"the iMac screen is one of the best 15-inch displays available"!??? That screen was absolutely horrible on the original iMac, probably about the worst you could get. Thankfully nowadays it's the other way around. I have a 27'' iMac since the day the 5k Version was available and they're still - 4 years later - isn't anything better on the market (at that price point).
Most of the places I know about would not spend extra money for color displays until after year 2000. The same as my parents and grandparents thought that Color TV was a frivolous expense. Only CAD/CAM users and folks who did graphic design and layouts had color screens, and the resolution on even those was fairly awful. Saw a Sun Workstation give off a big puff of white smoke at power-on in the late 1990s (I believe it was a $40,000 workstation, probably around 20-24" or so, for CAD/CAM). Luckily, it was under a maintenance contract, as was a Silicon Graphics workstation we needed for a different contract with a different large vendor.
One short time engineer had a black and white Mac. The Treasurer had a monochrome (green?) Apple II before replacing it with a pc (low resolution color).
Didn't see a flat screen at any workplace until around 2005, and not in common use until a few years later. Vacuum tube displays were still used for graphic design and layout for a few years later, due to relative low quality and high price of flat screens.
Steve Jobs was a true genius. The only problem with the iMac’s early debut was that nobody had really dealt with Ethernet or WiFi at the time, in fact, the internet was just really starting to become a thing.
Had it debuted with the iPod, Steve Jobs might have had the best way to get digital music, and saved apple completely.
The original iMac didn’t have WiFi so it’s completely irrelevant. Ethernet was well established but not in the home market. The internet want just becoming a thing. By the time the iMac came along Apple had already taken a stab at being an ISP when they licensed AOL and rebranded it eWorld. Technically they licensed it back. AOL was based on AppleLink which was a BBS.
The iPod as we knew it wouldn’t have been possible at the time. As mentioned by someone else, hard drives were not small enough. There is a reason early MP3 players were done in megabytes not gigabytes. Also, MP3s were just starting to bubble up in the public consciousness. SoundJam, which Apple would later buy and make iTunes, was still a year away from being released.
"the iMac screen is one of the best 15-inch displays available"!??? That screen was absolutely horrible on the original iMac, probably about the worst you could get. Thankfully nowadays it's the other way around. I have a 27'' iMac since the day the 5k Version was available and they're still - 4 years later - isn't anything better on the market (at that price point).
One of the big problem then was the screen driver is very expensive. The CPU has to spend time to calculate what to show on each dot of the screen. As a consequence, it is very expensive to use much bigger displays. This problem is largely resolved with the advancement of GPUs. Today it is unimaginable an iPhone 14 Pro Max can display millions of dots on a screen that is less than 7 inches.
They still haven’t beaten that iMac G4’s floating display arm. That computer got a lot of sales in customer service/kiosks for that reason alone.
The arm had a tendency to go bad and no longer support the weight of the screen, leaving the screen flopping down. It was a cool design but I don’t think they worked that well.
They still haven’t beaten that iMac G4’s floating display arm. That computer got a lot of sales in customer service/kiosks for that reason alone.
The arm had a tendency to go bad and no longer support the weight of the screen, leaving the screen flopping down. It was a cool design but I don’t think they worked that well.
I only got rid of mine about 3 years ago and it never had that issue.
Time for a new, big daddy iMac. I think Jobs and I’ve both settled on the big screen with thin casing and computer in the casing on a stylish, minimalist stand was the way to go with the iMac. Jobs loved the form factor as it was revised and revised and revised, but never changed after that.
In many ways, the studio display is really the new iMac form factor - the same basic structure, but refined to do away with the needless chin, an articulating tilt and height adjustable stand to replace the groundbreaking floating arm, and the power supply plus computing components all built into the case.
The form has evolved pretty far as-is. Once you finally develop the wheel, no other form will beat it. The only things they can do now is perhaps to add a swivel to the tilt and height adjustment. An ultrawide screen would also be a nice touch, separating it from the basic monitors and other computers out there.
