Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
Ahh, the end of an age. The only computer my mother ever used that almost completely replaced my usefulness.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Perhaps now that people realize Apple has stopped selling fruit colored computers we can see the end of all the pink and purple translucent plastic office products...
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?
I wonder if this means the newspaper comic Fox Trot will retire its iFruit computer.
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
It indeed is a sad day...
...and it was like, beep beep beep... and it was, like, gone...
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.
It was cool, the only problem is that Apple never sells old systems and Mac addicts seem to be far less likely to sell their computers on ebay. Since I don't want to pay $800 for a computer I only want to play around with, that usually means the only macs I get are covered in grease...
Anyone know a good place to buy old (like 3-5 yr. old) Apple computers like imacs or ibooks?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I'm surprised that slashdot posted about the CNET article about the end of the original iMac instead of new clustering Xserve. I mean think about it. Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of...oh nevermind.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
As far as computing is concerned, the iMac was just a blip on the screen of desktop computing. But realize the impact the iMac had on industrial design for absolutely everything.
You couldn't swing a deat cat and not hit a differently colored George Foreman grill, a phone, a printer, a kitchen gizmo, some transparently housed electronic gizmo, another technologically-all-in-one-packaged device, or any combination of the two.
Lest we forget the bold step Apple gave us in dropping the floppy, and changing the way peripheral removeable storage designers view the desktop.
It's cheaper. Eductational institutions are often compelled by budget restraints to buy lower cost items than other people/institutions. I'm sure Apple would rather they buy an older machine than no Mac at all.
Old Macdonald had a farm.
e Mac
i Mac
e mac
i Mac
O Mac
'Course my fave is BigMac.
Best Windows Freeware
Damn, then why am I trying to flog this darn Performa on eBay for 100 Euros!
Yes, fair enough and Apple have always had their entry level Macs for many a school to whip up, and I suppose the eMac will take centre stage on that front, but there's a big difference between entry level and discontinued.
Hey, they are still available through educational channels. I just ordered another one given the success I have had with an iMac running Webvision. This site is a new iMac G3 running OS X and is getting on average 30 thousand hits/day and the machine is absolutely quiet with no fans so one can actually have their server up and running right next to your desk.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I don't think it's too much hyperbole to claim that the iMac was one of the most revolutionary computers -- ever. The all-in-one factor was important, certainly, though not unique by itself. 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. When was the last time you saw a large manufacturer sell a beige case? When was the last time you saw a computer that didn't come with USB? Even now, manufacturers are still slowly phasing out the floppy drive, something that Apple basically did with that one bombshell back in 1998. Love it or hate it, the iMac changed the face of computing forever, and will be remembered as such a pioneer in the annals of the history of personal computing.
::bows and gets off his soapbox::
-- shayborg
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!
Uk apple store still has it, as does the French, Spanish, German, Austrian and Irish (and i'm guessing the rest of the world apart from The USA, but I'm too lazy to check any more countries.) They start from 999 or £649.
The new iMac is better in nearly every way, but one nice thing about the old CRT-based iMac is that it is difficult to damage.
CRTs are not bullet-proof, but they are much more "bored kid with a pen"-proof than LCDs.
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.
Alarm clock designers, cheap plastic toy manufactors, and eMachines annouced plans to "reinvent" their catalogs, creating whole new lines of items, based on the idea of a solid base, with a flexable-like and a flat screen interface.
A representative from eMachines was quoted as saying, "Good designers copy, great designers steal directly from Jonathon Ives."
Honestly, other than the "snow" colored version, I thought the iMac was pretty ugly... The new 17" however, very nice...
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
The main differences between the eMac and CRT iMac is that the eMac is a G4 (faster but requires more power and runs warmer) rather than a G3, and the eMac has a 17" CRT versus a 15" CRT.
Even still, the entry-level eMac goes for about $150-200 more than an entry-level CRT iMac... that definitely makes a difference for schools and companies on a budget.
