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Apple's iMac Turns 20 Years Old (cnn.com)
Twenty years ago on May 6, 1998, Steve Jobs unveiled the iMac for the first time. Current CEO Tim Cook shared footage from the event on Twitter Sunday. It shows Jobs describing the $1,299 iMac as an impossibly futuristic device. CNNMoney reports: "The whole thing is translucent, you can see into it. It's so cool," Jobs gushes. He points to a handle that allows the computer's owner to easily lift the device, which is about the size of a modern microwave oven. He takes a jab at the competition: "The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guy's, by the way." In January 1999, less than a year after the iMac's debut, Apple more than tripled its quarterly profit.
The San Francisco Chronicle declared Apple was "cashing in on insatiable demand for its new space-age iMac computer." For the next decade, Jobs kept the new "i" products coming. Today, the iMac is in its seventh generation and is virtually unrecognizable from its ancestor. An Apple spokesperson notes an "iMac today consumes up to 96% less energy in sleep mode than the first generation." Some of the original iMac's tech specs include: PowerPC G3 processor clocked at 233MHz, 15-inch display with 1,024x768 resolution, two USB ports and Ethernet with a built-in software modem, 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM (expandable to 128MB), 24x CD-ROM drive, built-in stereo speakers with SRS sound, Apple-designed USB keyboard and mouse, and Mac OS 8.1.
The San Francisco Chronicle declared Apple was "cashing in on insatiable demand for its new space-age iMac computer." For the next decade, Jobs kept the new "i" products coming. Today, the iMac is in its seventh generation and is virtually unrecognizable from its ancestor. An Apple spokesperson notes an "iMac today consumes up to 96% less energy in sleep mode than the first generation." Some of the original iMac's tech specs include: PowerPC G3 processor clocked at 233MHz, 15-inch display with 1,024x768 resolution, two USB ports and Ethernet with a built-in software modem, 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM (expandable to 128MB), 24x CD-ROM drive, built-in stereo speakers with SRS sound, Apple-designed USB keyboard and mouse, and Mac OS 8.1.
No more floppy.
The colored Mac gave them a bit of a bump, but ultimately failed to stop the decline in Macintosh sales. Ultimately it was the conversion to Unix, finally getting a decent OS that caused sales to continually increase.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They need to bring out a colorful 20th anniversary version, instead of the plain aluminum ones they currently make.
Crap then, crap now.
I remember my iMac G5.
It was a pretty nice computer (G5 jokes aside). The entire thing was modular and entirely user serviceable from the back side. You would place the unit screen down on a flat side, then undo three captive screws on the bottom that would actuate an internal locking mechanism and release the entire back panel. From there, you could grab the stand and pivot the entire back side up and off the computer.
Once you'd done that, everything was serviceable from the backside. The RAM slots were presented to you (and the memory was even user replacable- Apple had instructions for opening up the machine in the manual), along with the HDD, Superdrive, the heatsink covering the processor, the fans, PSU, and the rest of the logic board. The entire system was extremely modular and while you weren't supposed to replace anything other than the RAM, it was trivial for anyone to service their machines themselves.
So now what do we have?
We have a thin aluminum turd designed to be as un-servicable as possible. You used to be able to open up the newer machines with a pair of suction cups (the display glass was held on by magnets, once you pulled that off all you had to do was remove the LCD panel to get to the guts), but now you can't even do that. You actually need a pizza cutter (Apple calls it a "rotary cutter") to slice through the adhesive foam holding in the LCD glass, and every time you open up the machine you have to replace this entire gasket to seal the machine back up again.
Oh, yeah, and everything is soldered to the motherboard. RAM, CPU, GPU, SSD, everything. And guess what? When the SSD fails (which it will eventually), it will prevent the machine from booting (even from an external drive). You read that right- the machine is literally tied to the SSD, and if it can't enumerate the chipset, then the system will refuse to boot from anything.
