How the iMac Saved Apple
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- The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now.
- The slightly translucent plastic allowed you to see a little bit of the innards, but not so clearly. This gave the computer case some depth and complexity that you would never otherwise get in "cheap" molded plastic.
- The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for.
- The stacking of the internal components and the location of the vents allowed the computer to be fanless yet have sufficient cooling. Convection created by the heat of the CRT generated airflow to cool the CPU.
...is that actually true? Because it launched with a 233MHz G3, and although my memory is hazy, I remember people specifically pointing out that on most available cross-platform benchmarks it beat whatever Pentium II was current then.
That situation didn't last, but I have specific memories of "This is a cheap home computer that's faster than Dell's highest end tower".
Ditto with G4's and similar cycled Pentium III's.
From Wikipedia:
> The PowerPC 7xx is a family of third generation 32-bit PowerPC microprocessors designed and manufactured by IBM and Motorola (spun off as Freescale Semiconductor bought by NXP Semiconductors)
The other thing to remember, is that computers were only barely powerful enough back then. Powerful models felt powerful precisely because we were desperate for every last CPU cycle we could get.
The bottle neck was always macOS 9 which was a pretty rudimentary OS by today's standards.
It was a bit of a sore spot For a while there.
Apple has a looooong history of cherrpicking benchmarks, especially when their arch wasn't as fast as competing Intels.
The introduction of Safari is an underrated milestone in changing that, and I would suggest the Mac didn’t really match the Windows browsing experience inclusive of Flash until the introduction of Intel Macs.
One of the more tragic examples, from the perspective of laptop buyers, was the WallStreet PowerBooks. They started at $2300 and was easily 30% faster than the high end 3400s that were $4-5k. The original G3 PowerBook (Kanga) was over $5k. It was a huge boost in power for half the price and honestly much better industrial design. The 3400 was a chonky boi.
It is not.
One cool thing about the appliance computing revolution (phones and vg consoles) is that now most people don't have computers again and "being a computer person" is a thing again.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/07/19/apple...
Several of them don't own computers and rely entirely on smartphones for their computing needs.
It's frankly a worrying trend. Smartphones are consumer devices that do not allow the kind of automation, tinkering, scripting, and ownership that computers do.
On the flip side it means that I will be more competitive in the job market as I grow older than I was expecting.
A huge part of the mac user base at that time were writers/editorial staff and graphic designers. I don't know if we lump them in the "computer person" crowd as they basically spend their day in front of a computer, but yes, to them the colors were really well received, as a salvation from the beige world they had to deal with.
The same way people covered their macbooks in stickers and skins to get away from the uniform metallic gray canvas.
– "We're not so different you and I"
There's a difference between glued-on extras - which are more like car customisation - and stylish integrated design.
A friend of mine used to joke about design-for-men being anything that was black and ribbed - which most PC cases are. If you add RGB to something black and ribbed, it's still black and ribbed - but now it has RGB stuck on it.
The curves, colour wraparound, and white translucent plastic of the iMac were the opposite of that. Everything was integrated into a whole - which was actually a nice metaphor for where Apple were trying to go in general.
Ironically, except for macs. Macs only come in solid metalic colors, at best.
PCs and older Macs were boring, and so were the people who used them and talked about them.
So what if it had 253 Megasnerds and an extra fast blibbyblop? It was boring and beige. No one cared.
The iMac was exciting and fun, and so was anyone who bought one and used one.
You could get a row of them in different colours for your design office, and they'd look stunning. Clients would walk in and literally say "Wow!"
The magic worked in any SME office that wasn't trying to look boringly corporate - which turned out to be a lot of offices.
Absolute marketing masterpiece to make the design a marketing statement - not just for Apple itself, but for any creative or service provider who bought one.
You're sitting smoking up in a tiny dorm and the most dominant item almost certainly was your computer. Having it be Bondi Blue colored with beautiful curves made that experience much nicer.
Not that I can remember.
Chic. Not geek.
The marketing claim during the introduction couldn’t have been more fitting and for everything that followed after coming out of apple.
Yes to this!
I was in academia when I switched from Windows to Mac, and UNIX was a big factor.
Incidentally, my first Mac was an iMac G4.
Why does being unix based matter? I imagine if you are doing server stuff you are on Linux/Unix. If you are doing C stuff, you are doing it closer to the end device. If you are doing visual stuff you are doing it on Windows since they have us by the balls.
Maybe if you are making iOS apps, but that wouldn't be until the end of the semi-replaceable era.
Maybe doing web dev? Yeah probably not, you'd be doing windows with firefox, chrome, and IE for front end.
Even in this modern era where Microsoft cannot be trusted and Linux Desktop still cannot handle NVIDIA, people are still choosing to do dev work on those system. The only time I see using Macs is for iOS dev only. (Maybe you might SSH into a server for backend stuff, but 25 year old computers can do that)
I'd imagine these necessary tools for Linux server dev/admin are also readily available on Mac, if not installed already. Now, is that worth the price delta? Probably not, but given the sparsity of pre installed, supported Linux hardware I can potentially see the appeal.
