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Apple Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Steve Jobs Unveiling the iMac
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Commercial success or not, the Surface Studio is the closest attempt in recent years that captured some of the G4 iMac's magic and ingenuity.
Sadly, for all their billions and talent, the Mac ecosystem is in tatters and Apple designers have been resting on their laurels since 2012.
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Doesn't the current iMac Pro contain most of what the still current Mac Pro has in the 'cavity' behind its screen? Apart from having only one graphic card, what does the iMac Pro lack that the 2013 Mac Pro has?
How about a bezel-less iMac screen with the ergonomics of the G4 screen arm?
This sound like something that would make a cool YouTube project for the modding community.
Yeah, compare the innovation in just a few of short years (1998-2004) with what’s happened since.
You could say that they’re approaching peak-thinness and so innovation has to slow, but I don’t think putting everything behind the display was ever a good idea. It’s been a constant source of constraint, and to this day the screen hasn’t achieved the thinness and size of bezels that the G4 iMac had; nor its moveability/position-ability.
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For various reasons, this hasn’t happened. Laptops and desktops still outsell tablets as far as I’m aware (at least on the Apple side), and are likely to continue to for the foreseeable future.
Let’s not forget Jobs was a master showman and marketer. He was prone to hyperbole and melodrama, but at the same time possessed powers of reality distortion that could suck people in.
It may well have turned out that tablets wiped out laptops and desktops, but they simply didn’t. I think people like tactile keyboards that don’t take over half the screen, while for others the locked-down operating system of iOS is far too limiting.
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Fond memories. Maximum RAM was 8MB. Still have one at home, still working flawlessly. After almost 30 years! That was reliability. Hard to imagine these days
Logic suggests that the iMac will come out in Space Gray, maybe even Gold and Rose Gold.
I don't expect bright colors. They could do it.
But they would start with iPhones first and work their way up. I believe these colors would be extremely popular, especially blue and green.
I think he'd be OK with it. Recall, he was the one that declared the iPad was the beginnings of the post-PC era; that desktop computers over time were going to become less common and more specialized. So far he's not far off. Desktop/laptop sales in general (OS agnostic) have declined since 2010. More people rely on their phones, which in many cases are small tablets, for basic information they once used their computer for. Some even use tablets for more complicated tasks once reserved for desk and laptops like photo editing, even video editing.
Steve Jobs at the 2010 All Things Digital conference: https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/t...e-jobs-proclaims-the-post-pc-era-has-arrived/
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They could do it but won't. I don't see where logic would suggest it. Logic would suggest they wouldn't do it. Too many additional SKUs (Color x iMacs existing SKUs that would get the treatment, even if only the middle and high end.) Retailers are already juggling all the iPad and iPhone SKUs. iMacs are just not big enough sellers to warrant more SKUs than it already has -- not counting CTO. (check Apple's revenue by category -- ALL Mac sales, not just iMac, represent 8-9% of Apple revenue and laptops outsell desktops).
In the colored iMac era Apple didn't have a lot of products so multiple SKUs were more tenable. Also the iMac was Apple's "rebirth" symbol so it wanted to create buzz -- and the colors really came when the PowerPC processor progress petered out. The iMac is a back seat product for Apple today. The iPhone is it's symbolic and profit-maker product.
The Surface Studio has a critical design flaw: the screen can't function if it's disconnected from the base. That prevents creative professionals from using it with a swing-arm attachment that allows wide flexibility for positioning. A significant chunk of creatives just aren't going to buy something that is limited to drafting table positions.
Hmm. Here's some other computers released under Jobs' various reigns:
Apple II: The lid just unclipped and there was a row of expansion slots inside.
Lisa: I believe it had internal expansion slots
NeXT: ...had expansion slots (and Unix).
Power Mac G3 (Blue & White): tool-free access to its internal expansion features.
Power Mac G5: Again, slots, drive bays, tool-free access beyond the call of duty...
Mac Pro (cheesegrater): Slots, drive bays, tool-free access.
xServe: internal ram & expansion slots, removable hard drive bays...
MacBook Pro: easily (very easy, by laptop standards) upgradeable RAM and hard drive (intentionally so - with instructions printed in the user guide) until 2012.
Looks to me like someone who clearly understood the difference between a computing "appliance" and a pro workstation. From the release of the iMac through to 2011 - when the Mac Pro first started to wither on the vine there was always a powerful, versatile, expandable, easy-to-open option alongside the "appliances".
Methinks people are over-extrapolating Jobs' well-publicised original 1980s vision of the Macintosh range as a sealed appliance to some sort of dogma that all computing devices need to be like (original) Macs (or, indeed, iPhone/iPads).
It seems strange that someone who thought the future was only sealed-unit appliances would have allowed the G3 tower or the Cheesegrater - which the designers went out of their way to make easy to get inside - to be released.
In other news, Jobs could easily have hidden Unix away from the users (just like Android hides Linux) yet OS X shipped with a terminal app + a complete development suite (including all the usual Unix tools and compilers) "in the box". Even with the famously closed iOS, it is relatively cheap and easy for anybody to register as a developer (c.f., say, games consoles, which are pretty much serious-callers-only).
Sorry, but the idea that Jobs was single-mindedly pursuing sealed, closed systems for everything isn't borne out in his actions. That one is down to the new management.
I just recently bought a new iMac. Reason? My 4 year old iMac constantly made fan noise due to heating problems caused by poor ventilation. I suppose vacuuming the old one might have helped. If this one starts making fan noise that will be my next procedure, but that's true with PCs as well. In any case, the new one has a bigger screen, more memory, and a fusion drive rather than just a spinner. It's an improvement, though not revolutionary.
The surface studio barely sold. I think the main issue here is that it’s a great product for a very niche group of users, and pretty much dead weight for the rest of us who don’t need a swivelling touchscreen. And given the scale which Apple operates at, it cannot afford to be wasting precious engineering resources designing a niche product like the surface studio which is likely to move in very limited quantities.
And the surface studio has been criticised for having aenemic specs and an extremely expensive price tag. I think true to Microsoft’s reputation, you are looking at a product which looks impressive on paper but fails to deliver in the end user experience.
Thus began the cooling problems ...
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It is not just a site for Apple fans. It was designed as a site for people who used Macs and were interested in "rumors" about Macs - faults, advantages, and future developments. The site has started to morph into a cheering squad for Apple, albeit not so much about Macs. There are so called Apple fans who post on here who actually decry the desktop computer as being stodgy and old fashioned. Those who bash Apple these days tend to be unhappy with directions Apple is taking in their product lines. They are becoming a luxury mobile market catering to fashion over function. The emphasis is on slimness, lack of ports, emojis, touch bars, prettiness, and high prices. It is a plus, at least, that Mac RUMORS still provides commentary not skewed either way toward Apple. Go to 9to5 Mac for decidedly fan orientation.
Most folks in the cemetery don't miss you. They are way past that. Jobs cared, when living, about a product which would appeal to most end users. He's been gone for 7 years, and things have changed.
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I was 52 in 2004 - d&^n I'm old ....
Yes, the only part of the old commercials that had me feeling taken aback a bit was seeing the mouse again. It just gave me the "yucks" when it came on screen. I've tried, but I'll never find an Apple Mouse to agree with my needs. Their design philosophy is just categorically incompatible with what I need in a mouse, but the original iMacs just looked magical otherwise. It really had me feeling inspired about computing.
The Bondi Blue iMac was too underpowered for my needs, but I was so taken by it that I went to buy one anyway and gave it to my sister as a birthday gift.