So here's to 20 years of the iMac. We've witnessed the rise and fall of what used to be a very reasonable computer. Now it's just a pile of irreparable trash, like the majority of Apple's other products. Designed to fail (and if that doesn't work, they'll just obsolete your system in the most passive aggressive way possible) and marketed at people who don't know any better, other than that it has an Apple logo on it so somehow it must be magically better. Such a goddamn shame too.
...for over forty years, according to the experts...
I remember watching the WWDC via satellite broadcast in the Northwestern University Media Development Lab. The satellite feed was hooked into a PowerMac 9500. So I captured some screenshots - and posted them to our Mac Users' Group. And posted a link here. And got said NUMUG webserver slashdotted since it was one of the first places that had a picture of the iMac. Before the news sources could get theirs into the mainstream.
PowerPC G3 processor clocked at 233MHz, 15-inch display with 1,024x768 resolution, two USB ports and Ethernet with a built-in software modem, 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM (expandable to 128MB), 24x CD-ROM drive,
I recall my bargain-basement box I bought out of a catalog had far better specs, purchased 6 months after the iMac came out, for half the price. 400MHz AMD CPU, 20GB hard drive, 128MB RAM, DVD drive (and a video decoder card necessary to play back DVD videos at full speed). Ok, it didn't come with a monitor, but still.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The only Apple machine I have ever owned, wanted to own and still own is my Apple ][+, a masterpiece of design and form following function.
Sadly, I think the company and their products went down hill from there.
Do you recall the round mouse that came with that first iMac?
Ergonomically, it was absolutely catastrophic. I never could use it for
any length of time. Thankfully, the iMacs were few, and the labs had
more decent Macs around (for when we had to use those rather than
PCs or Unix workstations).
Also, the fixation on USB back then was... courageous, as there
weren't yet many devices around.
I never could stomach those integrated PCs/screens, much
preferring separate, exchangeable, upgradeable parts (obvious
exception for portable stuff).
... where you didn't need to know how to connect or adjust a monitor. A big win for non-experts. Nice move. I didn't get it back then as much as I get it now. Unpack, turn on, works. ... By and large Apple deserves all the billions it can make.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
First computer I ever tossed out because the screen died...
We have a thin aluminum turd designed to be as un-servicable as possible
I used to care about user serviceability until I realized that almost nobody actually does it including myself. Only a tiny fraction of a fraction of computer users ever crack the case of their machine. For the few people who care there are machines available to do this. Just not from Apple. So if this is important to you, don't buy Apple. They obviously don't want your business and frankly I can't really blame them. I don't understand the point in bitching because Apple isn't pandering specifically to you and a very narrow market segment like you. To Apple it's just a added cost that people demonstrably aren't willing to pay extra for and that very very very few people actually give a shit about.
Mounting all the hardware next to a CRT and making it hard to get to didn't seem like that great an idea to me. Still doesn't.
... that terrible, awful, worthless insult to a pointing device they called their mouse. The person who thought that a round "hockey puck" mouse design was somehow a good idea was an idiot. I can't tell you how many times in various jobs I grabbed one of those miserable mice and started moving it only to realize I grabbed it sideways, upside-down, or at some angle other than normal and it was dutifully moving in a direction other than what I had expected.
Apple should be charged with environmental disposal costs for the truckloads of those miserable piles of failure that they made that invariably were sent to the trash. I recall (at least) one company made a plastic cover for it that a user could snap on to it to give it a normal - and useful - non-round shape.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I was working at CompUSA back with the colorful iMacs were being sold there (side note that many people didn't realize, Apple forced retailers to order all colors simultaneously; if we had demand for 5 red ones we also had to order 5 blue, 5 yellow, 5 orange, etc in the same order - often causing us to have a surplus of unpopular colors and a drought of popular ones). One evening after close I was helping my colleagues move a new shipment of iMacs from shipping & receiving to top stock (done with a moving staircase). We were passing them up the stairs - which involved grabbing it from the person below me on the stairs and lifting it over my head to pass to the next person up the stairs - to get them up as quickly as we could. I had one though that slipped slightly from the hands of the next person up the stairs, and predictably fell straight onto my head. I did manage to save the iMac from falling any further though it was not comfortable to have it land on my head.
