Editor’s Note: This column was originally published in System Extension, the newsletter sent to 512 Pixels members. Learn more about the 512 membership here.
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the iMac G4. Two decades after its introduction, this machine is still a favorite of many, many Mac fans.
I was in high school in 2002 when the iMac G4 was introduced, and really getting into the Mac for the first time, thanks to my time at the student newspaper.
When I started at the paper, we had a collection of beige Macs, including the dreaded-yet-kind-of-amazing Molar Mac. Eventually, some colorful iMac G3s showed up. These machines were already a few years old before they landed in the newspaper room, but they let us move our production to Mac OS X.
In 2003, a rare event happened — we were able to get a brand-new Mac, and we picked a 15-inch iMac G4.
Before this, the only G4 we had in the room was an original Power Mac G4, stuffed in the corner, running as a file server. As a server, we didn’t do any production work on it, despite it being the most capable machine we had for a few years.
The iMac G4 was a revelation in terms of performance. On the iMac, Adobe Distiller chewed through our QuarkXPress exports faster than I had ever seen. It ran OS X better than any G3, which in hindsight shouldn’t have been a surprise.
When we had a complex layout or Photoshop document, I’d settle in at the G4, ready to work. It became a faithful companion, forgiving of my novice skills. It got out of its own way better than any other Mac I had touched, letting me push what I was capable of in new ways.
There’s even photographic evidence of this:
When I graduated high school in 2004 and said goodbye to the high school newspaper, I had to say goodbye to the iMac G4 as well. In college, I used a PowerBook and had a Power Mac G4 under my desk at the college student newspaper, but I missed the iMac. A few years later, I found one and it served as the media center in my wife and I’s first apartment, further cementing it as a very special Mac in my heart.