Outwardly, of course, there were plenty of changes. It’s the only Mac model name that has survived, unchanged, since the company’s resurgence under Jobs, and though it has itself evolved over that time, the product’s core identity, as a powerful but easy-to-use all-in-one desktop, has remained unchanged. While the evolution of the computer market over the past decade has shifted decidedly in favor of laptops, the iMac has remained, in many ways, Apple’s standard bearer. And while the iMac may not have accomplished that adoption single-handedly, there’s no doubt that it sped the process along-transforming the computer industry in the process. Gone were Apple’s legacy serial and Apple Desktop Bus ports, replaced with this strange new rectangular connector that, over the next two decades, would become as ubiquitous as a standard power outlet. Likewise, the iMac ushered in the era of USB, a new protocol that was just getting its foothold at the time. When I went off to college that fall, you didn’t have to look far to find a freshman toting one of any number of new PCs that included small colorful plastic accent pieces-almost always in blue. In that, it was very much an echo of the announcement of the original Macintosh in 1984, right down to its unveiling on May 6, 1998, by recently returned Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.Īs much as it was derided for being an underpowered toy, the iMac’s influence on the industry was undeniable. The original iMac on the cover of the July 1998 issue of Macworld (the printed version).
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