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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
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
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