15 ms·

iMac G3 – The Mac that saved Apple

267 points by a_band 6y ago

Uptrenda 6y ago
The iMac looks so beautiful and modern even today. Whenever I see one I want to buy it. If I had the time it would make an amazing case for an electronics project too.
- hashmash 6y ago
  I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When the iMac came out, my opinion was the same as yours -- absolutely beautiful design. Unfortunately, everyone copied the look (often quite badly), and now the original iMac looks tacky and dated to me.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    I prefer the boxy look of the Compaq Net1, which preceded the iMac. Yes it's beige but it has aged a lot better and doesn't look twee and toylike: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+prolinea+net1&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fbashny.net%2Fuploads%2Fimages%2F00%2F00%2F13%2F2014%2F04%2F23%2Fb53ce7904f.jpg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+prolinea+net1&t=fpas&iax=im...
    - Lio 6y ago
      I agree but to me that Compaq is clearly taking design influence from the earlier still Mac LC, which I prefer. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mac+lc&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mac+lc&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=image... It’s a nice design but the original iMac broke new ground. Personally I didn’t like it at the time, it drew too much attention to its plasticiness for my taste. Whereas something like a Silicon Graphics workstation looked out of this world cool. The first iMac that got me excited was the Sunflower. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imac+sunflower&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imac+sunflower&t=fpas&iar=images&i...
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      It looks boxy, generic, and very much of its time. When the iMac appeared people who knew nothing about computers would talk to me about it. "Have you seen...?" That's something Apple have always been intermittently good at - making computers for people who don't like computers.
  - rconti 6y ago
    Always kind of hated those iMacs, but loved the sunflower iMac.
- massysett 6y ago
  My favorite has always been what I call the "bowling ball iMac," more properly the iMac G4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 The smooth spherical half-ball and the swivel arm was perfection. I think the current iMac was a step backward from that.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    That was the foot in the door in our house. My wife saw the ad where the Mac stuck out its "tongue" at the window shopper and said "I want that". She used that for years until switching to a Macbook. It was a nice little computer. Less common but still a personal favorite is the eMac a family friend sold us for $100 because they didn't want it anymore. I thought it would be fun to play around with, and I was right. It ended up being so much fun that I stopped using my FreeBSD desktop and switched to Macs.
JonathonW 6y ago
Confession: the iMac G3 remains one of my favorite computer designs from Apple (with a slight preference toward the later slot-loading models, which smoothed out some rough edges in the original design). Yes, they’re all cheap plastic and it’s not even close to a “modern” aesthetic these days, but there’s something visually appealing and kind of quirky about the candy-colored translucent plastic and smooth curves of the G3 design that the sterile aluminum rectangles Apple currently produces lack.
- firecall 6y ago
  Yes, I like them too! I wouldnt say they were cheap plastic though! They felt very premium to me! I had the original Bondi Blue iMac! There was something very special about that design! I now have a Graphite G3 version in my vintage collection :-)
justinator 6y ago
The og iMac most certainly helped turn Apple around, but I have mixed emotions using it to develop on ('cause I was an intern and that's what we had). Most of my bad memories come from that damn CRT screen. We are so much better off not using those anymore. Also, it was just not fast enough for real work, and that damn puck mouse. At home (erm, dorm room), I had the latest, greatest G4 tower! which cost far too much for any 18 year old to need to own, but that thing ripped compared to whatever dull Pentium 233 I had previously had. ...except Apple couldn't ship with the original clock speed because G4 Macs were their own g/d drama. That Macbook G3 - the black one with the removable bays you could put in a battery (or two!) and hot-swap a CD drive in? One of the first ones they touted as being really thin (and probably at least 2x as thick as the current rev?) chef's kiss. That was the first computer that I thought was damn sexy, followed by the Ti Powerbook G4 when that came out. I can't wait to get my hands on an M1 to feel 1/100th of the excitement I did 20 odd years ago, but it'll feel much more utilitarian, which I'm quite fine with. Better things I guess to do now than pine over laptops. The keyboard better be up to snuff. Even with my humongous hands, I can hum along on those 2015 Macbook chiclet keys.
- deleted 6y ago
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- api 6y ago
  Apple mice have always sucked. The Magic Mouse is usable but before that you had their bizarre one button “unibrow mouse” dogma. It’s a case where they stuck to the guns and were wrong. Mice are useful with more buttons. Their trackpads on the other hand are fantastic. I use a Magic Trackpad a my desk and have become totally accustomed to those instead of mice.
  - samatman 6y ago
    > Apple mice have always sucked This is basically true, but in the annals of Apple mice which suck, the hockey puck iMac mouse stands alone. It remains a popular study in design circles for how to be hostile to your users, because a perfectly round mouse doesn't fit a human hand, and it's pointlessly difficult to orient the blasted thing.
justinator 6y ago
Also the late 90's were such a different time aesthetically. You'd probably be lounging in your room on a blow up chair that strangely matched your iMac G3, writing in your paper journal, before you set up your LiveJournal in the evening and hung out on ICQ avoiding your physics homework. Oh to date oneself.
- pram 6y ago
  Yes the weird aesthetics permeated everything too, even Windows Media Player had ridiculously wacky skins. http://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/ http://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/ There were exceptions though. I unironically think the transparent graphite iMac and the transparent Apple Studio Display CRT still look good today in 2020.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    I think the graphite iMac DV special edition was the most beautiful computer ever made.
    - doctor_eval 6y ago
      I still have mine. Well, it’s stuck in the office of a company I am no longer on good terms with. This made me start thinking about ways I could extract it!
      - yarcob 6y ago
        I hope nobody throws it away!
  - singhrac 6y ago
    Always fun to see zachtronics pop up on HN
  - skocznymroczny 6y ago
    These kind of skins are still alive in "gaming" motherboard softwares.
adjkant 6y ago
Enjoyed this one and went ahead and read another of interest to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567210
ogre_codes 6y ago
This series of articles is a great peek into Mac history. My personal favorite is the iMac G4, another short lived but truly beautiful form factor. Sadly the it didn't scale up to larger display sizes because it was truly an amazing looking machine. https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g4/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g... It didn't have the historical significance the original iMac did, but the look is timeless and just fantastic. I would still love to have one on my desk. If only that damned display were bigger than 15". I think it made it to 17", but still too small to be practical for dev work when 21-27 inch LCDs are now commonplace.
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  The largest G4 iMac had a 20" screen. It looked a bit top-heavy but it worked fine.
  - 1-6 6y ago