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 thought they dropped the gumdrop style when the LCD style came out, then changed the CRT model to the eMac...
Are they stopping sales of the eMac? show me someone who bought an CRT iMac recently please.
moo.
You do know that just because they aren't selling them anymore does not mean that the one on your desk is going to disappear...right?
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
1997, I was a die hard PC user just begging for a reason to 'switch' (back then you called it getting rid of Win95). On the software side the Mac OS was already showing its age badly and Rhapsody was a pariah. Enter the iMac. When it was going to be a time consuming clusterfuck to finally get everyone onto the OSX-UNIX-NeXT-Carbon-Blue Box(anyone remember that?)-Cocoa new Mac OS they innovated int he only space left..Well enter 2003 and OSX is just growing up and users are still clinging to classic boxes. But the imac - a hardware revolution that brought Apple just enough limelight and revenue to keep it afloat- 5 years later and a recent slashdot poll pegged apple as going out of business: Never...
It was an eye opening computer to own and i love my daily use of its decendent, the flat panel.
At the least they will live on for YEARS as macquariums.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Dipping into my unreliable memory the significance of the iMac (in desktop computing) was removal of legacy items: the floppy drive and the old serial port. It seemed to kick-start the USB peripheral industry (which was pretty much the only way to add devices to it - see removal of floppy drive ;-). It came with ethernet as standard which was rare in consumer models.
Well, there are a few suggestions. Your point about design is well made - I remember when even kettles tried to look like the iMac. Bizarre.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
It's not a matter of old equipment, it's a matter of the right tool for the job. The old imac is a perfect computer for some of the applications that schools have. For instance, in a school library what are the computers used for? 1) Searching for books, and 2) doing research online. You don't need a G4 or a P4 to use Google, or to search for a book in the stacks. Apple isn't pawning off old crap on schools, they're giving sys admins more choices.
This is just the first step in paving the way for a corporate partnership between Apple Computer and Hershey Co. The Hershey Kiss shapped iMac is just around the corner, available in brown, white, or brown and white striped. Consumers may upgrade to "with almonds" for $100 extra.
paintball
My iMac's not dead yet, I expect to get at least 5 or 6 years of routing and firewalling service out of it.
Seriously, the old iMacs (the DV version, in particular) make damn fine personal servers, with their reduced power consumption and perfect silence.
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'm an übergeek, but my wife wanted an iMac because it was cute. When we went shopping for one I asked her what specs was she looking for, g3?, 500 Mhz?, ram?, dvd drive? She just looked around pointed and said, "I want the blue one." I swear, I'm not kidding! We took it home, I set it up in 2 minutes, plugged it into our home network, she used it for a while, but then went back to using my computer. The reason she gave was that her computer was too slow when playing computer games. It seems the Java VM sucked @ss and was very very slow. She used my highspeed, water-cooled, dual monitor, 500 MB RAM system to play Pogo games on IE. Now I have it boxed up sitting in a corner in our new house. I swear I'm going to get my money out of it as soon as I can get her a desk and an 802.11b router and a wireless card for her iMac.
Anyone want an iMac??
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.
(Yes, I know the old one didn't have tray loader, but I'm trying to be funny)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
See what happens when you try to sell a computer with only one mouse button!
Are you speaking of years in production or sales volume? If it's the former of which you speak, the record holder remains the Apple IIe (1982-1993).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Yes, thank God the iMac showed the computing industry that they should focus on style and asthetics over features and functionality. I'm so fucking glad that Dell, IBM, and HP now feel the need to change the form factors of their machines every 3 months, and in the process give me some of the most horrible, badly designed machines ever made. iMac can kiss my ass. Anyway, my favorite iMac story:
I'm working at CompUSSR as a technician. It's a slow day, and I happen to be up at the front counter of the tech department, filling out some paperwork or something. A lady walks in the front door carting an iMac in hand, and from 10 feet away I can see the anger in her eyes. She steps up to the counter, and with one emphatic push, heaves the iMac up onto the counter, where it lands with a deafening *THUD*, loud enough the whole store takes notice. She takes a few moments to catch her breath from the effort, then looks me straight in the eye, and says...