Performamce is necessary though, whatever they do with the design. It needs to be able to accommodate an M series Ultra chip and 128-256 GB RAM on BTO.
THE THING ABOUT ABOUT IMACS IS THAT YOU COULD GET THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, MINIMALIST ALL IN ONE DESIGN out there that looked like it belonged in an architecture firm lobby, fashion boutique, and science lab all at once - and it would blow the doors off in terms of rip-snorting performance.
The 24 iMacs are cute little toys. But we are waiting for the serious big daddy iMac to return in style and substance.
The Macs are a closed computer system. The PCs are modular. They are made to tinker with. This is the fundamental difference between Macs and Windows PC. PC maker trying to copy Mac design so to obsolete Apple was met with great resistance by the PC World. They cannot customize their own computer. They won't accept. In the end these copy makers gave up. This is the cleverness of Steve Jobs. He gradually make Apple think different.
Apple’s closed-system factor that should be obvious, but still eludes competitors and even a significant number of the people who post here isn’t just that the hardware isn’t typically user-upgradable, but that the OS and the hardware are designed together and exclusively for one-another.
PC makers can make all-in-one iMac clones, but they’re still running a third-party bloatware operating system that’s designed to run any PC, with endless hardware variables. Sure, Microsoft makes the Surface, but it runs the same Windows OS that also must be able to run a janky, home-made boards-in-a-box machine with a random collection of hardware cobbled together inside and outside of that box. Likewise, Google makes its own phones, but their Android OS isn’t exclusive to those phones. It must also operate an endless lineup of devices, from flagship Samsung phones to cheap, disposable burner phones.
No competitor seems yet to have figured out that the special sauce lives in the vastly smaller set of variables that Apple’s operating systems must address.
I can’t believe the author failed to mention that the first iMac was the first Mac to include USB and jettison all the old legacy ports; ADB, serial and SCSI.
That was a huge leap.
It also legitimized USB as a standard interface. Sure USB already existed, but Apple made it essential.
But the best iMac I ever had was the G5. It was designed to be repairable and upgradable by the owner. Noisy though. and the first intel that replaced it was basically unrepairable. This situation did not improve until about 2010. It still wasn’t easy, but you could do it. After that forget it.
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Fair enough. But in 25 years of owning and using iMacs, both at work and at home, I've had to (1) replace the CD drive on a Rev. A 1998 iMac (that activity cost me a little bit of blood) and (2) bring one machine in to an Apple store for motherboard replacement after the graphics card died. That's out of nine machines at home. At work, we ran a couple of dozen over twenty years; one (only) needed a motherboard swap, which unfortunately required hauling the machine in to an Apple Store in (of course) an upscale mall less than a week before Christmas (which was more painful than the cuts and abrasions suffered during the CD drive replacement) — but despite the crazy business of the Store that day, they had the swap done in a couple of hours, most of which turned out to represent the hardware guy's lunch break.
Replacing entire units (e.g. motherboards) may not be the best thing for the environment, though I assume Apple remanufactured the ones we gave up, but from a business standpoint, they got the replacement process done in good time, despite retail stress.
Comments
One short time engineer had a black and white Mac. The Treasurer had a monochrome (green?) Apple II before replacing it with a pc (low resolution color).
Didn't see a flat screen at any workplace until around 2005, and not in common use until a few years later. Vacuum tube displays were still used for graphic design and layout for a few years later, due to relative low quality and high price of flat screens.
THE THING ABOUT ABOUT IMACS IS THAT YOU COULD GET THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, MINIMALIST ALL IN ONE DESIGN out there that looked like it belonged in an architecture firm lobby, fashion boutique, and science lab all at once - and it would blow the doors off in terms of rip-snorting performance.
That was a huge leap.
Sure USB already existed, but Apple made it essential.