That is why I even bothered with GNU/Linux to start with.
OS X adoption by UNIX crowd proved the point that for a large majority of development community, GNU/Linux itself is irrelevant, what they care about is a POSIX like experience.
Hence Microsoft learning by their Windows NT/POSIX management mistakes, and creating WSL to fill that gap.
For those of us running Virtual Box and VMWare for years, it only brings the convinience of one product less to care about.
I wanted to check the Internet price on something, and asked an employee whether any of the demo computers had connectivity. It turned out that only the Mac did.
As I started using it, I remembered that I used to be an Apple user, and it would be easier to find commercial software that worked for it, and it was actually UNIX. Terminal and everything.
So, I stopped component shopping and headed to my local Apple Store later that week. Bought a G5 tower and I’ve never looked back.
The other alternative was Windows 2000/XP, almost no one was caring for GNU/Linux other than on the servers.
I was part of the initial group having a go at Scientific Linux, and there weren't that many users of it when I left in 2004.
In fact for many years, not sure about nowadays, the IT official policy was that installing GNU/Linux, even Scientific Linux, meant the users were on their own, the only UNIX desktop that they would officially support was OS X.
I also prototype natively and locally even though I eventually deploy to Linux. Lower level C code (with the odd #ifdef), and compilers and tooling for more niche languages all work perfectly fine.
The latter is a bigger point than it may seem. There is still a lot of open source software that is not working well as it should on Windows, particularly compilers and libraries.
If you were a kid or wanted to get involved with web development or other stuff you had a supported consumer platform, with consumer software and this hidden mode that gave you access to all of the Unix toolset.
You have to remember - there was no docker back in the day, no WSL, and linux laptops were for a tiny niche group of hard core people.
When OS X came out, you could buy basically for the first time a good, lightweight but powerful laptop which would run most of your favorite Unix code as well as Office, Photoshop, etc. and had 5-6 hours of battery life because you didn’t have to disable power saving to avoid kernel panics. That wasn’t perfect, of course, but a ton of early web stalwarts like Perl, PHP, MySQL ran better than on Windows with decent fidelity for anyone deploying on Linux or Solaris.
I bought Apple stock starting around 2001 when I noticed that in addition to traditional markets like design, I was going to hackathons or conferences like USENIX and seeing half the attendees with titanium PowerBooks. It’s hard to imagine now but at the time that was pretty speculative since their finances were still lean in the pre-iPod era (if I’d been willing to make a bigger gamble I’d probably be writing this from a yacht).
I still don’t understand why investors didn’t understand Apple’s subscription accounting and how it meant that their quarterly iPhone profits were something like 1/16th their actual iPhone profits.
But I really only use Macs because it’s the easiest unix machine for me to use. I don’t know of another laptop where everything works and I also natively have a shell and unix. I know there are ways to get close to this but they are all one more step and I don’t care enough to bother.
If there was a Linux laptop with a decent desktop and packaging manager I never had to think about that cost the same as mac, I would switch in an instant.
I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this but, we're a long way off.
If it didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have spent big money on Mac-is-Unix advertising campaign.
MS didn’t rewrite Windows internals to support WSL for the love of open source. They did it because most dev work happens on Linux (and now macs). Macs get to use that for free. Microsoft had to do work itself to support NodeJS and Docker, for example, and they became available on Windows many years after they were available on Linux/MacOS.
Docker, especially, was a piece of software that for many years was almost necessary for dev teams. And for many years you couldn’t use it if you were on Windows.
And having a Unix shell out of the box was/is easier than dealing with Cygwin and its alternatives.
Windows is better these days because the cloud dragged Microsoft into doing something about its shell experience. But even now Windows versions of things like Curl are half-assed versions.
Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs and doesn’t on Windows (or didn’t initially at least…heck it wasn’t even available on Windows for many years until MS itself worked with Docker to bring it to Windows).
NodeJS took 2 years to come to Windows, again with MS having to work with Joyent yo achieve this, but was available on Linux and Mac from the outset.
It runs natively on Linux. On Macs it starts a Linux VM and then does containers inside that, which adds overhead (and seems to preallocate a lot of ram).
Other than that yes, you can have a working GUI and a unixy enough command line on the same machine. And that's why I switched to macs... from linux.
And one thing I don’t read much about for these original iMacs is how nice the screen was. It was a CRT, but it had a nice anti-glare coating and could have the resolution increased to 1024x768 which wasn’t typical for a 15” screen at the time.
So the feature set was very nice… ignoring the hockey puck mouse!
The fact that it could run Quake3 is kind of the point as it didn’t need “all that power.”
The complaint I had was that for the price I could get a more powerful wintel box.
Comically this is no longer true with mac laptops and it’s kind of weird to see it flipped where MacBooks have powerful processors and decent levels of ram (although sticking with 8gb in the air seems like they are just sticking to the principle that you don’t need lots of ram rather than saving the $9 for 16 or 32).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMachines_eOne
And Compaq had the all-in-one form factor back in 1995
It’s not so much how bad the windows os (I have to admin my kids gaming pc) but it’s inability to run many dev packages that are first or only on Unix. It’s possible to run WSL or Cygwin or other Unix interfaces and get stuff working. But it’s extra steps and I want to simplify.
