I loved the funky Pixar lamp iMac.
The commercial
The commercial
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iMac Turns 25 Today: When to Expect the Next Model to Launch
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Remembering you used to get a G4 iMac for $799
Which is about $1270 in todya's dollars, the price of an entry level iMac today as well.
I remember Computer Town - tax free shopping for Apple products. I bought a IIGS from them way back when.
Because you are moving your finger around a stationary tracking device, not trying to move the mouse with your fingers or grasp a circular mouse.
The first Mac with FW was The blue & white G3 tower in 1999.
Pismo was the first laptop with it in 2000.
No, you’re not the only one. Remember that tech blogs comments always tend toward the negative. Notice that every single product released by Apple is instantly crapped on by tech blog commenters.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
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That’s fine! No need to rush. M1 is still extremely strong and M2 is beast!
Yes now that we know with more certainty that all the new Macs will be M2 SoC based it allows predictions to be more accurate. Like the 24” iMac update expected soon. It would be more of a delight if a larger iMac was announced of course, just in time to recognize the 25 years of iMacs history.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
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Ready for the new iMac in retro colors.Yes now that we know with more certainty that all the new Macs will be M2 SoC based it allows predictions to be more accurate. Like the 24” iMac update expected soon. It would be more of a delight if a larger iMac was announced of course, just in time to recognize the 25 years of iMacs history.
iMac: Just Updated With M4 Chip! Features, Price, and Buying Advice
Apple's iMac is an ultra-thin all-in-one desktop computer that was refreshed with the new M4 chip, a minimum of 16GB of memory, a nano-texture...
www.macrumors.com
Today marks the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs introducing the iMac, a computer that helped Apple return to profitability following near bankruptcy in the late 1990s. The original iMac featured a colorful, translucent design in an era where most computers were boxy and beige, proving that computers did not have to look boring.
"This is iMac," said Jobs, at the Flint Center in Cupertino. "The whole thing is translucent. You can see into it. It's so cool. We've got stereo speakers on the front. We've got infrared right up here. We've got the CD-ROM drive right in the middle. We've got dual stereo headphone jacks. We've got the coolest mouse on the planet right here."
The original iMac pioneered many industry firsts, such as USB and FireWire, while abandoning the floppy drive and other legacy ports. The computer featured a 15-inch display, a PowerPC G3 processor, a 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, a CD drive, two USB ports, and an Ethernet port for connecting to the still-nascent internet.
Over the past two and a half decades, the iMac has received many design changes, moving to a flat screen and an aluminum enclosure. Fittingly, the current 24-inch iMac features a colorful design just like the original model did all those years ago.
When to Expect a New iMac
Apple released the 24-inch iMac in April 2021 with the M1 chip and an ultra-thin design available in seven colors, including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. This is currently the only new iMac in Apple's lineup, as the Intel-based 27-inch iMac and iMac Pro models were both discontinued over the past few years.
A new iMac will launch in late 2023 at the earliest, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In February, he said Apple had no plans to update the iMac with the M2 chip and is waiting until the M3 chip, which has yet to be announced. The M3 chip is expected to use TSMC's 3nm process for significant performance and power efficiency improvements.
TSMC has reportedly faced yield issues with 3nm chip manufacturing, and Gurman said there is a possibility the new iMac does not launch until 2024. In any case, the next iMac appears to remain several months away from launching.
Article Link: iMac Turns 25 Today: When to Expect the Next Model to Launch
Remembering how exciting the release of the iMac (and OSX) was. Completely innovative, fresh, daring, and game changing. It’s extremely rare we see that sort of bold innovation in design these days. Not just at Apple. With cars, clothing… lots more “playing it safe” these days. So many good memories of using a range of these and G4s at home and school and all the exiting apps, games, and OSX Easter eggs!
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To me the iconic things about the old systems besides their appearance was their OS. Classic Mac OS has a much more nostalgic feel than classic OS X. I just feel nothing when using old OSX Machines like I do Classic Ones. I have collected many classic machines that take up a lot of space but I only have laptops for older OS X machines and instead opt to just own the newest model possible that I can use. For machines that are not functional today, the ones that can run OS 9 or less are great. The only ones I see as collectible now are the ones past 2017 and above, especially the M1s. Those don't take up space and I can see one day being easy to collect.
Broke out this guy a few months back to take some performance numbers
Benchmark was Quake, with some interesting results
Testbed
iMac 1998 Rev B.
PPC G3@233MHz
192MB PC66
ATI Rage Pro 6MB VRAM
Results
Mac OS 9.2.2 640x480@65536 color software rendering 15fps
MacOS 9.2.2 640x480@65536 colors RAVE (voodoo) rendering 20fps
Mac OS 10.3.9 640x480@65536 colors software rendering 23.6fps
Mac OS 10.3.9 640x480@65536 colors OpenGL rendering <test didn’t complete before crashing>
Might break it out again to see if I can’t fix that OpenGL issue. I know it used to work…
Worth noting is the fact that the iMac has made it through not just a major operating system transition but two processor architecture changes clearly pegs it as a survivor. Clearly it is a unique product from a marketing standpoint.
