The Revolutionary iMac

A picture of the bondi blue iMac.

History

Apple was weeks away from bankruptcy and no one felt that Apple was capable of sustaining itself, until Steve Jobs came out with the iMac. The iMac came around August 15th, 1998. It was the first model of the iMac line of personal computers made by Apple Inc. It was also the first legacy-free PC with no floppy-disk drives but instead USB ports. Apple stated that the ‘i’ in iMac stood for internet as well as individual as it symbolized the main focus of being a personal device. There were revisions on the device making them slightly different. So once the revision came out the previous model was replaced.

Features

At the time, the iMac was different compared to the other computers because of its transparent bondi-blue teardrop shape. It also contained a handle making it much more unique than it was. The computer interfaces were hidden behind a door that opened on the right-hand side of the device. As we know the iMac was the first computer to offer only USB ports (including the connectors for the keyboard and mouse). This was done as Apple wanted to remove the 31/2 inch diskette-drive, which was present from every Macintosh since 1984. The keyboard and mouse were specially designed for the iMac with the matching bondi-blue translucent plastics. The original iMac had a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 (PowerPC 750) chip. It had a 4 GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, 2 MB video RAM, and was shipped with Mac OS 8.1.

Here is the Un-PC commercial for the first iMac.

Future of the iMac

A picture of the other bright-coloured iMacs. A picture of the new iMac from 2010.

The iMac line was continuously getting updated after its initial release. Aside from increasing processor speed, video RAM, and hard-disk capacity, Apple decided to replace the bondi-blue with other colours like blueberry, grape, lime, strawberry, tangerine and various other colours in 1999. Later, a hardware update was done to create a sleeker design. The iMac was targeted at the education market and was then called the iMac G3. Apple continued to release new versions of its computers.

Did You Know?

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