September 2023
On May 6, 1998, Apple announced the all-in-one computer iMac. The iMac had a translucent Bondi Blue casing and in terms of design, it took a different path from Apple's earlier machines.
The iconic drop-shaped design of iMac was the work of popular British product designer Jony Ive and his team at Apple.
iMac was the first Apple product with the prefix "i" in its name, which was eventually used for a whole range of Apple products, including iTunes, iPod, iBook, iPhone, iPad and iCloud. The meaning of the "i" is widely believed to be the "Internet" for which the device was built in the first place. But Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said during the keynote that the prefix also has other meanings, such as individual, instruct, inform and inspire.
It was later revealed that the name iMac had been suggested to Jobs by Ken Segall, who worked for the advertising agency TBWA Chiat/Day in LA. At first Jobs didn't like the name and wanted MacMan. But it was later accepted after Segall gave it to him twice.
The original iMac was also called iMac G3 because the device featured a 233-MHz PowerPC G3 processor along with an ATI Rage IIc graphics card. It came with a 4 GB IDE hard drive, 32 MB of SDRAM and a built-in 15-inch CRT display with 1024 x 768 pixels. For connectivity, the iMac was equipped with two USB ports, an infrared port, a 24x CD-ROM drive, a built-in 33 Kbps modem, two stereo headphone jacks, a 100Mbps Ethernet port, and so on.
The device also had built-in stereo speakers with Sound Retrieval System (SRS) sound and came with Mac OS 8.1 out-of-the-box. The original iMac cost $1,299 at the time and was launched a few months later in August 1998. Apple added more color options when it updated the iMac in 1999, including Grape, Lime, Tangerine and Strawberry.
The original iMac was replaced by the updated iMac G4 a few years later, in 2003, and still had a colorful range, just like its predecessors.
Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011