A revision to the mouse tweaked the design – Apple added a small dimple/notch to the button which had the effect that you could easily tell, by fingertip touch, when the mouse was correctly orientated.
Because you don’t need to move the whole arm/wrist as much.
I loved using that mouse. Its accent colour sides, in soft–touch plastic, were particularly nice to touch when using the mouse correctly (i.e. gripping it between thumb and fingertip, instead of with your palm over the top like other mice).
The duotone mouseball created a neat effect seen through the translucent top shell, under the logo.
And the short cord for the mouse seems to have been a design choice with the aim of improving the tangle problem caused by overlong mouse cords – connecting it to the keyboard gave just the right amount of spare cord to move freely. Apple made USB extension cables so you could position your keyboard further from the iMac.
Also loved the lenticular printed 3D decals around the ports and on the underside of peripherals (there was a similar desktop pattern to go with them).
I didn’t like them. I only started to like Mac once they moved to OS X. Still owned one for a while, though
I LOVED my Indigo G3 iMac. At the time I thought it made all other computers look stupid. I was heartbroken when the motherboard was fried by a power surge. The White G4 eMac that replaced it was a better machine, but it wasn’t as cool. My current 2012 21.5 has been totally great, but while a nice design it was never really Wow!, but I like it better than the eMac.
The current iMac 24 looks cool and brings that emotional element the G3 had. Wonderful!
I never had an original iMac puck mouse—by the time I got my G3 iMac the mouse had been redesigned—but I saw and tried one sometime later. Yeah, not great and not well designed.
Re: trackpads. I don”t care for trackpads at all. I much prefer a mouse which feels far more intuitive to me.
The current iMac 24 looks cool and brings that emotional element the G3 had. Wonderful!
I never had an original iMac puck mouse—by the time I got my G3 iMac the mouse had been redesigned—but I saw and tried one sometime later. Yeah, not great and not well designed.
Re: trackpads. I don”t care for trackpads at all. I much prefer a mouse which feels far more intuitive to me.
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No. Steve was the one who while working at Next, decided to put a graphical interface in BSD UNIX and call it "NextStep". Today MacOS is basically the same as NextStep with some refinements. This is a huge thing. Later Google copied the idea and pt a graphical interface on Linux and called it "Android" but it was Steve Jobs who was first.
Then the other thing was the idea that a cell phone is really a computer that can run a phone-app. No now had thought of it that way before. But once you do, the rest of it is obvious.
Steve had a half dozen or so really good ideas. Not all of them were while at Apple. He founded Next, where the modern Mac was invented and he founded Pixar to make a very different kind of movie that would do animation in a different way. In all these cases, he was never the engineer, he had other actual implement the big picture plans.
I keep my iMac keyboard and mouse - and they still just work when I need a spare.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs introducing the iMac, a computer that helped Apple return to profitability following near bankruptcy in the late 1990s. The original iMac featured a colorful, translucent design in an era where most computers were boxy and beige, proving that computers did not have to look boring.
"This is iMac," said Jobs, at the Flint Center in Cupertino. "The whole thing is translucent. You can see into it. It's so cool. We've got stereo speakers on the front. We've got infrared right up here. We've got the CD-ROM drive right in the middle. We've got dual stereo headphone jacks. We've got the coolest mouse on the planet right here."
The original iMac pioneered many industry firsts, such as USB and FireWire, while abandoning the floppy drive and other legacy ports. The computer featured a 15-inch display, a PowerPC G3 processor, a 4GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, a CD drive, two USB ports, and an Ethernet port for connecting to the still-nascent internet.
Over the past two and a half decades, the iMac has received many design changes, moving to a flat screen and an aluminum enclosure. Fittingly, the current 24-inch iMac features a colorful design just like the original model did all those years ago.
When to Expect a New iMac
Apple released the 24-inch iMac in April 2021 with the M1 chip and an ultra-thin design available in seven colors, including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. This is currently the only new iMac in Apple's lineup, as the Intel-based 27-inch iMac and iMac Pro models were both discontinued over the past few years.
A new iMac will launch in late 2023 at the earliest, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In February, he said Apple had no plans to update the iMac with the M2 chip and is waiting until the M3 chip, which has yet to be announced. The M3 chip is expected to use TSMC's 3nm process for significant performance and power efficiency improvements.
TSMC has reportedly faced yield issues with 3nm chip manufacturing, and Gurman said there is a possibility the new iMac does not launch until 2024. In any case, the next iMac appears to remain several months away from launching.
Article Link: iMac Turns 25 Today: When to Expect the Next Model to Launch
Yes, and the movements are more similar on both desktop and laptop with trackpad.
Doubt that I ever will go back to using mouse regularly again
But I have an old wired Logitech mouse as a backup, connected when I have forgotten to charge the trackpad, or when it it of some reason can be good to have a mouse connected.
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I love the iMac G4, partly for the way it looks, but most importantly, the ergonomics. I wish there was a Mac around now with such good ergonomics.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
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An evolution of iMac. Remarkably iconic! ✨💫
