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Home > Classic Macintosh Section > Apple's Saving Grace, The Original iMac
 Image Credit: Macworld, October 1998 View all posts by: John Ward | View all posts in category: Macintosh History Apple began selling the iMac on October 17, 1998. The iMac had the effect of a lighting bolt strike across the entire computer industry. Its success retuned Apple to profitability, spawned many imitators, and ushered in the new age of the "Internet" computer.  Image Credit: Macworld, July 1998
In 1996, Apple bought NeXT Software, Inc. for $402 million, bringing its CEO, Steve Jobs, back to the company he founded. In 1997, Jobs became Apple's interim CEO after the directors ousted then CEO Gil Amelio on July 9, 1997 in a boardroom coup[1]. Jobs' first priority was to simplify the product line. He discontinued the Newton, shut down Claris, and terminated the Mac OS licensing program. Apple announced a loss of $161 million for the fourth quarter of 1997. At the keynote address for the Macworld Expo held in San Francisco on January 6, 1998, Jobs surprised the audience by casually mentioning at the very end of his speech that Apple expected to announce a profit for the first quarter of 1998[2]. "We are thrilled that our new plans are beginning to work," proclaimed Jobs, "We've reviewed the road map of new products and axed more than 70 percent of them, keeping the 30 percent that were gems. The product teams at Apple are very excited. There's so much low-hanging fruit, it's easy to turn around."  Image Credit: Macworld, October 1998
The iMac was conceived and executed entirely under Jobs' new Apple regime. Development began immediately upon his return to power at Apple. At the time, Jobs was shocked to learn that Apple didn't have a compelling consumer model priced at under $2,000[3]. Apple had given up on the low-end market, conceding it to the proliferation of cheap Windows compatibles. Furthermore, the Macintosh cloners like Power Computing who had been very successful at exploiting this weakness with a product line that helped Apple fill in the gap were shut down when Jobs refused to renew their licenses to cover the newest iteration of Mac OS, System 8. Historically, Apple's product line had always attempted to cover the low end. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Apple's low end was occupied by the unique all-in-one (or compact) Macs like the Plus, the SE, the Classic and Classic II, and the Color Classic. From the early to mid 1990s, Apple offered the LC (low cost color) family of computers consisting of the LC, LC II, LC III, and LC 500 series. From the mid 1990s, Apple attempted to cover the low end with the Performa line.
Jobs' reached into Apple's past in hopes of blazing a new trail back into the hearts of consumers. By 1998, it had been roughly two years since Apple quietly exited the low-cost computing market, citing an inability to compete with manufacturers of Windows-based PCs on price and time-to-market issues. Since that time, the company downsized and became much more efficient and able to deliver new products faster. As a result, Apple was ready to reenter the consumer market with the dynamic new iMac that relied as much on nostalgia as it did on bold technology and design. Following a market penetration strategy, Apple priced iMac to sell at $1,295. For this reasonable price, the iMac offered consumers leading-edge capabilities and a breathtaking design[5].
It was not hard to recognize the iMac's lineage: the all-in-one case, the tiny footprint, even the integrated handle - all suggested the original Macintosh. But that was where the similarities ended. Using translucent plastics of "ice" and "Bondi blue" (in homage to the Australian beach), Apple's industrial design group created a computer without a single straight line - even the keyboard components were curved. Every piece of the iMac - from the cables to the keycaps - used translucence, curves, and light to great effect. The round "hockey puck" mouse revealed a tracking ball that was half white and half blue-green. Adding to the space-age effect, Apple used holographic stickers for port identifiers, FCC tags, and other labels[6]. A Bondi blue flip-down foot slightly angled the chassis for better viewing.  Image Credit: Macworld, October 1998  Image Credit: Macworld, October 1998 The original iMac shipped with a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 processor complete with a 512K backside cache. The iMac came with the ATI Rage IIc 2-D/3-D accelerated-graphics chip set and 2 MB SGRAM for video, expandable to 4 MB or 6 MB using SGRAM SO-DIMMs. The iMac was not the most powerful gaming machine, but the combination of its graphics chip and 233 MHz G3 yielded respectable performance. The iMac came with 32 MB SO-DIMM RAM, a common memory standard on Windows PCs, and was officially expandable to 128 MB. A daughter card housed the CPU, two RAM slots, and a new Open Firmware ROM. The CPU daughter card connected to the main logic board via a speedy, 66 MHz PCI system bus[6].  CPU daughter card Connectivity features included 10/100BaseT Ethernet via an auto-negotiating RJ-45 jack, a 4-Mbps IrDA infrared port, a 56-Kbps modem supporting the V.90 protocol, and two 12-mbps Universal Serial Bus (USB) connections[8]. When Steve Jobs originally announced the iMac, he said that it would ship with a 33.6-Kbps modem. In July 1998, Apple announced that it would move with the times and ship the iMac with a 56-Kbps modem[9]. Rounding out the package, the iMac came with audio-in/out ports on the side of the unit, two headphone jacks on the front of the case, and a low-noise digital audio chip that supported simulated surround sound (SRS) on the iMac's two integrated speakers[10]. The iMac originally shipped with OS 8.1 and later with OS 8.5. A rear door offered access to a slide out chassis that housed the logic board and media bays. Although a bit of challenge to remove, the door allowed users to remove the motherboard in order to upgrade both RAM and storage devices. The iMac shipped with a 4 GB EIDE hard drive and a 24x ATAPI CD-ROM drive. Like the original Macintosh, the iMac had a built-in display. The standard shadow-mask 15-inch monitor offered a 13.8-inch viewable area with a 0.28 dot pitch. It supported resolutions of 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1,024 x 768.
