iMac G3 – The Mac that saved Apple
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
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.
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.
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:
- Sight - it had bold, colorful design
- Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge
- Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac?
- Hearing - had great stereo speakers
- Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day!
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.
My family had a multimedia PC, with prominent integrated speakers, released in 1994. Based on the bundled software, it was promoted as a business + education + leisure computer.
At least in my circles, PCs with speakers and a mixture of educational (like MS Encarta) and gaming software were common from 1996 or so.
This is what Apple fanboy haters always say, but is really the fact Apple say "I'm the first at everything I do"?
;)
--
I think if ever, Apple try to say "I'm the first that do this good", with some arrogance for sure. Is terrible that this arrogance is based on facts.
And in this case, I know that kind of compaq (and have at the time a much better clon), and G3 where a league above and beyond, not as much when iPhone get into the scene (where Apple could actually claim a true "First" as "the first real modern smartphone"), but certainly to be a class on its own.
That, of course, is an evolution from the Mac Colour Classic which came out in early 1993 and had a built in mono speaker, but no CD-ROM drive. This being an evolution from the B&W compact Macs dating back to the original from 1984.
I don’t remember what I did for a while after Napster shut down. I remember doing a ton of file sharing through Zip drives on school computers. It used to be so fun to exchange Zip disks containing our Napster collection and play them on school computers.
Apple had LC|Performa 500 series of which the first models were sold in 1993 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series]
And don't forget the the classic Macintosh, SE, Classic etc models had everything integrated since 1984.
(Beleaguered, desperate, mid-90s Apple did some really weird stuff).
Apple had been doing built-in speakers for quite some time, especially in their Performas, but those weren't really seen in homes.
But with the iMac, not only were there speakers built-in but they had great sound, were beautiful (as far as aesthetics go in the 90s), and didn't feel like an afterthought. No used-up desk space, no ugly earmuffs on the screen, just booming sound coming from the front of this gorgeous, lickable, candy-coloured wonder.
We can talk about who did what first in the manner of a check list but that's sorely missing the point. A product isn't just what it is but how it feels — for every sense.
There's a reason why Apple uses terms like 'magic' and 'delight'. Whilst people deride it as marketing nonsense, every other company fires up their photocopiers, it's big enough of a deal.
The Commodore Amiga from 13 years before the iMac G3 has a better claim to the title of the first 'lifestyle machine'.
Actually that was the main reason why I stayed on OS X 10.9 for quite a while. I liked the dang glossy buttons and progress bars! Had to update when I later needed then-current Xcode for my job. I don't regret though — by doing this I essentially skipped the buggy mess that 10.10 and 10.11 were. I had stable WiFi and nice UI while everyone around me was complaining.
http://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/
There were exceptions though. I unironically think the transparent graphite iMac and the transparent Apple Studio Display CRT still look good today in 2020.
The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.
Then again, I'm all about people putting information out there because they have something to share, not because their primary focus is "how can I monetize this?"
I can spend less on a VPS for a month than I can at a morning of Starbucks. I can do a whole lot more (and share a lot more) with the VPS. No expectation of making money from it either.
I miss the days of /~ pages too.
But yes, absolutely, all the chairs were inflatable. None of them survive. Actually that's how the standing desk was discovered.
The vast majority of the bridge work and maintenance is done single-handedly by tulir. It'd be awesome to see more capable individuals contributing :)
My bet is that having the French and German governments as paying clients will be a game-changer for Matrix. We've moved over to it internally, and I'm federating onto a couple of social channels; using Slack feels like chewing glass now, and if I could interact with my remaining Slack obligations from Element, I would.
Slack can be as hostile as they want, I welcome it in fact, because I want them to be unprofitable, hemorrhaging users, and eventually shut down. Best of all, there's only so much they can do in that department, while keeping all the bot integrations which are their only remaining (and fast eroding) edge.
Matrix deserves to win— and they're poised to.
> I'm now back to using email.
/s
https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g...
It didn't have the historical significance the original iMac did, but the look is timeless and just fantastic. I would still 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.
Only trouble was the fans were ridiculously loud.
Firewire connectivity for external hdds was magical. The screen is still nice. However the fan noise is and was always terrible. With some mods it became bearable.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/IMac_G4_...
The 20" definitely looks the least balanced (aesthetically).
I am not sure what to use it for, but I do not want to get rid if it, and I want to keep its original hardware.
I like looking at it.
I also liked the LC520 from school, but that is a different aesthetic.
all these years later and it's still looking almost new. Mac OS 9 and everything.
I have a lot of love for the old PowerPC units. Even fire up Hotline sometimes.
I recently disassembled mine and gave it a good cleaning.
It is starting to slightly yellow, but nothing like what I have seen for sale on eBay.
I find the old iMac still attractive too but the form factor makes no sense without the CRT.
This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).
The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.
I submit that this observation also applies to Windows 9x.
