Nearly three decades later, Apple owes everything to the iMac

Twenty-seven years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Flint Center in Cupertino to unveil the first new product since his return to Apple: the original iMac.

The Apple of today would be nearly unrecognizable to the people of 1998, but Apple still sells an iMac. It’s literally the only product Apple sells today that it also sold in that era. (MacBooks were PowerBooks, and Mac Pros were Power Macs back in 1998.) Of course, today’s iMac bears little resemblance to the original G3 iMac. But in keeping the name alive, Apple is also nodding to the unique spirit of the iMac, a product that helped turn around Apple’s fortunes and define the computers of the next three decades.

It seems so quaint and obvious now, but in 1998 the iMac was, if not revolutionary, at least rebellious and radical. In an era of beige PCs, it was the color of the water off Australia’s Bondi Beach. In an era where the average computer was shaped like a pizza box or a minitower, tethered to a CRT monitor via a fat cable, the iMac was a clean self-contained unit.

Floppy disk drive? Didn’t have one. The array of legacy ports (serial, parallel, ADB, SCSI) that had built up over two decades of personal computing? Gone! Entirely! They were replaced with a single new connectivity specification: Universal Serial Bus… yep, and we’re still using USB all these years later.

A lot of these decisions were clearly made by Steve Jobs, who felt that computers were being held back by a devotion to backward compatibility. And all the way back to the original Mac, Jobs was committed to the idea that an all-in-one computer that you could pick up and move around, and resembled an appliance, was going to be more appealing than a box and a monitor and a big mess of wires.

He was right, in a couple of notable ways. Of course, most computers sold today are laptops, not desktops, but they are fundamentally all-in-ones that you can pick up and move around–just radically so. But the iMac has continued to sell well, even in this era of laptops and tablets, and smartphones. A few years ago, an iMac product manager told me just how large the iMac business still is–they reside in all sorts of spaces, from hotel check-in desks to offices to schools to libraries to homes, where it makes more sense to have a desktop computer than a laptop. (If that weren’t true, Apple would have no motivation to keep the iMac going, let alone give it the spiffy redesign it received as a part of its move to Apple silicon.)

The iMac has also, from the very beginning, been inspired by laptops. Back in the 1990s, laptops were always seen as lesser products. The high cost of miniaturizing components and building flat-panel screens meant that laptops were expensive. And the low-power, portable processors used in those laptops were underpowered compared to desktops. So you could get a laptop–and a lot of us did!–but they were quite a bit more expensive and noticeably slower than desktops.

Foundry

I don’t want to say that Steve Jobs saw the future, but he kind of did. To keep the iMac as small as possible (other than the huge CRT on the first model), it was built with a lot of parts traditionally found only in laptops. Over the years, this process continued. Desktop computers didn’t generally come with flat screens, but the iMac did. And with the arrival of the G5 iMac, which integrated itself into a display as a single unit, the iMac really reached its final form: A screen powered by small, laptop-inspired components.

Today, the difference between desktops and laptops is largely about shape, not about the components inside. My MacBook Pro runs the same chip that’s in a Mac Studio. The iMac’s chip is also in the MacBook Air. The desktops have become laptops, and vice versa. The iMac was a big part of that transition.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on the iMac’s colorful energy. That original aquamarine iMac was shocking in the era of beige boxes and kicked off a whole craze for translucent plastic in literally everything–from printers to George Foreman Grills. The next wave of G3 iMacs introduced multiple colors, so you could pick the one that spoke to you, whether it was red or green, or blue.

Apple took what it learned there and, beginning with the iPod mini, embraced a rainbow of color options. You can still see it in the iPhone (though some years, it seems to not be what it once was) and most notably in today’s iMacs, which come in seven different shades.

The truth is, the most influential products just don’t seem so impressive in hindsight, because they literally redefined reality. The path of the iMac seems obvious in hindsight. But it had a huge impact on today’s Mac, today’s Apple, and really the entire technology world of today. The iMac spirit lives on–as does the iMac itself.