20th Anniversary of the iMac
A celebration of the computer that saved Apple
The iMac has been around for 20 years. Just let that sink in for a moment. Since its debut in August 1998, Apple has launched 59 separate laptop models, 15 iPads and 18 iPhones. In fact, the iMac was already almost 10 years old when the original iPhone was launched. The product that saved Apple has seen a lot in its time.
This is the story of one of Apple’s most important products, a computer that not only brought Apple back from the brink of destruction, but propelled it to the cutting edge of cool, and coffers full of cash. We’ll trace its journey, from its fascinating beginnings to its worldbeating status quo. It’s a tale of inspiration and failures, fame and vitriol, jelly beans and sunflowers. It forged lifelong partnerships, took on giants and prompted a wave of imitators. And it continues to drive innovation and amaze the world today.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was in a very bad way. A far cry from its antiestablishment origins in the 1970s, it was churning out a confusing array of boring beige boxes that looked no different from the PC competition.
Worse, it was losing money hand over fist, with most analysts predicting its impending doom. The June 1997 issue of Wired magazine nicely summed up the mood, with a cover featuring the Apple logo wearing a crown of thorns. Below it ran a single word: Pray.
Steve Jobs knew he had a gargantuan task ahead of him when he returned to Apple, and he wasted no time slashing extraneous projects and products. From now on, he declared, Apple would have just four product categories, and no more: consumer and professional desktops and notebooks.
The iMac G3 was to be Apple’s consumer desktop offering. Soon after returning, Jobs strode into Jony Ive’s design lab to see what kind of work he was capable of. It wasn’t the start you might expect. Said Jobs to Ive with his trademark bluntness: “you’ve not been very effective, have you?” For his part, Ive had his resignation letter in his pocket. Yet Ive insists that he and Jobs clicked right away, saying that they were both “a little bit odd”.
That mutual understanding manifested itself in the iMac’s design. As Ive put it, “We could make a computer look like a grapefruit” because the then-current form of computers – plain beige boxes – had nothing to do with their function. Other computer firms were afraid to stray from that staid design, but not Apple. The task was to design a computer that could still be recognised as such, without scaring people away or boring them.
To do that, the original iMac had to be two things: approachable and elegantly simple. In 1998, people were still very much afraid of computers. They were distant, unknowable machines somewhat akin to the Enigma, with only the nerdiest and most devoted of acolytes able to operate them. At least, that was the perception. But by adding colour to the iMac, Apple brought it personality. By making it translucent, Apple took away the mystery of its internals.
An insanely great computer
Key to this approachability was the handle. Ive and Jobs knew that this was not a computer that many people were going to pick up and carry on a regular basis. But the handle was symbolic, too: it was an invitation to touch the machine, to make contact with it. And it said that this is a computer that the user can hold and manipulate, even if they are totally new to computing.
Being elegantly simple reinforced the approachability of the machine. Instead of coming with reams of trailing wires
“The back of our computer looks better than the front of their computers” Steve Jobs
and requiring hours (and possibly a technician) to set up, the iMac was a simple all-in-one computer. It was advertised as being able to get you set up and on the internet in a mere two steps. First it disarmed you, then it empowered you.
Still, it wasn’t without controversy. While some people bemoaned the absent SCSI ports, it was the lack of a floppy drive that really riled up the crowd. In 1998, the floppy was still a staple of many homes and offices, and conspiracy theories abounded claiming Apple had omitted the drives in order to make more money selling them separately. The truth, however, was much simpler: the floppy drive was dying. Games and apps were being distributed on CDs, Steve Jobs reasoned. And besides, people would send files over the internet in the future, Apple said; what better way to take a step into that future than with an iMac?
