This week the iMac turned 20 years old! It was back on May 6, 1998, that Steve Jobs first introduced us to the iMac. It was 40 pounds of Bondi Blue power, a whopping 233 MHz processor and 6mb of video memory and had the Apple Pro Mouse which, by today’s standards, was anything but pro! None the less, it was one of many major announcements to come from Apple and it’s gotten me thinking today. I started working for Small Dog in the spring of 2003 and my first workstation was an Indigo Blue G3 iMac. Over the last 15 years here I have seen a lot of revisions and evolutions in the iMac line up.
When I first started the G4 iMac with the swivel arm had been out for about a year and the idea of being able to easily adjust the height and angle of the iMac screen was a major advancement. As a user trying to share information with another viewer it was incredibly convenient, you just spun your screen around! For many users, retailers for example, this avoided the awkward moment where a customer might try to come behind the counter to view something on your screen. What was not easy about the G4 iMac design was accessing the RAM and hard drive. Sure, it was all there in the base and you just had to remove the bottom plate, but the round base and swivel arm had it’s own challenges in keeping the machine in the correct position to work on it. Then, along came the G5 iMac.
The G5 iMac was my first desktop. This iMac was a major leap in speed with a space saving design and one major change; no more swivel arm! This major change was one that had mixed feedback. Some users commented, as expected, on the lack of flexibility with the screen and how convenient the swivel arm was, other’s commented that they felt the computer wasn’t “cool” anymore. The upside down bowl design of the base, combined with that arm, made users feel like they really stood out as computer users. The slim, white picture frame design of the G5 iMac felt like a letdown to them. For me, I was happy to have a machine I could easily get into and access the RAM, hard drive and wifi card with ease! I had to remove and replace the wifi card multiple times in that unit. These were some of the earlier days of wifi and, after multiple teardowns and becoming an expert on wifi card installs, I eventually concluded it wasn’t the wifi card but rather something in my house affecting the signal!
After the release of the G5 iMac the design of the iMacs didn’t change significantly for several years. There were some minor changes like the introduction of the iSight camera, the release of the 24in screen size, and the transition from PowerPC to Intel, which for some is more memorable than a revision to the iMac lineup in early 2006. But, once we all survived that transition just like we did from OS9 to OS X, Apple introduced us to the Aluminum iMac.
I felt that the Aluminum iMac brought back some of the outside the box thinking of Apple like did with the G4 iMac; maybe I could finally picture an iMac in the Jetsons with the space-like feel of the silver aluminium, who knows! This revision in 2007 brought the iMac to a new level, even if it was only in the outer appearance. Eventually, we’d finally be able to use that beautiful iMac as a standalone monitor. It always surprised me that, one, Apple didn’t do this sooner and, two, how many users wanted to do this!
Twenty Years of iMac, there are a lot of memories, and I’ve only touched on some of them. I can’t see myself using the iMac Pro just yet. I am, however, looking forward to the day I get to look back and laugh about how I thought 22 teraflops was something to be impressed with.