huge amount of skepticism about Apple’s product announcements back in early 1998. Though there were definitely signs that the company was turning it around, I also recall being summoned to Apple product events where nothing much at all was announced. Regardless, only the editor in chief of Macworld, Andy Gore, even bothered to go to the announcement at the Flint Center that day.
As soon as the event ended, I got a phone call—I was working at home that day—and was told to immediately get in to the office, for an all-hands-on-deck meeting, because Apple had announced a new computer that was going to change everything. I have to give Andy credit—the moment he saw the iMac he knew it was going to be huge. We tore up our magazine issue in the matter of about a day in order to get first word about the iMac out to people in the days before instant Apple news was a thing.
And:
Apple’s bold choice to rip out all of the Mac’s traditional ports—Mac serial, Apple Desktop Bus, and SCSI—and replace it with the USB standard that was just starting to emerge in the PC world, was also helpful. It made all of us longtime Mac users cringe—you think the iPhone losing its headphone jack was tough?—but in a stroke it made the iMac compatible with a huge range of peripherals previously only designed to be used on PCs, and it made accessory manufacturers happy because with a low amount of effort the stuff they were making for PCs could now also be sold to new iMac users.
Huge move. Terrific writeup by Jason Snell.
Another great read is 20 Years of iMac: Steve Jobs iconic internet machine that courageously reinvented Apple from Apple Insider’s Daniel Eran Dilger.
Before unveiling the new iMac, Jobs outlined how it would be different. For starters, Apple was using a modern 233MHz G3 processor, the same chip it had used in its entry-level Pro Power Mac G3 just six months prior at a price $300 higher.
That new generation Power PC chip boasted a performance edge “up to twice as fast” as Intel’s Pentium II processors at similar clock speeds, a line promoted by Apple in commercials portraying Intel’s chip as a snail and its chip designers dancing in “toasted” bunny suits.
And:
Jobs at the time noted that about “ten percent of homes in Silicon Valley were already being wired up for Cat 5,” while also poking at consumer PCs, few of which had any provision for networking built in.
Interesting to see how little built-in ethernet matters now. But at the time, the Cat 5 wave was in full force.
I was briefly struck with the sinking feeling that perhaps Apple had done something too risky. A translucent, rounded computer? A one-piece design that included a monitor? Don’t people want to open up the side of their PC and plug-in expansion cards, and won’t they want to replace the PC components faster than their monitor?
This moment of “oh no Apple… this is not conventional thinking” was one of the first times in my life where I had to step out of my comfortable understanding of What Had Always Worked Before and consider that maybe instead of being afraid of this new and different future unfolding in front of me, I could freshly evaluate whether it might actually be a big improvement over the status quo. Maybe the world was indeed ready for iMac’s bright candy-colored translucency that could distinguish Apple from all of the look-alike PCs running Windows.
I love all three of these writeups, from folks who were huge Apple fans at the time, and are still around covering the beat, still passionate all these years later.
One last bit to check out. Jump to this tweet by Horace Dediu, charting “units shipped” of all the major computing devices over the years. Pinch to zoom in on the chart. Lots of interesting data there.
The iMac inflection point is highlighted, but check out the performance of the Windows PC, the overall Mac performance, Android, iPhone, iPad. Fascinating to see this overlaid over time. Nice job, Horace.