The iMac had OpenFirmware ROM that contained only minimal hardware-addressing instructions, unlike previous Mac ROMs that carried complex, machine-specific instruction sets. With OpenFirmware, most instructions were instead loaded into RAM. As a result, Mac OS took up more RAM on the iMac, but future ROM updates would be much easier to make, shortening the production times for new Macs dramatically. This was one of the main reasons why Apple was able to develop the iMac in just ten months[6]. Although iMac was revolutionary, it was also very troubling to Mac users because it did not have ADB or SCSI, it had no expansion slots, and it lacked a floppy drive. Perhaps the biggest variable in the iMac's equation was Apple's renunciation of its old connectivity standbys - SCSI, ADB, and traditional Macintosh serial ports in favor of the Universal Serial Bus[8]. When the iMac was announced, there were no current Mac peripherals that supported USB. Apple worked closely with hardware vendors to alleviate the problem. The peripheral issue was soon overcome by third party vendors who produced critical USB devices such as floppy and Zip drives, scanners, and printers. Although USB offered an inexpensive and speedy alternative to Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), it was a poor substitute for SCSI because the speeds of USB devices were interdependent: the more active devices on the bus, the slower each USB peripheral was likely to perform[8]. This was a major drawback for external hard drives. At the time of iMac's release, there were no third party USB to SCSI adapters for the Mac, and when they began to appear in the following year, the slower speed of USB meant that SCSI devices weren't nearly as speedy as they were on previous Macs[9]. The iMac would overcome this limitation when Apple incorporated FireWire in the 400 MHz iMac DV, introduced October 4, 1999. Easy connectivity was the chief advantage of USB. Unlike the ungainly, thick SCSI connection cables, USB cables were thin and easy to daisy chain. USB could support up to 127 logical devices including disk drives, keyboards, mice, modems, scanners, cameras, printers, and even monitors[8]. The "i" in iMac stood for "Internet." The iMac was designed to be a fully configured system that was easy to make ready for immediate use on the World Wide Web. Apple bundled the iMac with both Netscape and Internet Explorer. Mac OS' legendary ease of use made connecting to the Internet easy for many first time computer users. The iMac represented the "Internet-age computer for the rest of us."
Between the time Apple announced the iMac and actually released it, the company booked an unprecedented 150,000 orders. The iMac was the fasted selling Macintosh ever. After only six weeks of availability in North America, Japan, and Europe, Apple shipped a remarkable 278,000 units. Almost as important as the total number of Macs being sold was who bought them. In an exit interview conducted by research firm Audits and Surveys, it was revealed that 29.4% had never owned a computer before, and 12.5% previously owned a Windows compatible but not a Macintosh. Roughly half of the remaining buyers were replacing an old Mac, and half intended to keep their old Mac in addition to their new iMac. These statistics revealed that approximately 70% of all iMac sales in 1998 actually added to the total number of Macs in use[4]. Apple sold 800,000 iMacs in 1998, a rate of one iMac sold every 15 seconds of every minute of every hour of every day of every week. Almost overnight, Apple doubled its worldwide market share to 6%.
After only one year of availability, Apple had sold nearly two million iMacs, making it the top-selling desktop computer at the time. The iMac proved so popular that the PC industry attempted to clone it. Apple filed suit against eMachines and Daewoo for illegally copying the trade dress of the iMac. Both companies agreed to discontinue their iMac clones[11]. Having learned from its past mistakes, Apple refused to rest on the initial success of the original iMac. Just three months after shipping the iMac, Apple released the iMac Rev. B, boasting a faster ATI Rage Pro Turbo graphics card. On January 5, 1999 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Apple received critical acclaim for its introduction of the 266 MHz iMac Rev. C in five different colors: grape, lime, tangerine, strawberry, and blueberry. Before the grateful Mac community could take a breath, the speed of the iMac was bumped to 333 MHz in April, and in October, Apple released the 350 MHz iMac Rev. E and two 400 MHz models with DVD drives[7].  iMac Rev. C (Apple, Inc.) The iMac continues to be revised and now has little resemblance to original Bondi Blue iMac. The original iMac was a huge component of Steve Jobs' plan to revive Apple. The iMac was a cultural phenomenon rarely seen in the computer industry and its impact on Apple's bottom line was immediate and profound. Its radical departure from contemporary industry standards and remarkable translucent styling would make its chief designer, Jonathan Ive, an instant celebrity. Ive would go on to redesign it again and again. With the release of the original iMac on October 17, 1998, Apple could once again claim that it made an insanely great computer.
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