But nobody wanted them. We got 25 at our store and almost every one of them came back. People wanted PC's....
MacOS was behind the times vs. Windows. Still sticking with cooperative multitasking until 2000. Crazy!
iMac was the start of something different, but Apple had a decade of second-class product to atone for, first.
To be fair, sticking with it until 2000 wasn't Apple's intention; they'd expected to bring the new "Copland" Mac OS to market by the end of 1996.
I don't know how well the iMac may have sold at the OP's Best Buy, but my recollection -- and a web search just now seems to back this up -- is that the iMac sold very well pretty quickly after its 1998 introduction. For instance, a NYT article from January 1999 which begins:
"Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iMac desktop computer was the No. 1 selling machine through retail and mail-order channels in the 1998 holiday season, according to the research company PC Data.
"In overall sales, the iMac fell from the top spot in November to No. 3 in December. It is still the top-selling computer since its mid-August introduction and led overall sales in the fourth quarter, PC Data, of Reston, Va., reported."
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/22/business/apple-s-imac-led...
I thought the iMac was a massive success? Didn't it save Apple from ruin almost single handedly?
The iMac did get a lot of bad reviews and was $1299, in the days of $399 eMachines
Those eMachines chugged badly out of the box even.
...the overweight, less colorful cousin of the iMac.