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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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I'll miss the old iMacs, they really sent a shockwave throught the PC community (prompting many users to get one even if they didnt know what the hell they were getting into in the mac world), and a lot of new ideas and concepts.
I especially liked the manuals... the shortest manuals ever, something like 20 words right? But anyways, I've gotta hand it to Apple for those things lasting as long as they did, and bringing a new style and appeal to the computer market. Live long and prosper iMac..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
As long as they keep selling the eMac, how significant is this announcement? I mean, provided that you can spend the extra coin, the eMac seems like a better choice what with the larger CRT and all.
Still, it will be hard to make a fishtank out of the flat-panel iMACs...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
5 years is much longer time than your average x86 PC company would sell a computer for. I'm no Mac fanatic, in fact, I don't even own one, but I guess this goes to show that Apple does make solid products that last for a while.
Apple didn't go away, just the shape. And, if you're tied to a curvy all-in-one system with a CRT, you can still go with the iMac's big brother.
On a more serious note, Apple got lots of praise and lots of flak for producing a translucent computer. They knew it was "trendy" and they knew when to move on. Now everyone making a translucent device that wasn't designed to be translucent should move on, too.
There are all the usual jokes about the vacuum cleaners and the iLamp, but have you heard anyone say, "While the user interface is straightforward and the availability of the BSD architecture is a great plus, I'd never buy one because I think it looks like a lamp." - No. They don't know anything about them, but their friends said Macs suck 15 years ago, so they fall back on the only insults they know.
Sorry for the rant.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
scripsit inputsprocket:
Maybe an institution would have an interest in a standard platform? If I've already got (say) forty-five eMacs and I get the funds to add five more to my lab, is it inconceivable that I'd want to get five more like the ones I have, so I don't need to support an additional hardware configuration?
Not everything's a conspiracy...
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
I wouldn't buy a computer that looks like a lamp. I want my computer to look like a computer, damn it.
------------
And 20 years ago it was revolutionary to "componantize" the home computer.
"There is nothing that hasn't been thought of. The trick is to think of it again." - Goethe
KFG
Neither was USB, the lack of a floppy drive, or a round and colored case. But the combination of these (and others) in one radically different computer probably changed the history of personal computers.
What a bunch of bullshit!
Please point me to where I can get a dual or quad Xeon system for $2800 from a commercial vendor that will provide support for it. Thanks.
I had one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs. While other people were praising its beauty, I thought it was kinda ugly. As a fashion statement, the blue translucent plastic seemed somehow akin to bell-bottom trousers and leisure suits. The periodic release of new machines with different color schemes seemed to support that view.
But it was a fine computer. The original iMac was a brave departure from the beige boxes we'd all become so accustomed to. The compact all-in-one design simplified things for people who don't want to invest a lot of time in figuring out how everything goes together. (You or I may feel unfulfilled with any computer we haven't built with our bare hands from raw sand, but there are plenty of folks who just want to use the thing.)
The iMac moved things forward in part by turning its back on a lot of legacy stuff. The iMac upset a lot of long-time Mac fanatics who were upset that they couldn't plug their old ADB and serial peripherals into the USB ports. Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives, I guess the iMac's work here is done.
Snif... Drat... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
In my computer, I want some style. In my stapler? I probably want something that's going to push bits of metal into paper well for five years or more.
Just like I want my car to have some pizazz. My garage door opener? Pizazz is probably just going make it work poorly.
And that's because YOU weren't their target market for them.
The iMac was designed to be used by grandmas and the like, to send e-mail and browse the web. People like grandma don't need expansion or upgrade capability. Grandma won't be swapping out her video card and processor over the weekend to squeeze a few more FPS out of Quake III. As long as the machine starts up and runs when she wants to use it, it will always be plenty fast for grandma.
Don't call them cheap crap just because they didn't meet your needs. They were very good machines, they did just what they were designed to do, and for whom they were designed to do it, period. If they didn't, the model wouldn't have survived on the price list for almost five years, so show some freakin' respect-- if not for the iMac, there might not have BEEN those Power Macs you like so much.
~Philly
What was revolutionary about the iMac was the near total dependence on the plug-and-play USB interface. We didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but computers became a lot easier to deal with when one did not have to mess around with a multitude of different interfaces and cables (scsi, parallel, serial, ps2, adb,etc).
/. posted the story on the introduction of the iMac. Whoa, flames galore!
Let's see what I have now. USB mouse, keyboard, zip drive, floppy drive, scanner, Palm Pilot cradle, SD/MMC card reader, laser printer, ink-jet printer, web-cam, and link to my digital camera. All hot swappable, all plug and play, and no rebooting.
What is kind of weird is that I can remember when
Having read this I thought "right, go to ebay and buy one to run 'nix on). But they are still 75% more than an "equivalent" PC :-
Still have two of the originals (almost), and the only time they gave me trouble was after a lightning hit to my home. Every ethernet device in the house went out, including two iMac motherboards. Insurance paid, but a year later I discovered after a lot of pain that the processor card had been partly fried but only showed symptoms when upgrading from 32 to 256MB RAM for OS X. Got a new processor card on eBay for $50, and it lives on and on, serving my daughters for all their school, chat, and music download needs... I expect they will drag the iMacs off to college in the next year or two. Better than worrying about an iBook being stolen!
Jobs' Mac gave us windows, icons, mice, and pointers. His NeXT computer gave us the WWW, his iMac gave us a network appliance, and his OS X gave us Unix for teenagers. Quite a set of lifetime achievements...
ThosEM
You're wrong, and in the time that it took you to post your question to Slash, you could have typed www.apple.com in your broswer, and choose visit apple store see for your self, but that would have required that you really cared about the question, now wouldn't it?
I agree with the original poster... the sooner that fad dies, the better. There's more to stylish design than translucent plastic, and blindly applying an idea to everything you can get your hands on because someone else did it successfully is just another form of conformity
I bought a Dell PII 266 MHz about 6 years ago (64 Mb RAM, 6Gb HD). I have since upgraded the RAM to 128 Mb, the HD to 20Gb and the original 2D Gfx card to a 3D capable one. It runs Windows XP/ Office XP flawlessly, although not like a racing horse. It runs most of the recent games, with Gfx options set to a minimum.
I predict its end of life as a gaming machine in about 2 years, as the motherboard does not have an AGP slot, the PCI 3dfx card is not supported anymore and all new Gfx cards require AGP.
Of course, it was the most powerful configuration that could be bought then, but it shows that quality made PC can last as long as Macs.
Krouic
15 years ago was 1988. In february that year, Apple released A/UX 1.0, which combined a SVR Unix with Macintosh system software 6 (it wasn't called MacOS then.) Probably you would run in on some variant of Macintosh II (first released in 1987!), which had six NuBus slots into which you could plug extension cards, such as 8bit and 24bit! graphics cards and network cards. The OS supported multiple displays.
So while the PC-world was still struggling with DOS and pre-3.11 Windows, we Mac-people could enjoy Unix, vivid colors, multiple monitors, and of course the pleasant experience of using the Macintosh interface.
Now tell me which computer type *really* sucked in 1988?
-Lasse