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.

Comments

Yeah, and look at how shitty they've become.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They need a 20th anniversary version

[DarkVader]

You want Blue Dalmatian or Flower Power to come back?

(Those things were UGLY. The dealer I worked with sold every other iMac from that shipment at retail price. Those two sat around for quite a while, and finally had to be sold at a loss. And they only got one of each.)

Crummy Specs Even For Then

[mentil]

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.

Re: Small bump

[dryeo]

Actually the Model T was originally available in a variety of colours. Then Ford built his assembly line and black was the only colour of paint that dried fast enough for production and became the only choice.