Instead, it came out the following year with the introduction of the iBook. [1]
FireWire did not exist on the iMac right away though... but it also was not at all common on Wintel machines at the time.
10/100 Base-T Ethernet, something standard on even the original iMac [2], was also not commonplace on Wintel machines. Packing a 56k modem in from the start was also a nice move on Apple's part to ensure you had the chance to get the fastest internet possible over a standard landline, which is how the majority of internet users accessed the internet at the time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3
I think it's part of the product line differentiation. I do all my development on a macbook air (well, some of the compilation is done on a remote machine, fr code that will run there). It's great: conveniently very light and with plenty of power.
Sure, some people need a ton of VMs, but I don't. But Apple points out that if you're a "professional" you ought to be using a "Pro" machine and the RAM is one way they do it.
Yes, but then you’re stuck with an Asus. Having been there before, that’s a hard pass. The real comparison for Macbooks are higher end models like Thinkpads.
It might sound silly but this a big thing for me. It’s disconcerting for a laptop to sound like an angry banshee when I’m pushing it, and my 16” M1 Max MBP doesn’t. It’s also why I sold the gaming laptop and replaced it with a desktop, because quiet high performance x86 laptops are apparently hard to come by.
- Use Apple Silicon, run Docker in QEMU and enjoy idle temps of 70-80c when building for production
OR
- Use an old Intel Mac, use "native" Docker and get slightly shorter build times and a marginally cooler system
Looking back on it, the only engineers there with quiet laptops were the ones using Linux on x86 hardware. It was simply what we deployed to, as an SaaS business.
This should become less of a problem as it becomes more normal to maintain dual-architecture Docker setups. There’s also the possibility that “shipping the jungle” will fall back out of favor, which would fix various other papercuts that result from Docker’s tight coupling with Linux.
If you are going to compare crap from Asus with something Apple makes, as if they're even remotely comparable, then we can just stop right there.
That's the problem with whipping out the spec sheet: low-end commodity machines will always have a better price than anything Apple makes. Never mind that it sounds like a 737 if you dare open more than one browser tab, and your eyes will prematurely go bad from the fuzzy screen, hey, you didn't pay the "Apple tax"!
And $400 extra to get a 1TB SSD? Seriously?
It’s such an obvious little quality of life improvement, and yet the only other board I’ve come across with the feature is the HHKB Pro 2 (Pro 3 drops the hub) and some variants of Das Keyboards.
[0] the swappable USB cable is so handy! Just leave one plugged into each machine.
I haven't booted since maybe 2005 and I'm starting to wonder if there is battery on the motherboard I should remove.
https://books.google.com/books?id=2Zt0sZTS_0IC&lpg=PP1&dq=oc...
The mouse was the first laser mouse I ever used and I believe it connected with USB, which was novel at the time. It was probably the most impressive thing about the iMac for me personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
I remember the later G3 education models my school had having a "laser" (I assume LED?) mouse.
Likely the iMac went the same way.
That was my favorite part of the hockey puck mouse - it was one of those little moments of "surprise and delight" from Apple. And alas, I can't find a good video of it online.
I double-take at statements like this. I forget how much variation in experience there was. But, being in the SF Bay Area, we were able to read Computer Shopper etc. and carpool to the South Bay to get whatever we wanted. I recall trips to will-call doors at warehouses, as well as private sellers in small apartments. I guess I was spoiled for choice.
I distinctly remember having a 15" monitor that did 1024x768 around 1992, and working out the X modelines to use it with Slackware by 1994. I went higher from there as I got my hands on bigger 17" or 21" monitors. I'm pretty sure my 21" Nanao was usually running at 1600x1200 a couple years later. I always felt that image quality and keyboards were worth investing in, since I would spend so much time exposed to them.
As far as I recall, we often had to trade off lower color depth for higher resolutions, since framebuffer VRAM was usually limited. A lot of time was spent in 8-bit psuedo color palette modes with XFree86 before eventually using 15/16 bit "true color" modes. I don't think 24-bit made much sense until later with 3D accelerators that had more VRAM.
And wow, "true color" modes - now I remember having to make that choice, too! 8-bit with higher res, or 16-bit (I think it was described as "thousands of colors" at the time... and it looks like there was some scandal around the phrase "millions of colors" that Apple used: https://lowendmac.com/2018/millions-of-colors-vs-thousands-w...
The iMac had a fairly dim shadow mask display that shipped with most budget computers of the era. They were also one of the more common components to prematurely fail in iMacs.
The G3 was one heck of a CPU.
The only thing these machines suffered from was USB 1.1. ZIP drives, CD burners and scanners were all much faster in their SCSI versions. You could see USB was clearly the future, but not an immediate one.
People forget how it launched a complete craze of transparent plastics. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, disk drives[1], printers... EVERYTHING became colorful and transparent.