I could have applied for worker's comp - except I was part-time. No such benefits exist for part-time retail slaves.
--El Capitan (10.11) will run on a 10-year-old aluminum iMac. It has a Core 2 Duo 64-bit CPU, and you can upgrade the RAM to 6GB DDR2 if light virtualization is needed. (Confine yourself to 1 running VM at a time with a minimum of vRAM and renice -1 as necessary.) It will be a little slow compared to a modern build, but still doable.
--Apps which still install and run:
o All 4 major browsers: Firefox, Palemoon, Chrome, Opera
o Thunderbird
o Virtualbox
o OpenZFS
o Malwarebytes, CCleaner
o Libreoffice
o VLC
o Nomachine NX
o Midnight Commander (brew)
o Handbrake and MakeMKV
--With external drives and ReFind, you can even dual-boot a modern Linux on it. I wouldn't recommend KDE cuz the graphics card is a bit ancient, but XFCE and LXDE run fine - and they seem faster than OSX with a more recent kernel.
--The really nice thing about Mac OSX is having native virtual screens. I normally use 4 in Linux but I've got the iMac up to 8 because you can control other boxes with that nice big display and Nomachine. ;-) So, one less reason to use Win10.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
The real value of a "user serviceable" device is to avoid the assinine markup on storage and ram imposed by a lot of box builders.
And why is this the problem of the box builder? Tell me what benefit Apple derives from such a device? It adds measurable and significant cost to them for a feature few users care about when they are almost certain to not recoup those extra costs in additional sales. You can be sure they've done the math. It also creates a situation where they have to support users opening their devices and occasionally doing stupid things. Basically you are asking Apple to add a lot of cost to them to save you money. Are you really surprised they are not interested?
If you want expandability there are PC makers that make such devices. Apple is under no obligation to you or me to be one of them.
Systems that are difficult to maintain are fodder for landfills.
So are systems that are easy to maintain. Few people keep PCs for longer than 5-10 years. You aren't keeping them out of landfills. Just delaying the inevitable at most. And the pieces you take out are de-facto trash so all you are doing is taking the machine to the dump piecemeal instead of all at once.
Are you really white knighting to protect the honor of a declining consumer electronics company?
What honor? We're talking about unrealistic expectations of users who want Apple to give them something that doesn't benefit Apple and won't be used by more than a tiny fraction of people. Do the math.
And if you think Apple is a declining company I don't think you understand the meaning of the word declining. If having hundreds of billions in excess cash, products that sell in huge numbers for premium margins, and a fanatical customer base is failure sign me up.
Could there be anything more pathetic?
Your reading comprehension seems an obvious candidate. Complaining that a company isn't bowing and scraping to your every selfish whim is another.
The iMac led to the release of Disk First Aid 8.2 in mid-1998, which can finally repair the startup disk directly without having to boot from a DIsk First Aid floppy.
Will the specs were flawed, that design was amazing. Looking at it today, it still looks good. Those things look colourful, modern, and desirable (well if you ignore the CRT screen). I'd argue it aged even better than the very first Macintosh design, and will certainly look better in a few years time than the current iteration.
I guess you think iFixit and repair cafes and the like are just fads, no?
Basically yes they are. There is always a small community of technically inclined people who like tinkering with their devices and fixing things. Key word is small. The overwhelming majority of people do not give a shit and aren't going to bother. It's cheaper and easier to insure electronics rather than repair them. Especially given that most were not designed to be repaired. Or if they must repair most people will choose to hire someone to do it for them just like they do for their car or house.