    The eMac was also another good one along the same lines as the original iMac. At that point in time, the polycarbonate unibody was getting phased out and LCD displays were already getting cheaper to mass produce. It’s probably one of the last cathode ray tube Macs in existence.
    - agloeregrets 6y ago
      Yup, I had an eMac I got my hands on. It was a truly great machine and that was probably one of the best CRTs ever made. It was Apple’s last CRT product as well.
      - zapzupnz 6y ago
        I loved our eMac. Big screen, clearer picture than any iMac, and that gorgeous white plastic aesthetic that reminded one of an iBook — except chunky. Only trouble was the fans were ridiculously loud.
    - Lutzb 6y ago
NaOH 6y ago
I got a second generation one about a year ago, free from someone I know who was going to pitch it. It's basically identical to the first models, just a slightly faster CPU. I used it two or three times to access an old multimedia CD-ROM I still have before it locked up, the hard drive dead. I doubt I'll ever get it fixed, and unless I find someone to take it I'll end up bringing it to Apple since they have a free recycling program. I kind of dread doing that because the thing is heavy. Really heavy. It weighs more than the combined weight of all the other Apple devices I have around: MacBook Air (2013) Mac mini (2012) iPhone 4 iPod touch iPhone XS iPhone 5S iPad mini (v1) iPad mini (v2) Newton Powerbook G3 (Pismo) It's easy to forget how heavy CRTs were.
- toast0 6y ago
  If you want it gone, put some contact info in your post or your HN profile. I don't want it, but I'm sure someone reading this might.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
I got my start as a developer on one of the summer 2000 "DV" CRT iMac models, first with REALBasic with OS 9 and then with the developer disc bundled with OS X 10.0, setting me on my path to my current career. Great little machine, if a bit underpowered.
dereg 6y ago
I loved my G3 iMac. I was in elementary school around the time it came out and my father bought one for each of my sisters who went away to college and one for us at home. It was a fixture in our lives. From a user's perspective, the iMac G3 was the first computer that crossed the boundary from utility box to lifestyle machine. The built in speakers were everything. I used to download music via Napster and play that music with my sisters over the land line. Computer speakers may have existed prior to the iMac but never were they highlighted as a core element of the computer's design. I used to spend silly amounts of time in computer stores playing around with computers. I remember the time that the iMac G3 and G3 Tower started to hit the shelves and demo areas. It was a multi-sensory explosion. It's really, really hard to describe the impact that these computers had at the time. Maybe the multi-sensory thing was the reason why the iMac experience is so deeply ingrained in my memory. It managed to touched on all five senses: - Sight - it had bold, colorful design - Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge - Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac? - Hearing - had great stereo speakers - Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day! I'll spare folks from more of this treacle because I don't want to completely re-write history. The computer wasn't perfect - it was terribly slow and tended to crash whenever my father would yell at me to stop using it.
- phist_mcgee 6y ago
  Steve Jobs is being channeled through you for this comment ;)
- opencl 6y ago
  The iMac G3 had plenty of hard edges. You couldn't see them because they were all on the bottom of the carrying handle, aka the side that you actually hold it from.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dereg 6y ago
    Now that you bring it up, I remember the port enclosure to be particularly treacherous.
nbzso 6y ago
..and the iPhone that killed it.
- Torwald 6y ago
  Not really. Even in his first tenure with Apple, Steve Jobs held Sony in high regard as a sort of blueprint for Apple. This idea of the consumer electronics leader, that Sony was in the 80s with the Walkman etc, inspired Jobs long before he founded NeXT. Apple was "Apple Inc." instead of "Apple Computer Inc." in Steve's head for a very long time.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Having been around for quite some time, it appears to me that the OS X generation is completely unaware of how Apple used to be like, and whatever "openness" they had during the critical business years was just for survival, nothing else.
    - nbzso 6y ago
      It's obvious now. And the lesson is expensive one.
      - rational_indian 6y ago
        Let's not forget this lesson when it comes to Microsoft.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Google, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat,....
    - ksec 6y ago
      > OS X generation is completely unaware of how Apple used to be like I think they would be more accurate being referred to as iPod and iPhone Generation. The vast majority of people today only came to know Apple ( and Mac ) only after using those products.
asveikau 6y ago
In some of those photos you can see the ethernet port. What I remember of the time period is that most consumer machines didn't have an ethernet port. I bought quite a few PCI and ISA ethernet cards back in the day for this reason. It's easy to forget now that this feature was a little radical for a consumer machine. Modem sure, but ethernet? Consumer broadband was still on its way.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I never used Macs. Is the ethernet port present because this machine has no capacity for expansion cards? An ad in a 1998 PC magazine offers the cheapest ISA network card for $10, although the iMac G3 has a faster 10/100 card, about $40.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    > Is the ethernet port present because this machine has no capacity for expansion cards? It was relatively common for Macs to have ethernet before that point, whether or not they had expansion slots. I remember the PowerMac 6100 from 1994 had ethernet, although it required a dongle since 10baseT hadn’t taken over the world yet. I think prior to the iMac, there were a couple models that you could buy without ethernet, on the budget end. What I remember from this era was that networking was much easier to deal with on a Mac, until Windows XP (and 2000) addressed some of the issues. The same was true of audio in the 1980s.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      Apple was also relatively early on wifi adoption, IIRC.
      - rconti 6y ago
        According to Wikipedia[1], the original clamshell colorful iBook with the molded handle came out with WiFi in 1999. As a Linux user/sysadmin, I bought my first Mac in 2002, when I quit my job to go back to college, needed a laptop, and didn't want to deal with Linux on a laptop. I reasoned I "might as well" get something with Windows on it, since being able to easily play DVDs and use Office would come in handy. I had an "aha" moment when I realized "wait a second, if all I want is Office and a DVD player, I guess I could get a Mac?" OS X had been released about a year before, which of course meant the Mac appealed to me more than Windows for the first time. It's not an exaggeration to say I knew at that time, at age 21, that Apple was about to blow up, because when I brought my new G3 iBook Mac in to work at my tech job, EVERYBODY wanted to see it and play with it, especially the greybeards. I desperately wanted to buy Apple stock then, but I held off, since it would be on borrowed money. I don't regret it, because it was the right decision, but it sure would have paid off :) Oh anyway, back to the story. My iBook came with wifi, and I paid a handsome $300 for the Airport Extreme base station (the "snow" 2nd gen model, not the graphite 1st gen). Interestingly, both the AEBS and the iBook used the same PCMCIA wifi card inside, so many years later, when the iBook's card got flaky, I just swapped in the one from the AEBS I wasn't using anymore, and it worked great. Not many people in the dorms in 2002 had WiFi-- in fact, almost nobody I can remember did. my dorm room with wireless access point faced an outdoor gathering/picnic area, so during a fire alarm one time, I took my laptop with me and was surfing the internet while everyone else figured out what to do with themselves. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook
tannhaeuser 6y ago