And…it just worked out of the box. No messing around with IRQs and other tweaks that I had to use with my work day systems. Software was limited but IIRC Microsoft had updated Office as part of the earlier deal with Apple, and between Office, the dotMac suite, and web browser you could do most routine things just fine.
Apple just totally nailed the end to end experience of buying, shipping, and using the system, which was a refreshing change from the status quo those days.
I think there are stories of companies exploiting this, Microsoft with Windows and MS Works and Office, Apple and their angling on education, Adobe cultivating future Photoshop professionals in various formal and informal ways (a relationship they've since shit all over).
Seems like a missed opportunity.
But I'm guessing that's the point - make it confusing and unusable to steer people to specific choices??
However, just because a device exists on PSREF doesn't mean it's actually available to purchase anywhere, particularly since COVID.
I guess part of it is having so few models to choose from, but maybe Dell, Lenovo, and HP don't actually need that many models in the first place...
https://youtu.be/Vmp720kBLBU?list=PLBCr5xCUF7KeUlGJRAYFwccqP...
My parents were confronted with a wall of special deals competing on numbers and specs... or the computer their kid was nagging them to buy. They went with the iMac.
https://www.cultofmac.com/452599/today-apple-history-apple-b...
I bought my first PowerBook from such a section of CompUSA. That CompUSA was a good half hour drive from me and out of my way. I had to make a special trip to go pick it up.
What was cool about these set up is Apple apparently directed the stocking so they had Mac compatible accessories and Max boxed software. While the Mac had just fewer boxed titles in total than the PC the fact few stores rarely/barely stocked what existed made the disparity seem worse than it was.
Speaking of Ambrosia, it looks like EV Nova is on GOG. Maybe I should give it another spin one of these days.
Not the greatest mouse, but totally fine to use for me at the time.
I had one at home, and my day job was using grown up Macs so I was using both.
I don’t get the orientation complaints; how do people not have instant special awareness of the mouse orientation from just holding and moving it and the feel of the weight of the cable hanging out the front.
My hot take is that people just don’t like something different.
Like the Magic Mouse - to me the MM is the greatest mouse ever. Thankfully Apple don’t listen to YouTubers constantly bitching about it LOL
When you installed a card like Sound Blaster so your PC games could actually play some passable music and sound effects, you’d configure these settings with physical jumpers on the card. And then you have to pass those configuration settings to the game somehow so it can send data to the device.
You could leave the card to its default settings, but then it might collide with another device like a printer or whatever.
IRQ is short for "Interrupt Request" and each peripheral or device that needs to interrupt the CPU for time-sensitive processing needed to be assigned one. There were only 16 of them with several hard coded for certain things like RTC. Since each serial port, parallel port, floppy controller, HDD controller, video card, sound card, etc needed an IRQ assignment it was not unusual to run out of free ones and resort to overloading one or more. This was less than ideal as now multiple drivers are waking up unnecessarily for the same IRQ.
Originally these were set with physical jumpers on the motherboard and expansion cards. Most things switched to being configured with software/BIOS when the industry moved to PCI bus.
All of this still needs to be solved in a modern system, but for the most part the hardware, firmware, and OS will sort things out by themselves—even if some of the details of that process are liable to give you nightmares[3,4]. The iMac, for its part, solved this by not having any expandability at all (ISA or PCI), so the settings could be burned into the firmware.
[1] See e.g. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html
[2] I don’t think this was ever a problem for address ranges for memory-mapped I/O, UMA issues excepted,—perhaps because MMIO didn’t really become popular until PCI won and ACPI appeared?
Projects like the iMac were already underway before jobs returned under the wings of Amelio. In the same way the whole focus on education and the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.
That said, there was 10 month between Gil being ousted and the iMac being revieled so there was plenty of time for Jobs to put the finishing touches on that one could argue was what a lot of Apple products really needed at that time. But I suspect under Gil it would have been called something stupid like 'Machintosh for internet - 7400E'.
But true that many of the operational changes of the company mostly came from Gil. But also Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian etc deserve a lot of credit for shaking up the software and hardware teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300
The photo in the Wikipedia article isn't very good. The actual color of the translucent plastic is a brighter teal, fairly close to the "Bondi Blue" of the iMac that followed.
Also reminded me that Apple actually sold a dual 604e / 200 MHz system in the OS 8 era. I'm guessing the only software that could have made use of the second processor would have been some specially optimized routines in Photoshop or similar.
But it had many of the core pillars e.g. remote home directories, remote/RPC applications. NeXT in particular with frameworks like EOF/PDO pushed for more network centric desktop applications.
It doesn't sound like much today but were pretty new concepts for GUI users.
The reason I mentioned it was that there was talk that the iMac was going to be potentially the first consumer-grade thin client.
The JavaStation ran JavaOS, not Solaris. Not sure about the Sun Rays.
To my knowledge, NeXT never supported a diskless config. (Or did they?? Did anyone work with that?)
Diskless may have been an option when NeXT software was detached from NeXT hardware, though.
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/NeXTcube_running_68030_and_6804...
