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R.I.P. Original iMac: 1998-2003
Joey Patterson writes "CNET News.com reports that, after five years, Apple has stopped selling the gumdrop-shaped iMac to the general public."
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Apple also released today an Xserve Cluster Node that has no graphics card and starts at $1000 than the high-end Xserve.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I've never bought from them myself but they seem well talked of on Mac sites.
Um, they weren't the *same computer* they sold 5 years ago I'm afraid. I count 20 revisions made to that machine in 5 years. That gives each system a shelf life of about three months!
Being a PC tech, I never really get to play with macs too much. I have had 3 with shot monitors come across my desk though.
:(
My buddy bought some Imac with firewire for $150 bucks. AV version I think it was called. Anyways he brought it over, I patched his OS9 to its latest patches. He had it for about 2 weeks until the monitor gave out.
So of course, he brings it back to me. Having never ripped one of these things open I was excited at the prospect of tinkering around with some new hardware. Before I grabbed a screwdriver I called apple.
tech: No matter what the problem is, hold the special programmers button on the side, it erases the nvram which will make your monitor work because it has a bad analog board.
After several attempts at this and failing he gave me something else to try.
tech: press the apple key + q r a t during bootup, again this will fix your problem.
Well, again that lead nowhere.
So with the help of my fine freind google, I found a PDF service manual and some more docs. I converted the imac into a pile of electronic parts, pressed some magic button inside and still, black screen
Eventually I read that the analog boards on these things go out quite frequently, the replacement cost of the board went way above the $150 my friend had originally paid for it. I talked him into getting an external monitor (works now) and things were happy again.
As others have pointed out, Apple didn't sell the same machine for 5 years. Here's a useful chart showing the different versions of the G3/CRT iMac. (I think there may have been some slight variations for the educational market, in terms of memory and drives)
Things which remained the same across revisions:
- Shape and size (height and weight changed slightly, I think this was due to CRT changes)
- 15" CRT (actually, I think different CRTs were used, but all were 15")
- USB
- CPU type (various revisions of the G3 processor family)
- Lack of floppy drive
- 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
- 56 kbps modem
Things which changed between releases:- Price (no, it didn't start out as a sub-$1000 machine!)
- color (Bondi blue, fruit flavors [strawberry, orange, lime, blueberry, grape], indigo, ruby, graphite, blue dalmation, flower power, snow)
- speed (started at 233Mhz, finished at 700Mhz)
- memory (32MB
... 256MB)
- hard disk (4GB
... 60GB)
- mouse (they eventually dropped that evil hockey puck but it took them too long to do that...)
- keyboard (changed when the mouse changed, I think)
- video card (Various flavors of ATI Rage cards, from Rage IIc to RAGE Ultra 128)
- IR port
.. quietly dropped in Revision C (when the fruit flavors were added)
- internal expansion
.. the never-supported "Mezannine" slot was dropped in Revision c)
- Firewire
.. introduced to some machines in 1999, but wasn't included with all machines until 2001
- Airport (802.11b)
.. slowly added to product line, same as Firewire
- Fan
.. Rev. A and Rev. B had fans, the fanless iMac began with Rev. C
- optical drive
.. CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-RW of varoius speeds (I don't think the Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) or SuperDrive (DVD-RW/CD-RW) were ever available)
A number of very different machines, but all basically looked the same (ignoring color) and were sold under the same name.-- Tim Buchheim