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: Small bump

[mridoni]

At that time I was working in a shop that only sold Apple computers, and I had been working there for a few years. The first iMac, from a technical standpoint, wasn't really something to write home about: slow, prone to over-heating, no SCSI, floppy, ADB or serial when many people still used them (so you had to throw in the garbage all your old peripherals); the USB subsystem was lacking reliable drivers, so in the first months you had to choose between a floppy drive and a printer. Yes, it was repairable, but in 1998 that was still a given (and, anyway, putting an iMac back together after disassembling required some serious swearing, the damn thing had its insides so tightly packed, it wouldn't stick together if you routed the spaeaker cable the wrong way).

But its greatest achievement was putting Macintosh computers back on the map. The iMac wasn't a champion, but it was pretty and shiny. When Apple, afew years later, presented later the "flower power" and "dalmatians" versions, they knew perfectly well that they wouldn't sell, but they were just meant to generate enough buzz in the press. And that was the iMac did: before its time, Macintosh computers were either (very) expensive and confined to DTP/graphic/music professionals, or (not so) cheap, outdated and unreliable. The iMac changed all that and prepared the terrain for the advent of OSX and, ultimately, of the iPhone. People instantly loved it, and there was nothing you could say about screen resolutions, a substandard graphic card (ATI Rage II/II Pro? Really?) or anything else that could make them change your mind. And it sat very well on your desk, no more square beige boxes or ugly CRT monitors with lots of cables: the iMac proved that computers, other than being a useful tool, could be a fashion statement and an extension of your (purported, at least) personality.

The first affordable desktop ...

[Qbertino]

... 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.

Few people care about user servicability

[sjbe]

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.