I get what you're saying — I'm just remembering Jobs demoing how his NeXT user account was remote and any NeXT machine he sat down on and logged into suddenly became "his" computer.
That's the "thin" client I'm thinking of. But maybe that's just "client".
That’s something that thin clients also promise, but doesn’t require using thin clients.
Its claim to fame was bringing the term Architecture Astronaut into common parlance.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
In retrospect, it's quite funny in light of how webapps and Cloud evolved. As Spolsky predicted in 1998:
"between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us"
"And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him."
Go ahead, try and take away that feature now, see if any customers complain.
NeXT rendering engine was display postscript and they had a common set-up of rendering the DPS on a remote computer while logged in over a network. The overall set-up meant that all the data was at headquarters and users could login in from any location and have a local DPS rendering of the centralized user account.
Amelio simplified the product categories down to four. They were still full of garbage--Jobs made the real difference there. He got rid of all the trash peripherals and replaced the (many) computer lines with only the iMac.
Amelio failed to cut the printer/accessory divisions which were mostly just selling rebadged hardware from other companies. He kept the Newton division even though it was not on a trajectory to success (I say this as a long time Newton fan). He also kept around far more Mac SKUs than were necessary (Performas, education-only SKUs). That's all stuff Jobs cut when he came back.
Amelio had the unenviable task of righting a sinking ship. He didn't necessarily do a bad job at it but acqui-merging with Next and getting Jobs back was the best choice he made during his tenure.
In a way Gil probably would have done very well working under Jobs but once you are in the CEO seat, there is no chance of taking that demotion.
The keyboard is fine though laptop-sized with cramped arrow keys, but the original revision iMac puck mouse is a famous case of form over function. It's not actually as bad as its reputation suggests, but Apple still silently admitted to the flawed design by adding a little centered dimple to the butan on the later five-colors version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
“There's no reason that the Macintosh won't be an absolutely perfect gaming platform for anything that you wanna do. […] The only thing that you wanna do with a Mac as a serious gamer — you wanna pull out the silly one-button mouse and plug in a three-button mouse pretty quick, but aside from that…” — John Carmack, 1999 https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=4791
I'm actually looking for a similar kind of mouse for my small child today. He can't quite palm a mouse very well, and he often gets mixed up with right click and scroll and scroll click. When I get him focused on the right mouse button he can play some basic mouse-based games but he'll often end up getting distracted by the mouse wheel or right click which can sometimes drop him out of the games he's wanting to play.
Don't get me wrong the hockey puck mouse was probably atrocious for adult hands but as a little kid it was actually pretty nice.
Edit: but there is one concern - they are not optical mice and use a ball. So if they’re really young you might want something more like an apple pro mouse
1) They're all old and are of questionable state second hand.
2) They're all ball mice, as you mentioned there's issues with those over an optical mouse
3) They almost always have ridiculously short cables. They're designed to be used with the Apple USB keyboards which had the extra USB port on the side of the keyboard that they would plug into.
Sure, some of these problems could just be overlooked or solved with accessories but in the end I'd rather just have something new which I know will work well and won't require me to get a USB extension cable or whatever. I'd really like something in a similar enough form factor but wireless and optical.
I find using a single button mouse an interesting exercise - both windows and MacOS are usable without it, MacOS in particular you can still do ctrl+left click to get a right click. It sounds silly but when I use a mouse my left hand is still usually on the keyboard so it's not really a big deal.
I haven't done it in years, but I didn't really feel like I missed having 2 buttons and a scroll wheel when I used a 'pro mouse' lol.
Now, I could rant for a while about how awful the ergonomics of the magic mouse are!
Apple person: my computer can do anything yours can and better
window person: can you right-click?
I moved from SLC to Portland in 2000, and had it in my head that I would join a graphic design firm as their on-hand developer. (At the time, I was of the opinion that design and development should happen under the same roof, a belief that ultimately proved correct, but under the other roof.)
So I spent months shopping around my resume — with a prominent link to my website — to mostly-confused graphic designers, and didn't get a single callback or even an email saying "thanks but no." After around six months I sort of gave up and became the UI guy at a shipping company.
At the shipping co, I saw a bunch of "smurf" Powermac G4s in the corner. "Yeah those are for testing, but nobody uses Macs so we don't really care." I decided to take a look at my website on the latest version of MSIE just for the hell of it.
Instant computer crash. A bug in MSIE's CSS engine took down the whole computer. Not just the browser, the whole thing. All graphic designers at the time were still on Mac Classic, OS X had no penetration yet. I had been walking into offices, and turning off computers with unsaved work for months.
The first thing I did with some spending cash was get a "graphite" 400mhz iMac G3, installed OS X as I was becoming disenchanted with Windows, and soon found that I liked using that pathetically slow machine far more than my tricked-out 1.6ghz AMD Athlon.
I think the closest I felt to that later on was around the time when Vista came out and everyone was using WindowBlinds to change their theme up.