The original iMac was nice indeed (bought an iMac DV for my gf back then). But it was nothing compared to the original 9 inch b/w Mac/Mac SE relative to other computers at the time. Also, I liked the no-fan "toaster" G4 with its iconic flat screen display very much (a friend of mine prolonged its life with an aftermarket CPU/GPU upgrade kit) and remember the unpacking experience of my 15 inch G4 PowerBook, which got me excited like a child getting his first home computer, and generated that special smile on my face.
a5withtrrs 6y ago
I wonder if the Nintendo releases of a variety of gameboy consoles in transparent/colored plastics prior to the iMac was any influence at all. Certainly they gained popularity with the release of the transparent purple gameboy colors.
- klodolph 6y ago
  Other aspects of Nintendo’s design ended up in Apple’s products. Supposedly, the design of the Game Boy link cable was the inspiration for the FireWire cable. There were a few earlier translucent Apple devices though, like the eMate 300. My guess is that the suppliers for plastics in the 1980s and 1990s added better translucent plastics to their catalog, and that’s where people got ideas. Other manufacturers did it even earlier than Nintendo and Apple, like the transparent case landline telephones from the 1980s. Wikipedia has an article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_craze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_craze Nowadays you only see this stuff in prison.
anukulrm 6y ago
A trip down memory lane for sure! I can't help but feel that a list for 2020 has to include the Macbooks with the M1 chip. Personally, the difference between my mid-2017 Macbook Pro and my M1 Macbook Air has been astronomical. The battery life alone will "save" Apple.
simonh 6y ago
My first Mac was a white Intel iMac in 2007, but the original iMac first Mac I really noticed as something to be interested in. The radical forward looking design choices, including up to date ports combined with the RISC internals and the promise of a new Unix/NEXT based OS on the horizon (which took a while) made Apple interesting again. It took almost 10 years before I finally took the plunge, but whenever I looked at getting a new PC from then on, I seriously considered getting a Mac.
spike021 6y ago
I have such fond memories of playing StarCraft on a turquoise iMac just like the one in the article. That puck mouse was the worst, though.
gigatexal 6y ago
Off topic but imagine if they took a M series chip and relaunched the Cube. A G4 power Mac cube but with a M2 or M3. That or the Pixar lamp looking iMac. PC design back in the day at Apple was much more novel and whimsical. I want them to bring that back. And my wallet does, too.
- mdasen 6y ago
  I loved the aesthetic of the Cube, but I feel like Apple has basically created Cube replacements. The Mac Mini is basically a G4 Cube, just smaller. If you're looking for the same dimensions as a Cube, the trashcan Mac Pro had nearly identical dimensions as a Cube, but as a cylinder. I think it's likely that we'll see something similar to a Cube or trashcan Mac Pro in the future with M series chips. Apple was able to pack 130W Xeon chips into the trashcan Mac Pro. Seems reasonable to think that a Pro-class M series chip could fit within that power/thermal range. The new Mac Pros are 205W which probably necessitated moving away from the trashcan size. Given that the highest-end Mac Pro is around 2.5x faster than a Mac Mini while the Mac Mini is only around 10 watts, it seems like there's a lot of room for Apple to create a Mac Pro without dialing up the heat too much. I guess I'm wondering: did you like the cube, but not the trashcan?
- rconti 6y ago
  I'll buy the next desktop machine. My 5k 27" iMac (2015) is getting a bit long in the tooth, and I have a 2nd 27" 4k display next to it for more real estate. The M1 Air is a revelation. The current Mac Pro is just WAY too expensive. Whatever Apple releases as the "awesome" desktop machine, whether "M2" Mini Pro, a true Mac Pro that's not $5000, it'll be on my desk with an ultrawide. And yeah, I never had a sunflower iMac, but THAT was cool.
Gravityloss 6y ago
The lack of a disk drive was a really serious drawback - and of course the cost.
paulpauper 6y ago
The Imac was bad so many ways: blurry screen, icons too small due to the screen being too small for the OS , overpriced, slow speed, hockey puck mouse, no floppy . Even the Powermacs from 1995 were better than than Imac. I bought a PC instead and stopped buying macs from that point on.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amelius 6y ago
Back then at least Macs were different, each generation. Now laptops are always the same grey aluminum with an apple logo on the back. Has Apple lost its design skills? Are they too afraid to make changes?
- muro 6y ago
  All current apple hardware looks great. They just lost their fun, consumer line and only keep their pro design. I miss the second design line.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I don't think they've lost their design skills -- a lot of their stuff still has good-to-great industrial design. I think their failing is that at some point in the early 2000s, Jony Ive declared war on whimsy, relentlessly stamping out even the most minor bits of fun in the pursuit of the simplest forms possible. I'm not sure how this changes now that Ive isn't present; while I'd like to be cautiously optimistic, current design head Alan Dye has been there since 2006 and may have internalized a lot of that anti-whimsy. Based on Big Sur's UX, he seems to unfortunately share Ive's "form over function" failing.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Laptop design took over, and since key goals are strength, thinness, and lightness, and since the market is now global, and anything too weird would annoy at least some customers, there isn't much of an opportunity to do anything outstandingly creative. For example - you could anodise unique swirly coloured patterns into the aluminium. You could coat parts with a mirror chrome finish. You could make and sell your own Apple rubber bumpers in a series of interesting textures, including nice renewable materials like bamboo. But at least as many people would hate those as love them, which is why Apple will always play safe, and the bumpers will be left to after-market. Space Gray, Silver and Alu-Gold are timid design choices, and the muted blues/greens/etc on the new iPhones look pretty mediocre IMO. But they're cheap, practical, and relatively durable, so I doubt Tim Cook's Apple is going to move beyond them any time soon.
cm2187 6y ago
What I miss the most is System 7-9. The architecture was of course outdated and needed to be scrapped (no protected memory, cooperative concurrency, etc). But what I miss is that the OS directory was meant to be accessible and modified by end users. To install a driver, all you had to do was to drag and drop the driver extension onto the extension folder and reboot, and the opposite to uninstall it. No complex command lines, things left behind that still affect the OS. You could do the same with application settings, fonts, etc. This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).
- timw4mail 6y ago
  Classic MacOS certainly had its flaws, but there has likely never been a more efficient mass-market general-purpose OS. In many ways, a ~400MHz G3 processor running classic MacOS feels faster and more responsive than a modern high-end workstation. The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.
  - HeckFeck 6y ago
    > The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say. I submit that this observation also applies to Windows 9x.
  - trm42 6y ago
    I agree. The metaphor for manipulating files, drivers etc has been the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor (maybe with the exception of BeOS but they just copied and made kinda better version of MacOS classic. I recently bought a Powermac G4/553 DA model and it's really responsive with Classic. One of the last Classic-compatible models. But it feels really simple compared to any modern OS. And something I've forgotten in 20 years since the last usage of Classic: There's no real multi-tasking. Uncompressing zip or sit packages basically blocks the whole OS until the work is done. Oh and other things taken for granted nowadays I've forgotten: one can use _the same computer for other things when scanning photos_. Then even the fastest computer was blocked until the scanning was completed :D
bluedino 6y ago
I realize I wasn't the target market for these iMacs, but I had one, and I -hated it-. I worked at a retail store and at the time, we got 25 iMacs in. Almost every single one of them came back. People just didn't know what to do with them. I got one on discount, $699 I believe. Twice as much as the Celeron 300 eMachines that we had at the time. It wasn't very fast. It didn't have any expandability. The screen was terrible. 14/15" and it had a horrible dot pitch. You could run 800x600 but it would give you a headache. I returned it, and got the next hardware revision. It wasn't much better. It did, however, have a 6MB ATI video card in it so I could play some Quake. The screen was so limiting when it came to real work. The keyboard was passable but the mouse was awful. Later on, I stuck a pair of 128GB chips in it, and the biggest IDE HD I could find at the time (Maxtor 80GB?). It helped a little bit. But once I installed OS X, it was crippled. My friends PowerBook G3 Pismo was quite a bit faster but still too slow. It was a weird generation of Apple product where you got left behind almost as soon as it came out. About 10 years later, in 2009, I got another iMac (the newest model at the time), and completely fell in love with it.
- lastofthemojito 6y ago
  I hear you about those things being outdated quickly. I bought a Wallstreet Powerbook G3 back in '99 or so because it was a cool RISC laptop AND it was promised to run this amazing upcoming UNIX-based Mac OS X. When OS X came out, of course it ran...but it was an absolute dog on these machines. IIRC Apple never bothered to write optimized OS X video card drivers for these "old" machines, they just charged forward with the new stuff. The experience was definitely enough for me to swear off buying new Apple products for at least a decade (although OS X did eventually win me back).
  - klodolph 6y ago
    My understanding is that these old systems were slow because the window system was a compositing window system, and old hardware doesn’t keep up well with it. Using a compositing window manager has a lot of advantages, though, which is why most modern window managers work that way. Windows Vista also introduced a compositing window manager IIRC, and it was also horribly slow on old systems.
jasoneckert 6y ago
For me, Apple wasn't interesting until Mac OS X on the PowerPC G4 arrived on the scene in the early 2000s. However, there definitely is a lot of validity to the statement that the iMac G3 saved Apple in the late 1990s. When asked about Apple Computer at the time, Michael Dell (founder of Dell) said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Alongside the big cuts to their product lineup, the sales of the iMac G3 (which was being designed before Steve Jobs returned to Apple) was what kept them afloat until they could come out with the iPod and Mac OS X. I do remember helping a friend buy an iMac G3 back then. It was painfully slow for certain things, and still ran ancient MacOS, but it was good enough computer for what they needed (Internet, word processing, listening to music).
- rconti 6y ago
  Agreed. It was the combination of the new direction for the machines, and OS X. I just made a post about my first Mac, but TL;DR, OS X came out in 2001 and I didn't buy my first machine 'till late 2002, and even then, having a Mac was very unusual and, I thought, would be looked down on by tech people -- nobody had one, and I didn't THINK anyone was interested in them. Turned out, the interest in my new machine was a lot higher than I had expected. But, again, this is 5 years after the lollipop iMacs.
minikites 6y ago
I think a few revisions of this computer had no fan, natural convection was enough to cool the inside.
- timw4mail 6y ago
  I'm not sure there were CRT-based iMacs with fans.
scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
I very vividly remember the trip to Microcenter to buy that iMac in 1998 with my dad - we set it up on the floor. There were two games included - MDK and Nanosaur I would inherit that computer a few years later and spent I spent lot of time on it, mostly playing games and making pixel art.
- Ken_At_EM 6y ago
  I remember the nearly the exact same experience and games! Which MicroCenter?
  - scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
    Ha! I want to say one was somewhere on that Mountain View chunk of the 101 - a mall complex with AMC theaters, can't find it on the map anymore. Games were a touchy subject - they were hard to come by, MDK, Nanosaur and Warcraft and later Baldur's Gate were my top choices growing up. Along with a few Zip disks with a bunch of older MacOS9 and MacOS8 games!
timw4mail 6y ago
I miss transparent plastic cases on electronics...
- nikau 6y ago
  Well, good news is they are standard issue in the jail system so you cant hide contraband in your radio or tv set.
carrozo 6y ago
Ha, saw this tweet the other day: “i love how apple released a computer that came in four hundred neon colors, hit it big, and then made the exact same gray laptop for 15 years straight” https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?s=21 https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?...
taivare 6y ago
I had the beige G3 from the same year and boy did it crash a lot!
- trm42 6y ago
  My dad had 300Mhz beige G3 tower and it was always rock solid. Of course Photoshop and Pagemaker were a bit crashy apps...
jurip 6y ago
The thick CRT case reminded me, again, of the unveiling of the current iMac design in 2012. Phil turning the computer to demonstrate its thinness, to an obviously very carefully selected angle so the bulge remained just out of sight. It still feels a bit pointless, but what do I know.
bydo 6y ago
It's only mentioned in one line, at the very bottom of the page, but Jason Snell also is doing this series as a podcast: https://www.relay.fm/20macs https://www.relay.fm/20macs It has a lot of brief interviews with other long-time Mac users on their experiences with each machine.
rconti 6y ago
> In [the place of SCSI, ADB, and serial] was a new connection standard that had been introduced on the PC side, but not yet embraced: the Universal Serial Bus, or USB. To be fair, while Apple killed off three ports that had defined the Mac for more than a decade, it replaced them with a standard that’s still kicking more than two decades later. (Marvel for a moment about the fact that I can take an original iMac keyboard and plug it into an M1 Mac Mini and… it’ll just work!) Typing this from an M1 MacBook Air, I had to laugh and do a double take that they had to specify an M1 Mac Mini, since it's the only one with a USB type-A port :) But yeah, the longevity of USB-A is amazing.
rconti 6y ago
> Perhaps Apple’s best commercial of all time is the one in which Jeff Goldblum explains how you set up an iMac to get online: > Presenting three easy steps to the Internet. Step one: Plug in. Step two: Get connected. Step three… there’s no step three. There’s no step three! I had completely forgotten about the Jeff Goldblum ad[1]. The spiritual predecessor to Step 3: PROFIT!, I suppose. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg
- cosmotic 6y ago
  I'm pretty fond of this Jeff Goldblum gem where he explains the qualities of a new PowerBook G4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdOUjIKLSuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdOUjIKLSuM
ngcc_hk 6y ago
iPod and iphone more ?
avalys 6y ago
I was ~11 years old when the iMac came out. I hated it. Looking back now - I enjoyed working with computers, I suppose in part because I liked being good at something that was an "adult" activity. And here Apple comes out with a computer that looks like a Fisher Price toy 6-year-olds should play with. Of course I wanted nothing to do with it.
jrnichols 6y ago
I was in one of the first waves of AppleCare representatives at the then-brand new call center in Elk Grove, CA. We had an iMac as our workstation. There was a lot of "eat your own dog food" going on and I loved it. It was really exciting for me to see Apple start to rebound like it did. I have a lot of happy memories there and I love to see the older machines still bringing joy to people. I'm still kicking myself for not buying stock when I could.

267 points by a_band 6y ago

The iMac looks so beautiful and modern even today. Whenever I see one I want to buy it. If I had the time it would make an amazing case for an electronics project too.

hashmash 6y ago
I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When the iMac came out, my opinion was the same as yours -- absolutely beautiful design. Unfortunately, everyone copied the look (often quite badly), and now the original iMac looks tacky and dated to me.
- dingaling 6y ago
  I prefer the boxy look of the Compaq Net1, which preceded the iMac. Yes it's beige but it has aged a lot better and doesn't look twee and toylike: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+prolinea+net1&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fbashny.net%2Fuploads%2Fimages%2F00%2F00%2F13%2F2014%2F04%2F23%2Fb53ce7904f.jpg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+prolinea+net1&t=fpas&iax=im...
  - Lio 6y ago
    I agree but to me that Compaq is clearly taking design influence from the earlier still Mac LC, which I prefer. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mac+lc&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mac+lc&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=image... It’s a nice design but the original iMac broke new ground. Personally I didn’t like it at the time, it drew too much attention to its plasticiness for my taste. Whereas something like a Silicon Graphics workstation looked out of this world cool. The first iMac that got me excited was the Sunflower. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imac+sunflower&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=imac+sunflower&t=fpas&iar=images&i...
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    It looks boxy, generic, and very much of its time. When the iMac appeared people who knew nothing about computers would talk to me about it. "Have you seen...?" That's something Apple have always been intermittently good at - making computers for people who don't like computers.
- rconti 6y ago
  Always kind of hated those iMacs, but loved the sunflower iMac.
massysett 6y ago
My favorite has always been what I call the "bowling ball iMac," more properly the iMac G4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 The smooth spherical half-ball and the swivel arm was perfection. I think the current iMac was a step backward from that.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  That was the foot in the door in our house. My wife saw the ad where the Mac stuck out its "tongue" at the window shopper and said "I want that". She used that for years until switching to a Macbook. It was a nice little computer. Less common but still a personal favorite is the eMac a family friend sold us for $100 because they didn't want it anymore. I thought it would be fun to play around with, and I was right. It ended up being so much fun that I stopped using my FreeBSD desktop and switched to Macs.

JonathonW 6y ago

Confession: the iMac G3 remains one of my favorite computer designs from Apple (with a slight preference toward the later slot-loading models, which smoothed out some rough edges in the original design). Yes, they’re all cheap plastic and it’s not even close to a “modern” aesthetic these days, but there’s something visually appealing and kind of quirky about the candy-colored translucent plastic and smooth curves of the G3 design that the sterile aluminum rectangles Apple currently produces lack.

firecall 6y ago
Yes, I like them too! I wouldnt say they were cheap plastic though! They felt very premium to me! I had the original Bondi Blue iMac! There was something very special about that design! I now have a Graphite G3 version in my vintage collection :-)

justinator 6y ago

The og iMac most certainly helped turn Apple around, but I have mixed emotions using it to develop on ('cause I was an intern and that's what we had). Most of my bad memories come from that damn CRT screen. We are so much better off not using those anymore. Also, it was just not fast enough for real work, and that damn puck mouse. At home (erm, dorm room), I had the latest, greatest G4 tower! which cost far too much for any 18 year old to need to own, but that thing ripped compared to whatever dull Pentium 233 I had previously had. ...except Apple couldn't ship with the original clock speed because G4 Macs were their own g/d drama. That Macbook G3 - the black one with the removable bays you could put in a battery (or two!) and hot-swap a CD drive in? One of the first ones they touted as being really thin (and probably at least 2x as thick as the current rev?) chef's kiss. That was the first computer that I thought was damn sexy, followed by the Ti Powerbook G4 when that came out. I can't wait to get my hands on an M1 to feel 1/100th of the excitement I did 20 odd years ago, but it'll feel much more utilitarian, which I'm quite fine with. Better things I guess to do now than pine over laptops. The keyboard better be up to snuff. Even with my humongous hands, I can hum along on those 2015 Macbook chiclet keys.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
api 6y ago
Apple mice have always sucked. The Magic Mouse is usable but before that you had their bizarre one button “unibrow mouse” dogma. It’s a case where they stuck to the guns and were wrong. Mice are useful with more buttons. Their trackpads on the other hand are fantastic. I use a Magic Trackpad a my desk and have become totally accustomed to those instead of mice.
- samatman 6y ago
  > Apple mice have always sucked This is basically true, but in the annals of Apple mice which suck, the hockey puck iMac mouse stands alone. It remains a popular study in design circles for how to be hostile to your users, because a perfectly round mouse doesn't fit a human hand, and it's pointlessly difficult to orient the blasted thing.

justinator 6y ago

Also the late 90's were such a different time aesthetically. You'd probably be lounging in your room on a blow up chair that strangely matched your iMac G3, writing in your paper journal, before you set up your LiveJournal in the evening and hung out on ICQ avoiding your physics homework. Oh to date oneself.

pram 6y ago
Yes the weird aesthetics permeated everything too, even Windows Media Player had ridiculously wacky skins. http://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/ http://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/ There were exceptions though. I unironically think the transparent graphite iMac and the transparent Apple Studio Display CRT still look good today in 2020.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I think the graphite iMac DV special edition was the most beautiful computer ever made.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    I still have mine. Well, it’s stuck in the office of a company I am no longer on good terms with. This made me start thinking about ways I could extract it!
    - yarcob 6y ago
      I hope nobody throws it away!
- singhrac 6y ago
  Always fun to see zachtronics pop up on HN
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  These kind of skins are still alive in "gaming" motherboard softwares.

adjkant 6y ago

Enjoyed this one and went ahead and read another of interest to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567210

ogre_codes 6y ago

This series of articles is a great peek into Mac history. My personal favorite is the iMac G4, another short lived but truly beautiful form factor. Sadly the it didn't scale up to larger display sizes because it was truly an amazing looking machine. https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g4/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/20-macs-for-2020-9-imac-g... It didn't have the historical significance the original iMac did, but the look is timeless and just fantastic. I would still love to have one on my desk. If only that damned display were bigger than 15". I think it made it to 17", but still too small to be practical for dev work when 21-27 inch LCDs are now commonplace.

LeoPanthera 6y ago
The largest G4 iMac had a 20" screen. It looked a bit top-heavy but it worked fine.
- 1-6 6y ago
  The eMac was also another good one along the same lines as the original iMac. At that point in time, the polycarbonate unibody was getting phased out and LCD displays were already getting cheaper to mass produce. It’s probably one of the last cathode ray tube Macs in existence.
  - agloeregrets 6y ago
    Yup, I had an eMac I got my hands on. It was a truly great machine and that was probably one of the best CRTs ever made. It was Apple’s last CRT product as well.
    - zapzupnz 6y ago
      I loved our eMac. Big screen, clearer picture than any iMac, and that gorgeous white plastic aesthetic that reminded one of an iBook — except chunky. Only trouble was the fans were ridiculously loud.
  - Lutzb 6y ago

NaOH 6y ago

I got a second generation one about a year ago, free from someone I know who was going to pitch it. It's basically identical to the first models, just a slightly faster CPU. I used it two or three times to access an old multimedia CD-ROM I still have before it locked up, the hard drive dead. I doubt I'll ever get it fixed, and unless I find someone to take it I'll end up bringing it to Apple since they have a free recycling program. I kind of dread doing that because the thing is heavy. Really heavy. It weighs more than the combined weight of all the other Apple devices I have around: MacBook Air (2013) Mac mini (2012) iPhone 4 iPod touch iPhone XS iPhone 5S iPad mini (v1) iPad mini (v2) Newton Powerbook G3 (Pismo) It's easy to forget how heavy CRTs were.

toast0 6y ago
If you want it gone, put some contact info in your post or your HN profile. I don't want it, but I'm sure someone reading this might.

kitsunesoba 6y ago

I got my start as a developer on one of the summer 2000 "DV" CRT iMac models, first with REALBasic with OS 9 and then with the developer disc bundled with OS X 10.0, setting me on my path to my current career. Great little machine, if a bit underpowered.

dereg 6y ago

I loved my G3 iMac. I was in elementary school around the time it came out and my father bought one for each of my sisters who went away to college and one for us at home. It was a fixture in our lives. From a user's perspective, the iMac G3 was the first computer that crossed the boundary from utility box to lifestyle machine. The built in speakers were everything. I used to download music via Napster and play that music with my sisters over the land line. Computer speakers may have existed prior to the iMac but never were they highlighted as a core element of the computer's design. I used to spend silly amounts of time in computer stores playing around with computers. I remember the time that the iMac G3 and G3 Tower started to hit the shelves and demo areas. It was a multi-sensory explosion. It's really, really hard to describe the impact that these computers had at the time. Maybe the multi-sensory thing was the reason why the iMac experience is so deeply ingrained in my memory. It managed to touched on all five senses: - Sight - it had bold, colorful design - Touch - soft translucent plastic without a single hard edge - Smell - remember the smell of a new Mac? - Hearing - had great stereo speakers - Taste - Apple was in it's "lickable" phase.. I miss it to this day! I'll spare folks from more of this treacle because I don't want to completely re-write history. The computer wasn't perfect - it was terribly slow and tended to crash whenever my father would yell at me to stop using it.

phist_mcgee 6y ago
Steve Jobs is being channeled through you for this comment ;)
opencl 6y ago
The iMac G3 had plenty of hard edges. You couldn't see them because they were all on the bottom of the carrying handle, aka the side that you actually hold it from.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dereg 6y ago
  Now that you bring it up, I remember the port enclosure to be particularly treacherous.

nbzso 6y ago

..and the iPhone that killed it.

Torwald 6y ago
Not really. Even in his first tenure with Apple, Steve Jobs held Sony in high regard as a sort of blueprint for Apple. This idea of the consumer electronics leader, that Sony was in the 80s with the Walkman etc, inspired Jobs long before he founded NeXT. Apple was "Apple Inc." instead of "Apple Computer Inc." in Steve's head for a very long time.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Having been around for quite some time, it appears to me that the OS X generation is completely unaware of how Apple used to be like, and whatever "openness" they had during the critical business years was just for survival, nothing else.
  - nbzso 6y ago
    It's obvious now. And the lesson is expensive one.
    - rational_indian 6y ago
      Let's not forget this lesson when it comes to Microsoft.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Google, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat,....
  - ksec 6y ago
    > OS X generation is completely unaware of how Apple used to be like I think they would be more accurate being referred to as iPod and iPhone Generation. The vast majority of people today only came to know Apple ( and Mac ) only after using those products.

asveikau 6y ago

In some of those photos you can see the ethernet port. What I remember of the time period is that most consumer machines didn't have an ethernet port. I bought quite a few PCI and ISA ethernet cards back in the day for this reason. It's easy to forget now that this feature was a little radical for a consumer machine. Modem sure, but ethernet? Consumer broadband was still on its way.

Symbiote 6y ago
I never used Macs. Is the ethernet port present because this machine has no capacity for expansion cards? An ad in a 1998 PC magazine offers the cheapest ISA network card for $10, although the iMac G3 has a faster 10/100 card, about $40.
- klodolph 6y ago
  > Is the ethernet port present because this machine has no capacity for expansion cards? It was relatively common for Macs to have ethernet before that point, whether or not they had expansion slots. I remember the PowerMac 6100 from 1994 had ethernet, although it required a dongle since 10baseT hadn’t taken over the world yet. I think prior to the iMac, there were a couple models that you could buy without ethernet, on the budget end. What I remember from this era was that networking was much easier to deal with on a Mac, until Windows XP (and 2000) addressed some of the issues. The same was true of audio in the 1980s.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Apple was also relatively early on wifi adoption, IIRC.
    - rconti 6y ago
      According to Wikipedia[1], the original clamshell colorful iBook with the molded handle came out with WiFi in 1999. As a Linux user/sysadmin, I bought my first Mac in 2002, when I quit my job to go back to college, needed a laptop, and didn't want to deal with Linux on a laptop. I reasoned I "might as well" get something with Windows on it, since being able to easily play DVDs and use Office would come in handy. I had an "aha" moment when I realized "wait a second, if all I want is Office and a DVD player, I guess I could get a Mac?" OS X had been released about a year before, which of course meant the Mac appealed to me more than Windows for the first time. It's not an exaggeration to say I knew at that time, at age 21, that Apple was about to blow up, because when I brought my new G3 iBook Mac in to work at my tech job, EVERYBODY wanted to see it and play with it, especially the greybeards. I desperately wanted to buy Apple stock then, but I held off, since it would be on borrowed money. I don't regret it, because it was the right decision, but it sure would have paid off :) Oh anyway, back to the story. My iBook came with wifi, and I paid a handsome $300 for the Airport Extreme base station (the "snow" 2nd gen model, not the graphite 1st gen). Interestingly, both the AEBS and the iBook used the same PCMCIA wifi card inside, so many years later, when the iBook's card got flaky, I just swapped in the one from the AEBS I wasn't using anymore, and it worked great. Not many people in the dorms in 2002 had WiFi-- in fact, almost nobody I can remember did. my dorm room with wireless access point faced an outdoor gathering/picnic area, so during a fire alarm one time, I took my laptop with me and was surfing the internet while everyone else figured out what to do with themselves. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook

tannhaeuser 6y ago

The original iMac was nice indeed (bought an iMac DV for my gf back then). But it was nothing compared to the original 9 inch b/w Mac/Mac SE relative to other computers at the time. Also, I liked the no-fan "toaster" G4 with its iconic flat screen display very much (a friend of mine prolonged its life with an aftermarket CPU/GPU upgrade kit) and remember the unpacking experience of my 15 inch G4 PowerBook, which got me excited like a child getting his first home computer, and generated that special smile on my face.

a5withtrrs 6y ago

I wonder if the Nintendo releases of a variety of gameboy consoles in transparent/colored plastics prior to the iMac was any influence at all. Certainly they gained popularity with the release of the transparent purple gameboy colors.

klodolph 6y ago
Other aspects of Nintendo’s design ended up in Apple’s products. Supposedly, the design of the Game Boy link cable was the inspiration for the FireWire cable. There were a few earlier translucent Apple devices though, like the eMate 300. My guess is that the suppliers for plastics in the 1980s and 1990s added better translucent plastics to their catalog, and that’s where people got ideas. Other manufacturers did it even earlier than Nintendo and Apple, like the transparent case landline telephones from the 1980s. Wikipedia has an article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_craze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_craze Nowadays you only see this stuff in prison.

anukulrm 6y ago

A trip down memory lane for sure! I can't help but feel that a list for 2020 has to include the Macbooks with the M1 chip. Personally, the difference between my mid-2017 Macbook Pro and my M1 Macbook Air has been astronomical. The battery life alone will "save" Apple.

simonh 6y ago

My first Mac was a white Intel iMac in 2007, but the original iMac first Mac I really noticed as something to be interested in. The radical forward looking design choices, including up to date ports combined with the RISC internals and the promise of a new Unix/NEXT based OS on the horizon (which took a while) made Apple interesting again. It took almost 10 years before I finally took the plunge, but whenever I looked at getting a new PC from then on, I seriously considered getting a Mac.

spike021 6y ago

I have such fond memories of playing StarCraft on a turquoise iMac just like the one in the article. That puck mouse was the worst, though.

gigatexal 6y ago

Off topic but imagine if they took a M series chip and relaunched the Cube. A G4 power Mac cube but with a M2 or M3. That or the Pixar lamp looking iMac. PC design back in the day at Apple was much more novel and whimsical. I want them to bring that back. And my wallet does, too.

mdasen 6y ago
I loved the aesthetic of the Cube, but I feel like Apple has basically created Cube replacements. The Mac Mini is basically a G4 Cube, just smaller. If you're looking for the same dimensions as a Cube, the trashcan Mac Pro had nearly identical dimensions as a Cube, but as a cylinder. I think it's likely that we'll see something similar to a Cube or trashcan Mac Pro in the future with M series chips. Apple was able to pack 130W Xeon chips into the trashcan Mac Pro. Seems reasonable to think that a Pro-class M series chip could fit within that power/thermal range. The new Mac Pros are 205W which probably necessitated moving away from the trashcan size. Given that the highest-end Mac Pro is around 2.5x faster than a Mac Mini while the Mac Mini is only around 10 watts, it seems like there's a lot of room for Apple to create a Mac Pro without dialing up the heat too much. I guess I'm wondering: did you like the cube, but not the trashcan?
rconti 6y ago
I'll buy the next desktop machine. My 5k 27" iMac (2015) is getting a bit long in the tooth, and I have a 2nd 27" 4k display next to it for more real estate. The M1 Air is a revelation. The current Mac Pro is just WAY too expensive. Whatever Apple releases as the "awesome" desktop machine, whether "M2" Mini Pro, a true Mac Pro that's not $5000, it'll be on my desk with an ultrawide. And yeah, I never had a sunflower iMac, but THAT was cool.

Gravityloss 6y ago

The lack of a disk drive was a really serious drawback - and of course the cost.

paulpauper 6y ago

The Imac was bad so many ways: blurry screen, icons too small due to the screen being too small for the OS , overpriced, slow speed, hockey puck mouse, no floppy . Even the Powermacs from 1995 were better than than Imac. I bought a PC instead and stopped buying macs from that point on.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

amelius 6y ago

Back then at least Macs were different, each generation. Now laptops are always the same grey aluminum with an apple logo on the back. Has Apple lost its design skills? Are they too afraid to make changes?

muro 6y ago
All current apple hardware looks great. They just lost their fun, consumer line and only keep their pro design. I miss the second design line.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I don't think they've lost their design skills -- a lot of their stuff still has good-to-great industrial design. I think their failing is that at some point in the early 2000s, Jony Ive declared war on whimsy, relentlessly stamping out even the most minor bits of fun in the pursuit of the simplest forms possible. I'm not sure how this changes now that Ive isn't present; while I'd like to be cautiously optimistic, current design head Alan Dye has been there since 2006 and may have internalized a lot of that anti-whimsy. Based on Big Sur's UX, he seems to unfortunately share Ive's "form over function" failing.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Laptop design took over, and since key goals are strength, thinness, and lightness, and since the market is now global, and anything too weird would annoy at least some customers, there isn't much of an opportunity to do anything outstandingly creative. For example - you could anodise unique swirly coloured patterns into the aluminium. You could coat parts with a mirror chrome finish. You could make and sell your own Apple rubber bumpers in a series of interesting textures, including nice renewable materials like bamboo. But at least as many people would hate those as love them, which is why Apple will always play safe, and the bumpers will be left to after-market. Space Gray, Silver and Alu-Gold are timid design choices, and the muted blues/greens/etc on the new iPhones look pretty mediocre IMO. But they're cheap, practical, and relatively durable, so I doubt Tim Cook's Apple is going to move beyond them any time soon.

cm2187 6y ago

What I miss the most is System 7-9. The architecture was of course outdated and needed to be scrapped (no protected memory, cooperative concurrency, etc). But what I miss is that the OS directory was meant to be accessible and modified by end users. To install a driver, all you had to do was to drag and drop the driver extension onto the extension folder and reboot, and the opposite to uninstall it. No complex command lines, things left behind that still affect the OS. You could do the same with application settings, fonts, etc. This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).

timw4mail 6y ago
Classic MacOS certainly had its flaws, but there has likely never been a more efficient mass-market general-purpose OS. In many ways, a ~400MHz G3 processor running classic MacOS feels faster and more responsive than a modern high-end workstation. The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.
- HeckFeck 6y ago
  > The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say. I submit that this observation also applies to Windows 9x.
- trm42 6y ago
  I agree. The metaphor for manipulating files, drivers etc has been the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor (maybe with the exception of BeOS but they just copied and made kinda better version of MacOS classic. I recently bought a Powermac G4/553 DA model and it's really responsive with Classic. One of the last Classic-compatible models. But it feels really simple compared to any modern OS. And something I've forgotten in 20 years since the last usage of Classic: There's no real multi-tasking. Uncompressing zip or sit packages basically blocks the whole OS until the work is done. Oh and other things taken for granted nowadays I've forgotten: one can use _the same computer for other things when scanning photos_. Then even the fastest computer was blocked until the scanning was completed :D

bluedino 6y ago

I realize I wasn't the target market for these iMacs, but I had one, and I -hated it-. I worked at a retail store and at the time, we got 25 iMacs in. Almost every single one of them came back. People just didn't know what to do with them. I got one on discount, $699 I believe. Twice as much as the Celeron 300 eMachines that we had at the time. It wasn't very fast. It didn't have any expandability. The screen was terrible. 14/15" and it had a horrible dot pitch. You could run 800x600 but it would give you a headache. I returned it, and got the next hardware revision. It wasn't much better. It did, however, have a 6MB ATI video card in it so I could play some Quake. The screen was so limiting when it came to real work. The keyboard was passable but the mouse was awful. Later on, I stuck a pair of 128GB chips in it, and the biggest IDE HD I could find at the time (Maxtor 80GB?). It helped a little bit. But once I installed OS X, it was crippled. My friends PowerBook G3 Pismo was quite a bit faster but still too slow. It was a weird generation of Apple product where you got left behind almost as soon as it came out. About 10 years later, in 2009, I got another iMac (the newest model at the time), and completely fell in love with it.

