Category: Apple History

Yours truly, over on MacStories:

For almost five years, the heart of the Power Mac was the PowerPC G4 chip. Starting in 1999 it clocked at just 350 MHz, but by the time the Power Mac G4 line was retired, a tower with dual 1.42 GHz CPUs could be ordered. In that time frame, things like Gigabit Ethernet, SuperDrives, and Wi-Fi became mainstream.

The Power Mac G4 came in three distinct cases over the years it was available. Each style of machine saw several revisions while in service, bringing the total number of models to 10. That’s a lot of computers to cover, so let’s get started.

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A user on r/VintageApple has posted a real treat:

A retiree in my area sold me his original 1984 Macintosh - with unused transport bag! - for $200. I’ve always wanted to own one, so I was thrilled to learn that he took excellent care of his Mac and kept pretty much everything that came in the original box… except the manuals. (“It’s a Mac, who needs the manuals?“). I decided to document the unboxing, because I have never seen an original Mac unboxing posted online. I also took some shots of product and packaging details that I found particularly striking.

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The iPod mini marked a giant turning point in Apple’s music business. With its smaller size and colorful design, it turned the iPod from a tech product to a piece of fashion:

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I’ve been checking out some cool iMac documentation this afternoon, via Brendan Shanks on Twitter:

The Apple iMac computer is a new consumer-oriented desktop computer. This developer note is a technical description of the iMac, with the emphasis on the features that are new or different from those of other Macintosh desktop computers.

Don’t miss the related USB page Apple had up on its website at the time.

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Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, about how the Mac community responded to the announcement of the iMac 20 years ago:

From the perspective of 2018, the iMac is history, and history is written by the victors. But in 1998, the iMac was controversial, especially among the sorts of dedicated Mac users who subscribed to Macworld. It ditched the floppy drive that had been on every single Mac to that date, as well as several ports—SCSI, serial, and ADB—that had been on basically every Mac since the Mac SE. Imagine Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, multiplied by four. Literally every Mac accessory ever made was no longer compatible without an adapter.

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Horace Dediu, writing at Asymco:

But the iMac is a historically significant machine. It allowed Apple to start on a new trajectory. It did this by first offering a financial lifeline. Sales of Macs, which were at the time the only source of revenues for Apple, increased from 2.7 million to 3.8 million a year. This at a time when Windows PCs were shipping about 100 million units. That was enough to ensure survival. Today Mac units are five times higher while Windows PCs are about 2.5 times higher. The following graph shows the impact of iMac on the Mac’s trajectory.

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The iMac was famous for leaving the floppy drive behind, but it turns out that the logic board had the header and pins used by other Macs at the time for the drive. Some hardware tinkerers got it working.

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If you haven’t read enough iMac G3 stuff, here are some more articles you should check out or send to your read-it-later service of choice:

• Six Colors: The original iMac: 20 years since Apple changed its fate — Jason Snell writes about the machine’s impact, and covering it for Macworld, which only sent the editor in chief to cover the event.

• Newsweek: Steve Jobs Unveils the iMac — Steven Levy’s exclusive look at the new machine, from May 1998.

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Today marks twenty years since Steve Jobs introduced the very first iMac G3.

Apple’s press release for the machine is pretty great:

It’s a good thing there’s no law against a company having a monopoly of good ideas. Otherwise Apple would be in deep yogurt for the ideas that Steve Jobs shared with the crowd at Apple’s Flint Center auditorium Tuesday, May 6.

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Michael Steeber at 9to5Mac has an incredible roundup of the iMac’s evolution over the last 20 years.

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The Titanium PowerBook G4 is the template that is still defining Apple’s notebooks today. I had one in college, and it was fun to spend some time with it again:

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This month in my MacStories column, I wrote about what may be the ugliest Mac ever made:

Any nerd in their 20s or 30s probably remembers seeing one those colorful, curvy iMacs in school growing up. Their friendly design and relatively low cost – for a 90s Mac, at least – made them a staple in education for years.

I certainly saw and used my fair share of them in middle and high school, but I also got to experience the iMac G3’s weird older sibling, the Power Macintosh G3 All-in-One.

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