I recently bought a Powermac G4/553 DA model and it's really responsive with Classic. One of the last Classic-compatible models. But it feels really simple compared to any modern OS.
And something I've forgotten in 20 years since the last usage of Classic: There's no real multi-tasking. Uncompressing zip or sit packages basically blocks the whole OS until the work is done.
Oh and other things taken for granted nowadays I've forgotten: one can use _the same computer for other things when scanning photos_. Then even the fastest computer was blocked until the scanning was completed :D
And yet it has now been abandoned in favor of UNIX style "scatter and hide everything, but include an overengineered piece of software to manage it in very limited ways for the user".
I personally think that this is because developers once largely thought of their products as existing to enable users, whereas contemporary developers think of their products as herding or farming users.
It absolutely screams (Photoshop 5.5 cold launches in about 1.5 seconds), and I'm not sure how much of this is pure nostalgia, but the look and feel of classic Platinum Mac OS is friendly in a way that's really hard to describe.
Of course this machine is only useful for opening all my old documents from the '90s, but I plan on keeping it in a working state for many years to come, if for no other reason than to let the nerds of the future get a taste of what computing was like before the internet destroyed everything.
In reality, we don't need to imagine it. Windows 9x was like that and, unsurprisingly, easily pwned.
Delete it all.
And the companies that have the power to drive it into newer territories, like Google, don't care about providing yet another UNIX clone, just reducing the kernel development costs.
Had Inferno been a success, I bet we would also see blog posts on how to dump Limbo, replace ACME with vim, and have the GNU userland on it.
I don't either. But a boy can dream.
Given Windows 10X original design goals, you might need to move to somewhere else eventually, if they go through with it.
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.
I got one on discount, $699 I believe. Twice as much as the Celeron 300 eMachines that we had at the time.
It wasn't very fast. It didn't have any expandability. The screen was terrible. 14/15" and it had a horrible dot pitch. You could run 800x600 but it would give you a headache.
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.
The screen was so limiting when it came to real work. The keyboard was passable but the mouse was awful.
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.
About 10 years later, in 2009, I got another iMac (the newest model at the time), and completely fell in love with it.
Windows Vista also introduced a compositing window manager IIRC, and it was also horribly slow on old systems.
...except Apple couldn't ship with the original clock speed because G4 Macs were their own g/d drama.
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?) chef's kiss. That was the first computer that I thought was damn sexy, followed by the Ti Powerbook G4 when that came out.
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.
Their trackpads on the other hand are fantastic. I use a Magic Trackpad a my desk and have become totally accustomed to those instead of mice.
This is basically true, but in the annals of Apple mice which suck, the hockey puck iMac mouse stands alone.
It remains a popular study in design circles for how to be hostile to your users, because a perfectly round mouse doesn't fit a human hand, and it's pointlessly difficult to orient the blasted thing.
> 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!
I had completely forgotten about the Jeff Goldblum ad[1]. The spiritual predecessor to Step 3: PROFIT!, I suppose.
“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”
https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?...
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.
I wouldnt say they were cheap plastic though! They felt very premium to me!
I had the original Bondi Blue iMac!
There was something very special about that design!
I now have a Graphite G3 version in my vintage collection :-)
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.
An ad in a 1998 PC magazine offers the cheapest ISA network card for $10, although the iMac G3 has a faster 10/100 card, about $40.
It was relatively common for Macs to have ethernet before that point, whether or not they had expansion slots. I remember the PowerMac 6100 from 1994 had ethernet, although it required a dongle since 10baseT hadn’t taken over the world yet. I think prior to the iMac, there were a couple models that you could buy without ethernet, on the budget end.
What I remember from this era was that networking was much easier to deal with on a Mac, until Windows XP (and 2000) addressed some of the issues.
The same was true of audio in the 1980s.
As a Linux user/sysadmin, I bought my first Mac in 2002, when I quit my job to go back to college, needed a laptop, and didn't want to deal with Linux on a laptop. I reasoned I "might as well" get something with Windows on it, since being able to easily play DVDs and use Office would come in handy.
I had an "aha" moment when I realized "wait a second, if all I want is Office and a DVD player, I guess I could get a Mac?" OS X had been released about a year before, which of course meant the Mac appealed to me more than Windows for the first time.
It's not an exaggeration to say I knew at that time, at age 21, that Apple was about to blow up, because when I brought my new G3 iBook Mac in to work at my tech job, EVERYBODY wanted to see it and play with it, especially the greybeards.
I desperately wanted to buy Apple stock then, but I held off, since it would be on borrowed money. I don't regret it, because it was the right decision, but it sure would have paid off :)
Oh anyway, back to the story. My iBook came with wifi, and I paid a handsome $300 for the Airport Extreme base station (the "snow" 2nd gen model, not the graphite 1st gen).
Interestingly, both the AEBS and the iBook used the same PCMCIA wifi card inside, so many years later, when the iBook's card got flaky, I just swapped in the one from the AEBS I wasn't using anymore, and it worked great.