I've had a number of conversations with people in the last few years who didn't work through the 90s, and who therefore had NO idea the absolutely stranglehold MSFT had on computing in that era. And I get it; it's hard to see today, when we have 5 or 6 viable platforms to work on (two flavors of mobile; Mac; Windows; ChromeOS; Linux). The degree to which being non-Windows in that era put you in a bit of a desert, especially as Apple hit its darkest years, is really really difficult to grasp now.
If you try to explain the wildly predatory things MSFT did, like insisting that every computer sold include a Windows license, they just sound like evil overlord plots. "Whoa, that can't be right..."
And maybe the biggest one is the fact that Apple itself -- now a juggernaut of profitability and stability, and a real leader in the industry on several fronts -- very nearly went under, which would've taken with it the only other viable desktop OS of the time, further cementing Redmond's domination.
Its recovery, starting with the iMac, is absolutely one of the greatest turnarounds in American business history.
Obviously, it wasn't all Steve, and required a lot of things to go their way, but the results are still amazing to me.
And yet: If you're 25, Apple has ALWAYS been who Apple is today. If you're 25, we've always had great options for computing environments with near-parity experiences. If you're 25, no single vendor has had anything like the kind of market power MSFT had.
It's a weird thing to realize the events of your early adulthood have become paragraphs in history books but here we are.
Then I started using it and wondered what people actually used it for, it seemed to do nothing I was used to doing on other computers.
And even though now it's obvious why you'd buy a Mac, that's been my relationship with them ever since! Hardware envy, but I like Linux too much to leave it behind.
That was what the “i” in “iMac” was for. It had a built-in 56K modem, with an RJ-11 jack.
My story diverged from yours when one of my Mac using friends said "Apple is releasing a Unix based OS." I thought "oh please make it Unix with an awesome GUI." I was so tired of working on my GUI in linux instead of working with it. I just wanted Wi-Fi to work, I wanted wake from sleep to work consistently, I didn't want my graphics drivers to break or be so much different to configure on a different device. I wanted a consistent trackpad experience. And Apple delivered. Some of my happiest feelings of my first Mac, the 12" mbp, were about how little I used it because I was able to open it, quickly do what I wanted, and then close it. I had been using Linux as my daily driver, but switched to OS X 10.2.6, and have been there ever since. Between then and now I've used a fair variety of unixes for work, like aix, hpux, solaris, FreeBSD, and linux, and I've never been without at least a few Linux boxes at my house, but I find that the macOS GUI does the best job of getting out of the way so I can get to work.
Every once in a while I try out a Linux GUI, hoping that I'll be compelled to give it a shot as my primary work environment. I have an old Thinkpad that I keep loaded with some desktop flavor, but I always run into things that steer me back to macOS.
I was exposed to NeXTSTEP on my job then and loved it. And I was using FreeBSD at home.
Then Mac OS X came, basically NeXTSTEP with some FreeBSD and a gorgeous GUI. Shut up and take my money…
(EDIT: This is HN, we all know that integrated CPUs/GPUs are not what is referred to as GPU.
Please don't be pedantic. )
I was on Win95 on laptops in the 90s, and that was a complete dumpster fire. Sleep never worked, long boot times, etc. But at the time, I was mostly producing documents and presentations, and Office was file-format-consistent across both platforms. I saw how a colleague's Powerbook worked, and bought my own. It was a HUGE improvement even though it was pre-OSX.
Then the firm tanked, and I went back to coding (LAMP stuff) at about the same time OSX was released. I upgraded and never looked back.
Having a machine where zsh is a click away and on which I can ALSO run Excel is wonderful.
I wired it up in my little brothers(10) room. He would play nethack and make elaborate barcode based auth systems with it. A lot of fun. I still have strange dreams of running an entire office off terminals to this day. Strangely nobody has taken me up on it yet.
But the real lesson is do your part and help a poor high school kid.
Uh, in my country that was exactly the reverse. Macs were for creation people: journalists, writers, audio and video producers, press people, cinema, poster designs, comic books... everything multimedia related.
If you knew what CMYK/RGB does mean, you'd probably be using a Mac at work.
Also it didn't feel like Apple was for consumers until the iPod came out.
In Portugal, nowadays there are Apple Stores all over the big cities, although people still mostly buy them on credit and cable TV deals, back in those days there was a single vendor, Interlog in Lisbon, that would sell for the whole country.
Buying Apple gear meant either traveling to Lisbon, having them coming to the company if big enough or a renowed university, or buying by catalog in the listings from computer magazines.
Here's the quote from the article.
> But Apple reasoned that most people were consumers, not creators.
I also remember Nintendo 64s and their controllers coming in see-through cases. These cases were available in a variety of bright colours. Ref: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/87/ae/3c87ae0913e29c2109cc...
It can't all be rose tinted glasses; the world was genuinely more colourful back then.
March 22, 2001: "Don't Cry for Me Argentina"
Steve Jobs was back at Apple, the blue iMac was out, Microsoft was in big anti-trust trouble and had just invested $100m in Apple, Steve had bought out NeXT. But the future wasn't yet assured:
This won't be easy,
you'll think it's strange.
When we try to explain what we need
that we now need your help
after all that we've said.
You won't believe us.
