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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>- Sight - it had bold, colorful design<p>- Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge<p>- Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac?<p>- Hearing - had great stereo speakers<p>- Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day!<p>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.
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.
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.<p><a href="https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g4/" rel="nofollow">https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g...</a><p>It didn't have the historical significance the original iMac did, but the look is timeless and just fantastic. I would <i>still</i> 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.
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.<p>This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).
I realize I wasn't the target market for these iMacs, but I had one, and I -hated it-.<p>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.<p>I got one on discount, $699 I believe. Twice as much as the Celeron 300 eMachines that we had at the time.<p>It wasn't very fast. It didn't have any expandability. The screen was <i>terrible</i>. 14/15" and it had a horrible dot pitch. You could run 800x600 but it would give you a headache.<p>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.<p>The screen was so limiting when it came to real work. The keyboard was passable but the mouse was awful.<p>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.<p>About 10 years later, in 2009, I got another iMac (the newest model at the time), and completely fell in love with it.
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 <i>so</i> 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.<p>...except Apple couldn't ship with the original clock speed because G4 Macs were their own g/d drama.<p>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?) <i>chef's kiss</i>. That was the first computer that I thought was <i>damn</i> sexy, followed by the Ti Powerbook G4 when that came out.<p>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.
> Perhaps Apple’s best commercial of all time is the one in which Jeff Goldblum explains how you set up an iMac to get online:<p>> Presenting three easy steps to the Internet. Step one: Plug in. Step two: Get connected. Step three… there’s no step three. There’s no step three!<p>I had completely forgotten about the Jeff Goldblum ad[1]. The spiritual predecessor to Step 3: PROFIT!, I suppose.<p>1: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg</a>
Ha, saw this tweet the other day:<p>“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”<p><a href="https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?...</a>
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).<p>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.<p>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.
For me, Apple wasn't interesting until Mac OS X on the PowerPC G4 arrived on the scene in the early 2000s.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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).
It's only mentioned in one line, at the very bottom of the page, but Jason Snell also is doing this series as a podcast:<p><a href="https://www.relay.fm/20macs" rel="nofollow">https://www.relay.fm/20macs</a><p>It has a lot of brief interviews with other long-time Mac users on their experiences with each machine.
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 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<p>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.
> 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!)<p>Typing this from an M1 MacBook Air, I had to laugh and do a double take that they had to specify an M1 Mac <i>Mini</i>, 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.
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.
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 was ~11 years old when the iMac came out. I hated it.<p>Looking back now - I enjoyed working with computers, I suppose in part because I liked being good at something that was an "adult" activity.<p>And here Apple comes out with a computer that looks like a Fisher Price toy 6-year-olds should play with. Of course I wanted nothing to do with it.
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:<p>MacBook Air (2013)<p>Mac mini (2012)<p>iPhone 4<p>iPod touch<p>iPhone XS<p>iPhone 5S<p>iPad mini (v1)<p>iPad mini (v2)<p>Newton<p>Powerbook G3 (Pismo)<p>It's easy to forget how heavy CRTs were.
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.<p>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.
Enjoyed this one and went ahead and read another of interest to me: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567210" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567210</a>
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.<p>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.
Back then at least Macs were different, each generation.<p>Now laptops are always the same grey aluminum with an apple logo on the back.<p>Has Apple lost its design skills? Are they too afraid to make changes?
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.<p>I'm still kicking myself for not buying stock when I could.