From iMac to MacBook Pro
In dire need of a revival, Apple soon hit upon a winning streak with the success of the revolutionary first iMac
BY 1997, APPLE was close to going out of business. Returning CEO Steve Jobs quickly diagnosed the problem: Apple was making too many products and they weren’t good enough. To use Jobs’ favorite quote from hockey player Wayne Gretzky, Apple needed to “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. And with the iMac, Apple did. It’s hard to overstate the effect the iMac had on everything. Doomsayers mocked its lack of floppy drive and the candy–colored cases, but those colors were a tonic in a world of beige boxes and the iMac would influence the design of everything from steam irons to sex toys.
Apple sold nearly 280,000 iMacs in just six weeks, and nearly half of its sales were to first–time computer buyers. Another 20% were switchers from Windows PCs. By 2001, Apple had sold five million iMacs.
The product grid
In 2002, the iMac got a makeover in the form of the Pixar–esque iMac G4, aka the anglepoise iMac. It changed again in 2004 to the flatter and less fun iMac G5, which has stayed much the same while getting ever thinner and with ever smaller bezels. The G5 and the current M3 iMac may be nearly a decade apart, but you can see the shared DNA. Steve Jobs also introduced his famous product grid: consumer and pro, desktop and portable. That brought us the iMac and iBook, the Power Mac and the PowerBook.
That lineup would change slightly over time. The iBook and PowerBook became the MacBook and MacBook Pro in 2006, their PowerPC processors replaced by Intel ones. The move to Intel was hugely important, because the PowerPCs that Apple had previously relied upon were no longer delivering what Apple needed them to. By moving to Intel, Apple was able to close the performance gap with PCs. It would stick with Intel inside until history began to repeat and Apple once again found itself moving to a
The move to Intel meant Apple was able to close the performance gap with PCs
different kind of processor, 2020’s Apple– made M1.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro were joined by a third mobile Mac in 2008 when Steve Jobs took to the stage and showed off a standard buff envelope. To gasps, he pulled out the MacBook Air. Given that even the slimmest notebooks at the time weighed about 2kg (4.4lbs) and had microscopic displays, the MacBook Air looked like a miracle. It was also the beginning of Apple’s increasing obsession with super–slim notebooks, an obsession that some people reckon went too far, but it was enormously influential: you can see echoes of the Air’s design everywhere in today’s notebooks, and it would inform the design of future MacBook Pros too.