All you'll see is Apple you once knew,
although we've crashed down in the dumps
begging for Microsoft cash.
It didn't have to happen.
We should have won
Better software and patents than Bill
Looking down on Windows,
staying far from Sun.
So we chose NeXT.
Running aground, trying computers in blue.
But nothing revived us at all.
You never expected it too.
Don't cry for us, William H. Gates.
The truth is we're dead without you.
We need your dollars
We need Mac Office
You need a rival, for your survival.
And as for Fortune,
and as for Time,
We never invited them in
though it appeared, to the world,
they were all Steve desired.
Even Adobe,
they're making solutions for Windows right now
The answer was here all the time.
We need you, and hope you need us.
[chorus]
Have we begged too much?
There's nothing more we can think of to say to you.
But all you have to do,
is look at us to know,
we're through without you.I understand your need to take a dig at Apple, but the current iMac comes in orange, purple, pink, yellow, blue, green and silver.
It’s also a timeless design. The 2008 unibody MacBooks look like they could have been made brand new yesterday, with the only giveaways being the I/O and the bezels on the display.
It’s safe to say that the design will almost certainly (reasonably) never get old.
I was a fledgling IT Manager in SoCal and went to the local Fry’s Electronics to check out an iMac. It was the first time I had ever seen a line of people out the door with computers in their shopping carts.
What made all of this more remarkable is that most tech-savvy people knew that both the hardware and software (OS) were sub-par as Apple had gone through a long period without great direction. But this is the genius of Jobs. He regains control of Apple and with minimal resources figures out how to sell a very mediocre computer computer by the truckload.
The packaging (not just the box or case) was brilliant. Old hardware, mediocre software, wrapped in a beautiful, unique package with enough nice features and a low price to make it sell very well.
Up to that point I’d never owned an Apple product, and the iMac was not enough to sway me. It took OS X, adding BSD to the core of the OS, along much more beautiful and much improved hardware in the form of the 2002- era MacBook Pro. Still all in all a stroke of genius. My main personal computing devices (outside gaming and server rigs) have been Apple ever since.
However, after a while the design language was picked up by other brands ... and you could see translucent and coloured plastic on pretty much all types of products for a while: from PCs to home electronics to toilet paper holders, and by then it started to feel a little tacky.
I hate reading how easily humans are exploited.
You’ve commented hundreds of times on a site that is the marketing campaign of a VC firm.
Apple had their hands on education for sure, as most buildings had at least one room with rows and rows of the blue iMacs. The library and others had publicly available iMacs.
I had a job doing inventory for the schools accounting department (not to be confused with Accounting, the education department) - I tagged a lot of computers. In competition with departments getting iMac’s were ones getting cheap, unpowered Dell desktops.
More to the point, I remember when our computer lab got an entire room of iMacs and I can still remember their new smell, and how exciting it was to have them. We also got a lab full of the candy colored G3(?)s for the film & video students.
Also, the advertising was fresh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#/media/File:Boya...
That's not true. USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
Apple innovated a lot, but frequently get credit for many that didn't come from them.
They only included USB on the original iMac, which was a death-knell for the legacy connectors, and quite controversial at the time given the iMac's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
Don't you consider the original Mac adoption of the 3.5" floppy drive as innovation?
Yes. USB ports certainly existed on PCs prior to the iMac's release in August 1998 and announcement in May 1998. They were, however, largely unused because of a lack of mass-market USB peripherals. Keyboards and mice used PS/2 ports. Printers (and ZIP drives!) used parallel ports. More expensive peripherals (storage and scanners) used SCSI. A handful of other devices used RS-232 serial. Go back to those old PC World magazines and look for the mass-market USB peripherals available for sale and let me know what you find.
Starting with the iMac-inspired Cambrian explosion in USB peripherals and for a rather lengthy period of time measured in years afterwards, it was actually rather difficult to find USB peripherals that were not made out of translucent plastic to match iMacs.
Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
"UNTIL RECENTLY , USB hardware was as scarce as hen's teeth . Now, after almost two years of foot-dragging, hardware companies are fina ll y delivering peripherals. We tested 18 of these new products"
Among the products there are keyboards, mouses, joysticks, cameras, scanners, speakers... you name it.
>Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
Sure they were scarcely used, support began with Windows 95 OSR 2 in Aug-97. And relatively new computers were only a fraction of the market. But the real market driver was the PC.
https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/
Edited to add link and page reference.
I was a diehard PC user way back then but even I wasn't shameless enough to claim the iMac had nothing to do with pushing USB forward.
So many peripherals were still PS/2 (for mice), parallel (eg Zip/Tape drives), or serial (soooooo many things especially bespoke, industrial, or specialized equipment).
Think about it: do all PCs have USB ports? Definitely not. Do all PCs have a serial port? 99% yes. You're a manufacturer making a non-top-100 product. Do you use the new-fangled USB or do you use a serial FIFO? Obviously you use serial. That maximizes your audience.