"Jeff Goldblum is a fucking liar!"
It was a good 5 minutes before I could compose myself enough to speak.
The cheapest dual processor Xeon rackmount server from dell is a PowerEdge 2650. With all other options stripped and no OS, it's $5425 retail. For a single Xeon, subtract $500. Please don't give me some BS about how you can build some amateur-hour machine for $2800, because I really don't fucking care. The Xserve is a supported machine from a commercial vendor, with a supported commercial UNIX, with telephone support, optional onsite support, and the ability to beat the living daylights out of Intel stuff at certain tasks. So please, the original poster needs to get a grip on reality.
I don't think it's too much hyperbole to claim that the iMac was one of the most revolutionary computers -- ever.
I'm gonna nit-pick now. I know that's out of character for me, but y'all just bear with me.
I don't think "revolutionary" is really the right word to use here. I think a better word would be "influential."
The Apple II was revolutionary; it created the personal computer market from scratch. The Macintosh was revolutionary; it changed the way people interact with computers. The iMac was more evolutionary than revolutionary, but the combination of its design (rounded, transluscent, tinted, happy-looking) and its design philosophy (easy and fun to use) touch everything.
So I think I would say that the iMac was the second-most influential computer ever. The most influential? The IBM PC, of course.
I write in my journal
I thought the saddest iMac moment was that scene in Zoolander... Oh Well...
And the Amiga's still alive and... um...
*hugs Amiga 1200 to chest and cries*
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
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
Man, if the "I Didn't Do It" boy wasn't right on, I don't know what was...
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
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 :-
On my machine right now, the mouse is plugged into the keyboard via USB, which is plugged into the monitor via USB, which is plugged into the computer via ADC, which is plugged into the wall. That's it. No other plugs.
:)
I guess if you need to escape out of the window real quick for some reason, you won't have to go looking for rope.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
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
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
Ford no longer sells the 1998 model Taurus and has instead replaced it with the model year 2003 line. Anaylists were left baffled at this move. One remarked, "Who thougth Ford would make such a drastic move as this? Updating their models and not selling the older ones...I'm baffeled!" Similar trends have been noticed in just about every other freakin company on earth! So why is this front page /. news?
SIGFAULT
Is eMachines now free to sell their iMac lookalike?
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
[quote]With WindowsXP there is no need for Mac any more.[/quote]s/WindowsXP/Windows200/0 0/Windows NT/
s/Windows20
s/Windows NT/Windows 98/
s/Windows 98/ Windows 95/
s/Windows 95/Windows 3.1/
s/Windows 3.1/Windows 3.0/
s/Windows 3.0/Windows 2.0/
s/Windows 2.0/Windows 1.0/
It's good to have a dream.
One of the fundamental laws of the universe is that sooner or later, everything becomes Office Space. Everything that doesn't become Office Space becomes This Is Spinal Tap.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
A hideous looking but magnificently functional design for its intended use. The best thing about them? Quiet. Who needs a quiet fan when you _ d o n ' t _ n e e d _ a _ f a n !
I had to support a variety of those iMac thingies over the years, and I was sad when they dropped the IR port. I nearly wet the floor when I was looking at that port and had the user's Palm III in my hand, then on a whim instead of setting up his cradle I just pointed it and pressed hotsync... and it did.
OK, I know it's normal for laptops, but usually fussy. This just... worked.
A few years later I was problemsolving a printing crisis with a bad ethernet cable and no crimp goodies. Again, point the oldy-but-goody bondi iMac and shoot at the HP printer with 20 seconds of configuration... and it prints. Damn!
And yes, after I realized they were just a laptop with a CRT glued on, I used the handle to lug them between buildings.
Even better, the heat vents were wisely on a slope, so the cats could never settle down on them.
Damn those pesky terrorists
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
Apple - been happily going out of business since 1985
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.