This month in my Apple History column at iMore:
In his keynote address, Jobs addressed the challenges in front of Apple working with the PowerPC roadmap. Apple hadn’t been able to deliver the 3.0 GHz Power Mac G5 the company had promised:
We can envision some great products we want to build for you, but we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap.
(That’s a pretty sick Steve Jobs burn.)
At Macworld Tokyo 2001, Steve “Business Suit” Jobs showed off what would be the last two new iMac G3 designs: Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power.
Like Sage and Ruby before them, Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power were used for just one generation of iMac: the Early 2001 models.
According to Jobs, the new cases took 18 months to develop. They weren’t “colors,” but rather patterns molded “right into the plastic.” While some companies may have just used a decal, Apple wanted something special with these machines.
This page marks a milestone in the life of our hobby turned business. We’ve been pushing pixels professionally for twenty years!
What an amazing run.
Yesterday, OS X got renamed macOS to better match its mobile and TV-bound cousins. While I can get behind everything matching, lots of people have been rolling their eyes a little bit at the lowercase m.
The reason is a pretty good one. Before the days of Aqua and the Dock, the Mac operating system was named “Mac OS.” Some may think that name comes from the very beginning of the Macintosh, but it doesn’t.
On July 19, 2000, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld New York. In this keynote, he unveiled updated PowerMac G4s, the G4 Cube and updated iMacs.
Jobs walked through the history of the iMac. Every nine months or so, Apple had revised the iMac, and the time had come to do it once again.
This marked the iMac’s second birthday. In the two years since the first machine shipped, Apple had sold 3.7 million iMacs. Jobs boasted that an iMac sold at a rate of 211 an hour, or one every 18 seconds.
Apple loves a good television ad. Here are a bunch from the iMac G3 era:
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Nine months after announcing the Five Flavors, Steve Jobs took the stage to rev the iMac G3s again.
These new iMacs all had three main new features: a slot-loading optical drive, Airport capability and a tweaked case that allowed for fanless operation.
Jobs opened the iMac pitch with the optical drive. Gone was the tray-loading drive, replaced with a slot-loading drive. This may seem odd now, but according to Walter Isaacson, it was important to Jobs. Here’s a story from the time leading up to the original iMac’s 1998 launch:
If these photos weren’t enough for you, here are a whole lot more. Do with them as you wish!
As a bonus, here are some of the wallpapers that came with these machines.
Last time, we looked at the original iMac introduction that took place in 1998.
Just a year later, Apple discontinued the Bondi Blue iMac and replaced it with something far more colorful.
The 1999 iMacs came in five flavors:
(Blueberry is very similar to the Bondi before it, but was a little richer and slightly less teal. It’s hard to tell them apart unless you have them next to each other.)
On the latest episode of the Simple Beep podcast, Ed, Brian and I got real deep into the detailed history of the various revisions Apple made to the iMac. Think of it as an extended version of that YouTube video from the other day.
In August of 1998, Apple released the Bondi blue iMac. This computer left a bunch of stuff in the past, including beige plastic, ADB and serial ports, and the floppy drive.
It received a minor update a couple of months in, but the Revision A and B machines aren’t all that different.
I’ve watched a lot of this show in recent weeks: