The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least
- Reference: 1588803010
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/06/the_imac_at_22/
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The machine showcased at the MacWorld event was the [1]iMac G3 . It was, to put it gently, uncharacteristic for the era. As the wider industry churned out unremarkable beige boxes and towers, the iMac was colourful. Playful, even.
[2]Youtube Video
The chassis was partially constructed out of a translucent plastic, and came in 13 different hues, with names like "Bondi Blue" and "Flower Power". It ditched the customary right angles for a curved design that enveloped the 15-inch display. And while rival machines were pockmarked with a dizzying array of serial ports, the iMac G3 kept things, er, minimal with just two USB ports.
The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs [3]READ MORE
"The back of this thing looks better than the other guys," remarked Jobs to a room full of laughter. "It looks like it's from another planet – a good planet. A planet with better designers."
And that was the point of the iMac G3. It emerged at a point when computing had ceased to be the preserve of businesses and hobbyists, becoming a staple facet of everyday life. So why shouldn't it look good?
Of course, there were detractors. Writing for The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray described the iMac G3 as [4]"too odd to succeed" and Apple as "a computer company on the cutting edge of irrelevance". Apple, Bray said, hadn't "lost its knack for the irrational" and predicted the iMac would "only sell to the true believers, and not as many of them as you might think".
A huge point of contention was the absence of the 3.5-inch floppy drive, which remained a staple of the PC world until the early 2000s, and was described by Bray as "an astonishing lapse from Jobs, who should have learned better".
But what ultimately defined the iMac was its wholehearted embrace of the internet, which was swiftly going mainstream. The iMac G3 deliberately embodied that trend, with the "i" standing for internet (as well as "individual", "instruct", "inform" and "inspire" but not "idiot").
The iMac G3 had a 56.6Kbps modem, and packed 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet, which made it simpler for education customers to network. At that point, the US education system was one of Apple's most faithful bases, with Cupertino dominating the market until late 1999, thanks to its strategy of selling cheaper machines. In many respects, the iMac G3 was as much aimed at schools as it was home users.
While the G3 trod new ground in industrial design, it's also significant for saving Apple. In the mid-1990s, Apple was the sick man of the computing world, haemorrhaging money and customers. It sold a dizzying array of products, many of which were dismal failures, like the Newton and the Bandai Pippin games console.
Worse, Apple had effectively devalued the Macintosh by allowing third parties to license the Mac OS 7 and Mac OS 8 operating systems. Many of these "clones" were more powerful than official Macintosh computers, yet sold at a fraction of the price.
In the financial year ending 26 September 1997
[5]PDF
, Apple lost $1bn. The very existence of the company was in doubt, prompting Dell CEO Michael Dell to say that if he was in charge of Apple he'd "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders". It's a quote that will forever live in infamy, not least because Apple eclipsed Dell's market value from 2006 onwards.But thanks to products like the iMac G3, which sold nearly 280,000 units in the six weeks after its launch, and aggressive product rationalisation decisions from Jobs, Apple returned to profitability in 1998, with earnings of over $300m.
And the rest, they say, is history. ®
Sponsored: [6]Legacy Modernization: Finding Your Way With Low-Code
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHPtoTctDY
[3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/10/steve_jobs_bio_2/
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/05/06/toooddtosucceed.jpg
[5] http://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/a/NASDAQ_AAPL_1997.pdf
[6] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8553/legacy-modernization-finding-your-way-with-low-code?td=wptl1936
SGI were way more revolutionary.
The iMacs were sold to rich Californians to have a computer at home for the kids. So it wasn't exactly revolutionary that it matched a teenage girl's bedroom.
SGI sold the most powerfull machines you could fit on a desk - to people curing cancer.
It takes a lot more chutzpah to sell a $20,000 machine for drug design and say - oh by the way, it's going to be pink
As a mere physicist we got Suns to repalce the Vaxen - always envious of the chemists
Didn't Jobs actually say...
"The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys"?
Being more computery than the average consumer, I remained uninterested in the Mac until OS X when the pitch was a UNIX with a first-class UI (this was in the XP period, recall) that runs Microsoft Office (with bonus nerd points: it's RISC!). I'm still a big fan.
The full-blown Apple formula
Make it "desirable" - this machine looked different, in a good way, to anything else on the market.
Make it familiar - it ran Apple's OS. In the 'states and in Yorkshire (oddly), Apple was standard in schools*
Give it some useful features that few other devices have - even in 1998, networking was an "extra" for Windows machines (certainly those destined for the home) - very few motherboards (did any?) came with a port as standard and consumer machines often didn't include the add-in card. Installing a network card on Windows was far from plug-and-play even once W98 was out but here it was, already built-in and working in the iMac.
After all the good stuff you then make it incompatible with previous and other systems in clever ways.
The machine had a CD drive, but IIRC it was read-only, not a writer, so the only way to get information out of the machine was by network or by "something" that plugged into a USB port. Of course, Apple had such devices ready.
Unceremoniously ditching the external SCSI bus and the Apple Desktop Bus meant that anyone already invested in the system had to buy new peripherals (they couldn't bring the keyboard from their old Mac with them), and with Windows's USB stack being somewhat fragile at that point (from what I remember) the market for third-party USB peripherals was quite small.
So Apple made a desirable machine, the buying of which was only the first part, and also made a lot of money from the add-ons.
It's a formula that worked for them for many years after that (as witnessed by the sheer variety of adapters I have to carry at work in order to be able to connect Apple machines to projectors), but seems to have fallen apart more recently, or maybe the PowerMac's monitor stand and case wheels are just someone trying to see how far they can push the punters.
M.
*I understand the point about the clones. Apple saw Microsoft and thought they could emulate them, completely forgetting that while Microsoft had always been purely a software company (that has failed time after time in hardware), Apple had always been a software *and* hardware company. What most people forget with the clone debacle though is that it introduced a lot more people to MacOS who would otherwise have ignored it on cost grounds alone. When the clone market was shuttered, these people had often already invested time and money in MacOS software and were either going to have to start from scratch with Windows or would be compelled to buy new Apple hardware. I would contend that while in the short run the clones were (very) bad for Apple, once Apple had blocked the clone makers, the larger userbase became an asset - people who would in future buy Apple hardware.
Sorry guys, the iMac was riipping off the SGI boxes before it like the o2 and indigo's coloured and shaped chassis.
Hell they even took Macs to the gfx and vfx conferences prior to launching these. No-one took much notice of them because they couldn't do anything compared to the other machines.