IMac G3 - History

History

Steve Jobs reduced the company's large and confusing product lines immediately after becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997; toward the end of the year, Apple trimmed its line of desktop Macs down to the beige Power Macintosh G3 series, which included the iMac's immediate predecessor, the G3 All-In-One, which featured nearly identical specifications and was sold only to the educational market. Having discontinued the consumer-targeted Performa series, Apple needed a replacement for the Performa's price point. The company announced the iMac on May 6, 1998 and began shipping the iMac G3 on August 15, 1998.

The iMac was dramatically different from any previous mainstream computer. It was made of translucent "Bondi Blue"-colored plastic, and was egg-shaped around a 15-inch (38 cm) CRT. There was a handle, and the computer interfaces were hidden behind a door that opened on the right-hand side of the machine. Dual headphone jacks in the front complemented the built-in stereo speakers. Jonathan Ive, currently Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, is credited with the industrial design.

The iMac was the first computer to exclusively offer USB ports as standard, including the connector for its new keyboard and mouse, thus abandoning previous Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI and GeoPort serial ports.

A radical step was to abandon the 3½-inch diskette drive (which had been present in every Mac since the first one in 1984). Apple argued that recordable CDs, the Internet, and office networks were quickly making diskettes obsolete. Apple had initially announced the internal modem in the iMac would operate at only 33.6 kbit/s rather than the new 56k speed, but was forced by consumer pressure to adopt the faster standard. Apple's omissions generated controversy. At the time of iMac's introduction, third-party manufacturers offered inexpensive external USB diskette drives, often in translucent blue plastic to match the iMac's enclosure.

The keyboard and mouse were redesigned for the iMac with translucent plastics and a Bondi Blue trim (Apple USB Keyboard and Apple USB Mouse). The keyboard was smaller than Apple's previous keyboards, with white letters on black keys, both features that attracted debate. The mouse was mechanical, of a round, "hockey puck" design which was instantly derided as being unnecessarily difficult for users with larger hands.

Apple continued shipping the round mouse, adding a divot to the button in later versions so that users could distinguish proper orientation. Eventually, a new capsule-shaped optical mouse, known as the Apple Mouse (formerly "Apple Pro Mouse"), replaced the round mouse across all of Apple's hardware offerings.