The Mac that saved Apple (and Steve Jobs)
Deep inside the Bondi Blue
This Old Box On May 6, 1998, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iMac at the Flint Center Theater in Apple's home town of Cupertino, California — the same venue where he had unveiled the original Macintosh back in 1984.
"We think iMac is going to be a really big deal," he told the crowd. He was right.
The iMac shipped at the stroke of midnight on the morning of August 15 of that year, sparking one of the original fanboi feeding frenzies — roll-out rituals that have since become de rigueur for every major Apple-product intro.
With the iMac, the Apple logo changed from rainbow-striped to candy-colored (click to enlarge)
I remember covering that crowded midnight rollout at a Palo Alto, California, store, and talking with then Apple hardware-engineering honcho Jon Rubenstein, who was beaming like a proud papa. An exhausted proud papa, to be sure, but grinning ear-to-ear nonetheless as he watched a long line of purchasers plop down $1,299 for the latest shiny-shiny, and lug their big boxes out of the store, smiling as broadly as Rubenstein himself.
Rubenstein told me that the iMac was going to redefine consumer computing. He was right.
The Bondi Blue iMac: the consumer computer that saved Apple's bacon (click to enlarge)
A few years back, I got my hands on one of those original iMacs — or so I thought. A few days ago, I decided to take it apart, grab my camera, and share its innards with Reg readers — and when I did, I discovered that what had been represented to me as being an original iMac, well, wasn't an original iMac.
But it's close — and let me explain.
The trend toward translucent everything began with the Bondi Blue iMac (click to enlarge)
The original iMac is known by the moniker of "Bondi Blue" — that name being a reference to its color, which was inspired by the waters lapping up to the shore of Bondi Beach, a suburb of Sydney in Australia's province of New South Wales. (Note: my Bondi Blue iMac is more "Bondi" than "Blueberry" in reality than in my photos. Blame it on my misreading of color temperature.)
There were, however, two versions of the Bondi Beach babe: Rev. A, which shipped only briefly, replaced by Rev. B on October 26 of the same year. The differences between the two are minimal — and I'll point them out as we take apart what I discovered to be my Rev. B, not Rev. A, model.
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COMMENTS
Sooo close
You so nearly got through without your inner fanboi escaping but fluffed it at the end:
"I'm surrounded by the guts of the personal computer that saved Apple, arguably jump-started the internet age, helped kill off the floppy, and brought translucency to everything from George Foreman grills to Rowenta Surfline steam irons."
Jump-started the internet age? My arse. I'd love to see any accurate statistics you may have for the number of people who first experienced the internet or first had the internet at home on an iMac. I'd be prepared to make a healthy wager that the true figure is vanishingly small.
Helped kill off the floppy I can't really sit still for either. Yes it helped but so did about a billion other factors. Claiming the iMac was significant is like trying to take credit for keeping the worlds trees alive because *I* produce CO2. The iMac is way down the list behind CD-R, CD-RW, freefalling drive prices, USB memory sticks, software bloat etc.
You probably deliberately left out the 'i'. We're into our second decade of marketing wonks insisting that anything can be cool if you put an 'i' in front of it. Shoot them, shoot them all.
Translucent everything - oh yes, that's thanks to the iMac for sure which is a marmite thing in itself but you should have highlighted the bigger truth I'd credit the iMac with. It started a revolution in design. We see attempts at aesthetically pleasing design in the most mundane of items these days from cheap radios to phones to, well, you name it. Nothing in a poorly designed or plain beige box stands a prayer. Much as I dislike Apple the iMac deserves a beer for that so here's one.
@Christian Berger re: 56k
It's all comparative.
If you had moved up from 1200/75b/s, through V.22bis, V.32 and V.32bis, then V.90 was fast.
If you were using it for commercial use, then it was almost certainly the upload speed that was your issue, as it was asymmetric and the upload channel was a fraction of the download speed. IIRC, if you did V.90 modem to V.90 modem directly, you could only get 33.6kb/s anyway. You needed something like a DS0 setup, which could directly inject digital signals into the phone system, to give you the 56k download speed to end-users.
Most home users mostly downloaded data, so this was not a big issue.
Don't compare your 20Mb/s ADSL line, or even channel-bonded ISDN with what home users had available at the time, because ISDN was far too expensive for home users to consider, even the 'reduced-cost' Home Highway that BT tried to sell.
At this time, nobody did large mail attachments or video, and you left P2P running for hours or days if you were using it. Web sites were still mainly HTML, with only fairly small GIF images. You also did not have flash video adverts or java or javascript apps at all. Most pages were fairly static, and eminently cachable, so we got what we though was a good service at the time.
I wan my whole household (several computers with thin-wire Ethernet, and then wireless as it became available - we're a techie household) on a dial-on-demand 56K modem for several years, until BT got round to upgrading our exchange to ADSL.
Best Selling?
The best-selling computer of all time is the Commodore 64 - by a significant amount.
There's a tendency amongst both Apple execs and fans to re-write history in their favour - Commodore had the best-selling computer ever with the 64, and the first colour DTP machine with the Amiga.
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