A winning partnership
The iMac G3 was very much Steve Jobs’ baby. Like a proud father, he helped guide its development and helped overcome its problems. But because it was based on his perception of what a computer should be, there was a lot riding on it. Ken Segall, the creative director of Apple’s advertising agency and the originator of the ‘Think Different’ campaign, was wowed by the iMac, but also a tad worried. “I’d like to believe we were all so smart that within seconds we were convinced that we were witnessing the start of a miracle resurgence,” he later said, “but it wasn’t quite like that.” His own feeling, and that of his fellow agency members, was “part shock, part excitement, and part hope that Steve Jobs really knew what he was doing – because there was a real chance that this revolutionary computer might just be too shocking for its own good.” The iMac didn’t just have to save Apple. It had to save Steve Jobs, too. The shock soon wore off for Segall, to be replaced with excitement. The iMac G3 was the future, he realised. At his next meeting with Jobs, the Apple co-founder was feeling ebullient. “The back of our computer looks better than the front of their computers,” he said, dismissive as ever of his rivals. “Once the shock of our first sighting had worn off, we understood how revolutionary [the iMac G3] was going to be,” says Segall. “We were believers. We couldn’t wait to start developing a campaign for it.”
Jobs was involved in almost every stage of the iMac’s design, which Ive described as a “vigorous intellectual process”. The Apple CEO insisted that the iMac had to be an all-in-one, a throwback to Apple’s heritage with the original Macintosh. It had to build on that heritage while also bringing it up to date. By the end of his first meeting with Jony Ive, the two were already sketching iMac design ideas together. “One thing most people don’t know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer,” says Ive. High praise indeed.
While Ive and his top deputy Danny Coster were tasked with coming up with iMac designs, Jobs made refinements and approved – or rejected – models. Jobs disliked Ive’s first dozen designs, but Ive pressed on with one, insisting it had promise. He told Jobs that its curves and creative look meant “It has a sense that it’s just arrived on your desktop or it’s just about to hop off and go somewhere.”
After some slight adjustments, Jobs had changed his tack, declaring that he loved it. He carried the model with him around the office, showing it off to trusted executives and colleagues. It was the embodiment of Apple’s philosophy – it thought different, it was fun, it was rebellious. Even the internals were subject to Apple design principles, since you could see them through the iMac’s shell. The revelation of the machine’s guts took away their mystery, and also illustrated the effort that designing them had entailed. There were no secrets with this machine, no hidden, unfathomable moving parts. Like Prometheus bringing the knowledge of fire to the first humans, the iMac was designed to make computing understandable and, ultimately, conquerable.
More than skip deep
Achieving the right effect for the case was not easy, and Jobs and Ive visited a jelly bean factory to learn how to make translucent colours look attractive. The cost of each case was $60, three times as much as a regular
“One thing most people don’t know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer” Jonathan Ive
PC case, but Jobs had no qualms about that – he knew it was vital to the iMac’s identity.
It worked. The iMac was a huge success, propelling Apple not only back into relevancy, but profitability too.
That line of thinking – the deep understanding of what was required, regardless of the cost to Apple – separated the iMac from its imitators (and there were plenty of those). Here’s how Steve Jobs put it: “When people look at an iMac, they think the design is really great, but most people don’t understand it’s not skin deep. There’s a reason why, after two years, people haven’t been able to copy the iMac. It’s not just surface. The reason the iMac doesn’t have a fan is engineering. It took a ton of engineering and that’s true for the Cube and everything else.”
He explained further: “The thing that all of our competitors are missing is that they think it’s about fashion, they think it’s about surface appearance. And they couldn’t be further from the truth. The iMac isn’t about candy-coloured computers. The iMac is about making a computer that is really quiet, that doesn’t need a fan, that wakes up in 15 seconds, that has the best sound system in a consumer computer, a superfine display. It’s about a complete computer that expresses it on the outside as well. And [competitors] just see the outside. They say ‘We’ll slap some colour on this piece of junk computer, and we’ll have one, too.’ And they miss the point.”
Missing the point or not, it wasn’t long before the world was flooded with translucent plastic. From computers to George Foreman grills, the look that shook up the world of tech suddenly looked very dated indeed. Apple knew that it was time for change – it was time for the iMac G4.
“The thing our competitors are missing is that they think it’s all about fashion” Steve Jobs