In 2023, Apple sits on top of the world. Sometimes ranked as the most valuable company, its influence in technology and media – and even in some areas beyond – exceeds almost any other company. But it wasn’t always that way, and much of the company’s current predicament can be traced to a product released 25 years ago: the original iMac.
I vividly remember the first time I saw a picture of this machine: sitting in my high school library, a few days away from graduation, I was flipping through my copy of this same publication (in the classic format dead tree), devouring the cover story about this strange new computer that, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, would pave the way for Apple for years to come.
As an avid Apple fan in the darkest days of the 1990s, it was hard to deny that the iMac was the stuff of excitement. There was something new here, something distinct from everything else on the market, something that perfectly exemplified the company’s then recently adopted slogan, which, although only used for a few years, has become its most emblematic motto: Think different.
Add some color
At first glance, the original iMac was a refutation of the personal computer market as it stood in the late 1990s: resolutely colored in a sea of beige, eschewing legacy connectors, with an unmistakably playful spirit. The iMac said computers didn’t have to be boring.
Foundry
In this, it was very much an echo of the announcement of the first Macintosh in 1984, until its unveiling on May 6, 1998, by recently returned Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Although it was derided for being an underpowered toy, the iMac’s influence on the industry was undeniable. When I went to college that fall, you didn’t have to look far to find a freshman wearing one of the many new PCs that included little, colorful, almost plastic accent pieces. always in blue.
Likewise, the iMac ushered in the era of USB, a new protocol that was just beginning to take hold at the time. Gone are Apple’s old serial and Desktop Bus ports, replaced by that odd new rectangular connector that, over the next two decades, would become as ubiquitous as a standard power outlet. And while the iMac may not have accomplished this adoption on its own, it undoubtedly accelerated the process, transforming the computing industry.
What is happening
While the evolution of the computing market over the past decade has turned decidedly towards laptops, the iMac has remained, in many ways, Apple’s flagship. It is the only Mac model name that has survived, unchanged, since the company’s resurgence under Jobs, and although it itself has evolved over that time, the main product identity, as powerful yet easy-to-use all-in-one desktop computer has remained unchanged.
Externally, of course, there have been many changes. The iMac went from a colorful gumball-shaped desktop to a floating flat screen, going from plastic to polycarbonate to aluminum, and although there was a long journey through the land of white and monochromatic silvers (except for a brief banter with black in the one-off iMac Pro) – the current iMac M1 has finally taken the device back to its roots as a whimsical, colorful machine. (And it makes me smile that the default color pictured in the product’s technical specs page is, yes, blue.)
Likewise, while those original USB ports gave way to a host of different options in the mid to late 2000s (FireWire of various flavors, video out, audio in), connectivity has also been more recently stripped down to the bare essentials, with just the latest version of USB on base models. The product has, in some ways, come full circle, the purest distillation of iMac identity since that original release. Heck, the iMac M1 even starts at $1299, exactly the same price as its ancestor a quarter century ago.
With the iMac M1, Apple brought back the color choices.
Apple
The iMac drags on?
But in a world where most people prefer laptops to desktops, and many more rely on mobile devices like tablets or smartphones, where does the future of the venerable iMac lie?
For my part, I am not yet ready to count it; the fact that the iMac went through not only a major operating system transition, but two The processor’s architectural changes clearly place it as a long-term survivor.
Will a future tech product like headphones end up knocking the iMac off its pedestal? Maybe. Nothing, after all, lasts forever. But Apple has offered desktop Macs continuously since the product line launched nearly forty years ago, and while they may be less common than they once were, they’re not more antiques. As long as this continues, I anticipate the iMac will stick around, quietly enjoying the fruits of the world it rebuilt.