Not many people in the dorms in 2002 had WiFi-- in fact, almost nobody I can remember did. my dorm room with wireless access point faced an outdoor gathering/picnic area, so during a fire alarm one time, I took my laptop with me and was surfing the internet while everyone else figured out what to do with themselves.
Oral History of Arthur "Art" Astrin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj5NNxVwNwQ "Supreme Commander of Wireless Engineering for Apple Computer"
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."
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.
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 has a lot of brief interviews with other long-time Mac users on their experiences with each machine.
I think it's likely that we'll see something similar to a Cube or trashcan Mac Pro in the future with M series chips. Apple was able to pack 130W Xeon chips into the trashcan Mac Pro. Seems reasonable to think that a Pro-class M series chip could fit within that power/thermal range. The new Mac Pros are 205W which probably necessitated moving away from the trashcan size. Given that the highest-end Mac Pro is around 2.5x faster than a Mac Mini while the Mac Mini is only around 10 watts, it seems like there's a lot of room for Apple to create a Mac Pro without dialing up the heat too much.
I guess I'm wondering: did you like the cube, but not the trashcan?
Whatever Apple releases as the "awesome" desktop machine, whether "M2" Mini Pro, a true Mac Pro that's not $5000, it'll be on my desk with an ultrawide.
And yeah, I never had a sunflower iMac, but THAT was cool.
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.
Games were a touchy subject - they were hard to come by, MDK, Nanosaur and Warcraft and later Baldur's Gate were my top choices growing up. Along with a few Zip disks with a bunch of older MacOS9 and MacOS8 games!
Typing this from an M1 MacBook Air, I had to laugh and do a double take that they had to specify an M1 Mac Mini, since it's the only one with a USB type-A port :) But yeah, the longevity of USB-A is amazing.
There were a few earlier translucent Apple devices though, like the eMate 300. My guess is that the suppliers for plastics in the 1980s and 1990s added better translucent plastics to their catalog, and that’s where people got ideas. Other manufacturers did it even earlier than Nintendo and Apple, like the transparent case landline telephones from the 1980s.
Wikipedia has an article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_craze
Nowadays you only see this stuff in prison.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+prolinea+net1&t=fpas&iax=im...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mac+lc&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=image...
It’s a nice design but the original iMac broke new ground. Personally I didn’t like it at the time, it drew too much attention to its plasticiness for my taste.
Whereas something like a Silicon Graphics workstation looked out of this world cool.
The first iMac that got me excited was the Sunflower.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imac+sunflower&t=fpas&iar=images&i...
When the iMac appeared people who knew nothing about computers would talk to me about it. "Have you seen...?"
That's something Apple have always been intermittently good at - making computers for people who don't like computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4
The smooth spherical half-ball and the swivel arm was perfection. I think the current iMac was a step backward from that.
Less common but still a personal favorite is the eMac a family friend sold us for $100 because they didn't want it anymore. I thought it would be fun to play around with, and I was right. It ended up being so much fun that I stopped using my FreeBSD desktop and switched to Macs.
Looking back now - I enjoyed working with computers, I suppose in part because I liked being good at something that was an "adult" activity.
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.
MacBook Air (2013)
Mac mini (2012)
iPhone 4
iPod touch
iPhone XS
iPhone 5S
iPad mini (v1)
iPad mini (v2)
Newton
Powerbook G3 (Pismo)
It's easy to forget how heavy CRTs were.
It still feels a bit pointless, but what do I know.
That puck mouse was the worst, though.
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.
Now laptops are always the same grey aluminum with an apple logo on the back.
Has Apple lost its design skills? Are they too afraid to make changes?
I'm not sure how this changes now that Ive isn't present; while I'd like to be cautiously optimistic, current design head Alan Dye has been there since 2006 and may have internalized a lot of that anti-whimsy. Based on Big Sur's UX, he seems to unfortunately share Ive's "form over function" failing.
For example - you could anodise unique swirly coloured patterns into the aluminium. You could coat parts with a mirror chrome finish. You could make and sell your own Apple rubber bumpers in a series of interesting textures, including nice renewable materials like bamboo. But at least as many people would hate those as love them, which is why Apple will always play safe, and the bumpers will be left to after-market.
Space Gray, Silver and Alu-Gold are timid design choices, and the muted blues/greens/etc on the new iPhones look pretty mediocre IMO. But they're cheap, practical, and relatively durable, so I doubt Tim Cook's Apple is going to move beyond them any time soon.
I'm still kicking myself for not buying stock when I could.
This idea of the consumer electronics leader, that Sony was in the 80s with the Walkman etc, inspired Jobs long before he founded NeXT. Apple was "Apple Inc." instead of "Apple Computer Inc." in Steve's head for a very long time.
I think they would be more accurate being referred to as iPod and iPhone Generation. The vast majority of people today only came to know Apple ( and Mac ) only after using those products.