lastofthemojito 6y ago
I hear you about those things being outdated quickly. I bought a Wallstreet Powerbook G3 back in '99 or so because it was a cool RISC laptop AND it was promised to run this amazing upcoming UNIX-based Mac OS X. When OS X came out, of course it ran...but it was an absolute dog on these machines. IIRC Apple never bothered to write optimized OS X video card drivers for these "old" machines, they just charged forward with the new stuff. The experience was definitely enough for me to swear off buying new Apple products for at least a decade (although OS X did eventually win me back).
- klodolph 6y ago
  My understanding is that these old systems were slow because the window system was a compositing window system, and old hardware doesn’t keep up well with it. Using a compositing window manager has a lot of advantages, though, which is why most modern window managers work that way. Windows Vista also introduced a compositing window manager IIRC, and it was also horribly slow on old systems.

jasoneckert 6y ago

For me, Apple wasn't interesting until Mac OS X on the PowerPC G4 arrived on the scene in the early 2000s. However, there definitely is a lot of validity to the statement that the iMac G3 saved Apple in the late 1990s. When asked about Apple Computer at the time, Michael Dell (founder of Dell) said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Alongside the big cuts to their product lineup, the sales of the iMac G3 (which was being designed before Steve Jobs returned to Apple) was what kept them afloat until they could come out with the iPod and Mac OS X. I do remember helping a friend buy an iMac G3 back then. It was painfully slow for certain things, and still ran ancient MacOS, but it was good enough computer for what they needed (Internet, word processing, listening to music).

rconti 6y ago
Agreed. It was the combination of the new direction for the machines, and OS X. I just made a post about my first Mac, but TL;DR, OS X came out in 2001 and I didn't buy my first machine 'till late 2002, and even then, having a Mac was very unusual and, I thought, would be looked down on by tech people -- nobody had one, and I didn't THINK anyone was interested in them. Turned out, the interest in my new machine was a lot higher than I had expected. But, again, this is 5 years after the lollipop iMacs.

minikites 6y ago

I think a few revisions of this computer had no fan, natural convection was enough to cool the inside.

timw4mail 6y ago
I'm not sure there were CRT-based iMacs with fans.

scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago

I very vividly remember the trip to Microcenter to buy that iMac in 1998 with my dad - we set it up on the floor. There were two games included - MDK and Nanosaur I would inherit that computer a few years later and spent I spent lot of time on it, mostly playing games and making pixel art.

Ken_At_EM 6y ago
I remember the nearly the exact same experience and games! Which MicroCenter?
- scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
  Ha! I want to say one was somewhere on that Mountain View chunk of the 101 - a mall complex with AMC theaters, can't find it on the map anymore. Games were a touchy subject - they were hard to come by, MDK, Nanosaur and Warcraft and later Baldur's Gate were my top choices growing up. Along with a few Zip disks with a bunch of older MacOS9 and MacOS8 games!

timw4mail 6y ago

I miss transparent plastic cases on electronics...

nikau 6y ago
Well, good news is they are standard issue in the jail system so you cant hide contraband in your radio or tv set.

carrozo 6y ago

Ha, saw this tweet the other day: “i love how apple released a computer that came in four hundred neon colors, hit it big, and then made the exact same gray laptop for 15 years straight” https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?s=21 https://twitter.com/philjamesson/status/1342601788273389570?...

taivare 6y ago

I had the beige G3 from the same year and boy did it crash a lot!

trm42 6y ago
My dad had 300Mhz beige G3 tower and it was always rock solid. Of course Photoshop and Pagemaker were a bit crashy apps...

jurip 6y ago

The thick CRT case reminded me, again, of the unveiling of the current iMac design in 2012. Phil turning the computer to demonstrate its thinness, to an obviously very carefully selected angle so the bulge remained just out of sight. It still feels a bit pointless, but what do I know.

bydo 6y ago

It's only mentioned in one line, at the very bottom of the page, but Jason Snell also is doing this series as a podcast: https://www.relay.fm/20macs https://www.relay.fm/20macs It has a lot of brief interviews with other long-time Mac users on their experiences with each machine.

rconti 6y ago

> In [the place of SCSI, ADB, and serial] was a new connection standard that had been introduced on the PC side, but not yet embraced: the Universal Serial Bus, or USB. To be fair, while Apple killed off three ports that had defined the Mac for more than a decade, it replaced them with a standard that’s still kicking more than two decades later. (Marvel for a moment about the fact that I can take an original iMac keyboard and plug it into an M1 Mac Mini and… it’ll just work!) Typing this from an M1 MacBook Air, I had to laugh and do a double take that they had to specify an M1 Mac Mini, since it's the only one with a USB type-A port :) But yeah, the longevity of USB-A is amazing.

rconti 6y ago

> Perhaps Apple’s best commercial of all time is the one in which Jeff Goldblum explains how you set up an iMac to get online: > Presenting three easy steps to the Internet. Step one: Plug in. Step two: Get connected. Step three… there’s no step three. There’s no step three! I had completely forgotten about the Jeff Goldblum ad[1]. The spiritual predecessor to Step 3: PROFIT!, I suppose. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg

cosmotic 6y ago
I'm pretty fond of this Jeff Goldblum gem where he explains the qualities of a new PowerBook G4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdOUjIKLSuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdOUjIKLSuM

ngcc_hk 6y ago

iPod and iphone more ?

avalys 6y ago

I was ~11 years old when the iMac came out. I hated it. Looking back now - I enjoyed working with computers, I suppose in part because I liked being good at something that was an "adult" activity. And here Apple comes out with a computer that looks like a Fisher Price toy 6-year-olds should play with. Of course I wanted nothing to do with it.

jrnichols 6y ago

I was in one of the first waves of AppleCare representatives at the then-brand new call center in Elk Grove, CA. We had an iMac as our workstation. There was a lot of "eat your own dog food" going on and I loved it. It was really exciting for me to see Apple start to rebound like it did. I have a lot of happy memories there and I love to see the older machines still bringing joy to people. I'm still kicking myself for not buying stock when I could.