Technology is sexy, or at least it can be, and that's mostly thanks to Steve Jobs and the iMac, which was unveiled 24 years ago this week.
Your options for home and office computing in 1998 were getting more and more boring. So-called white box PCs dominated the personal computing landscape. They were invariably white or tan rectangles, with several removable storage slots, a grille to let in some air on the large motherboards, and giant CRT monitors balanced on them. The keyboard and mouse were chore efforts that got the job done.
The iMac's unusual design was born out of an absolute necessity, not only to shake things up in a dull industry like dishwater, but also to save Apple from the trash.
Steve Jobs joined Apple almost a year before introducing the first iMac. The plan, as Walter Isaacson explained in his Steve Jobs biography, was to build "an all-in-one product with a keyboard, monitor, and computer ready to use right out of the box. It should have a distinctive design that will make a statement." branded".
With its curved design and no sharp corners, translucent candy-colored back, front-facing stereo speakers, small keyboard, and perfectly round mouse, iMac accomplished all of that and more.
While almost every brand name computer in the entire Windows PC industry in 1998 could hardly be picked from one line, there was no question that the iMac was more than just an Apple product.
The iMac wasn't just a distinctive product, it was a statement of intent. Apple, as it had almost fifteen years earlier, would think differently, ditching the familiar and the comfortable for the exciting, the flashy, and the special.
To Apple and Job's credit, the first iMac wasn't just a sexy package, Apple also took a gamble on the component side. It had a PowerPC processor (co-developed with IBM and Motorola), but no floppy drive. At the time, every PC worthy of a desktop space (and many laptops) had a 3,5-inch floppy drive. Apple got rid of it and just included a CD-ROM drive inside. The iMac introduced Apple's still relatively new USB port to the public (no previous Mac had one).
Apple also pushed the limits of connectivity by introducing the 56K V.90 modem, a connectivity option so new that many ISPs weren't ready to go online. And in a nod to the original Macintosh, the iMac even had a handle that let you carry the somewhat bulky computer.
Jobs wanted the new iMac (which came in five different candy color options, another first in the PC space) to be a consumer device. But sales were brisk, and I remember them showing up in every office in 1999. In fact, a design team I worked with at the time insisted we only buy new iMacs from them.
The iMac appealed to a generation of technology consumers like few products before. We were excited about not only what the technology could do, but also how it looked and felt. Most competitors have been slow to get the message, but not Apple.
In the years that followed, Apple would introduce one iconic product and one product design after another. On the iBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad, we would see echoes of the iMac inspiration. Not that all products looked like the iMac. They didn't. In fact, the next iMac, which featured an LCD screen, looked nothing like the first design, but the DNA of that emotion-first design approach was clear.
Apple has given up a bit on allowing form to totally replace function. Apple designs today are marked by both simplicity and beauty. Where the original iMac might have been accused of excessive design, a Mac Studio arguably has almost no design.
However, that would not be true. In my opinion, all Apple products are always designed to elicit a response, like a car you see driving down the road. You can't touch it because it's going 70 mph, but you've seen it, you remember it, and you have an opinion about it.
Without the original iMac, our laptops would still be ugly boxy extensions of their desktop counterparts. Shelves can have square edges. Our phones may look more like telephones than smooth, shiny slabs.
Every piece of technology we touch is built in the shadow of the first mold-breaking consumer electronics technology design since the original Mac. Few seemed to learn of this 1984 product, but the industry got the message in 1998 and thankfully nothing has been the same since.