But the iMac changed the thinking: This new iMac thing is hot. Seems like Apple is on the rise again. If I want to sell to these customers (who are more affluent and known to buy more software/accessories) I don't have a choice: it must be USB. I know the majority of the PC install base doesn't have USB yet but most new PCs do so I can still reach a lot of the PC audience. So the next version of my product uses USB (or a USB-FIFO bridge). As more of the market switched to USB even existing PC users installed USB expansion cards.
Would USB have eventually gotten there? Yes. Would it have done so as quickly? I don't think so. The wide-open nature of the PC has always been both its boon and bane. See the many attempts to supplant x86 in the PC world, the several attempts to replace or expand ISA before PCI, etc.
I remember testing the original iMac at a computer trade fair back in it's day, and I was not impressed at all. For me it was a cheap looking plastic computer that didn't have a floppy drive (but hey they sold you one) and _forced_ you into an integrated monitor.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/04/19Apple-Ships-5-Milli...
Edit typo.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/72
It's true however that until year change 97/98 USB devices were very rare. Windows got support half a year before in Aug97.
In fact, I still have it and it works beautifully (except for the CD tray, which to my knowledge is unrepairable as there are no replacement devices out there - I have to use a firewire external instead).
I'd used Apple computers throughout art school in the 90s, and absolutely loved the UI. I used Windows NT at work, and the iMac at home. Back then I used Earthlink to get online and check my email. I used Macromedia products for web design. And Adobe products for, well, photoshop mainly. Later in the early 2000's when I saw people upgrading to OS X, I clung to 9.2.2 and made that machine keep that OS forever. I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS.
Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.
It’s too bad that Classic Mac OS soundsets didn’t make the cut when selecting features to bring over to OS X. I can understand why they might disabled by default but they would’ve been nice to have as an option.
Same for Appearance Manager themes, really. That feature was never really marketed much and many users probably didn’t even know they existed since OS 8.5-9.2 only included Platinum, but it was cool to have theming capabilities on par with the third party Kaleidoscope (which is unparalleled on modern operating systems — not even Linux can compare) built right in, but that’s just not something that could’ve happened worth Jobs at the helm.
The iMacs were pretty and started a lot of HW innovation but the actual experience of using them was not great. OS 8/OS 9 were still bad operating systems, and the first few releases of OS X were not very stable either.
They looked nice, but didn't work as well for us as the boring beige towers.
Mac OS 8 and 9 didn’t even have memory protection. A program with faulty memory management, which wasn’t uncommon since it was before the creation of the wonderful and magnificent Rust, could very well destroy the runtime memory of other programs and even the kernel…
I wouldn't call that particularly weird.
I thought it looked like a bubblegum toy computer for kids so I didn't want one. I was a kid myself, but hey, all the computers I was familiar with were serious beige boxes and this didn't seem "professional" enough. But I was intrigued.
I'm also intrigued about the "Princess Bride" analogy in the article, I'm still processing that. Is SJ being compared to Cary Elwes or am I missing the joke?
There's a scene where the Man in Black is barely alive / awake after taking The Miracle Pill, while Fezzik and Inigo are telling him he has to help them stop the wedding and rescue the princess. He says "and our assets?" As little as they have, it just happens to be exactly what they need to give them an advantage.
I suppose if Steve Jobs came in and asked someone at Apple to list their assets, then yes, he's being compared to the Man in Black, as he's asked to save the day!
> With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan.
Contrast with their view of the internet today, now that they own the mobile platform that is dominant in the most important market.
One thing I'd like is that Apple would have their pro product line offer more colours.
The white ibook G4 was really the one I saw starting making dent at the pc market, especially with students.
It’s absolutely accurate to say the iMac is the product that launched the modern era of Apple. Had it been a flop the company likely would have gone under.
Do you have a number of units solds for the first gen imac G3 compared to say, the combined sales of all the Macintosh PowerMacintosh/Performa models of the generation before and the global growth of regular PC at the time?
My perception, and I emphasize in the word perception, because I lack numbers, is that the early imac and ibook were quite ridiculized for their appearance and the imac/ibook/probook series started being fashionable and successful items the generation after those: white ibook, flat LCD panel imac G4, titanium powerbooks...Those were the ones you would see elsewhere compared to the aquarium looking imac g3 and the clamshell "toilet seat" ibook that nobody wanted to be seen with. Hence me looking for numbers instead of praising news article written with rose tinted glasses and without sales numbers.
And I mean by that it may have saved apple temporarily by at least reversing/flattening the curb while not being a mega success. Macs were losing market share every year, just not losing more market share or gaining a little bit can be considered a success even without making a huge dent in the PC market.
I saw a chart that was showing the revenues and they didn't really grow from 1998 to 2000. The real increase started between 2001 - 2005 which correspond to the second gen imac and more importantly the ipod.
Having said that the apple share stopped declining after the first imace release so it may not have generated a lot of money but at least gave confidence in the market.
Yikes, that's a hell of a statement about a company with 20% global market share on smartphones and 8% on PCs -- as well as a negligible enterprise and server share.
Apple's only the most important technology company to the professional-managerial class, where the social clout gained by owning an Apple product is much more important than the product itself.