How the iMac saved Apple

On August 15th, 1998, the iMac hit store shelves. In the 25 years since then, the iMac has been a core product in Apple’s lineup and influenced many other products, both inside and outside the company. Today, we’re celebrating the iMac’s silver anniversary with a series of pieces exploring its design, influence, and future.

The original iMac entered a computing world that was in desperate need of a shake-up.

After the wild early days of the personal computer revolution, things had become stagnant by the mid-1990s. Apple had spent a decade frittering away the Mac’s advantages until most of them were gone, blown out of the water by the enormous splash of Windows 95. It was the era of beige desktop computers chained to big CRT displays and other peripherals.

In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to an Apple that was at death’s door, and in true Princess Bride style, he rapidly ran down a list of the company’s assets and liabilities. Apple didn’t have a wheelbarrow or a holocaust cloak, but it did have a young industrial designer who had been experimenting with colors and translucent plastic in Apple’s otherwise boring hardware designs.

With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan. Essentially, Jobs went back to his playbook for the original “computer for the rest of us,” the Mac, to sell simplicity. The Mac’s mouse-driven graphical interface may have changed the course of the PC world, but its all-in-one design just hadn’t clicked. Jobs decided it was time to try again.

The anti-computer

The iMac contradicted every rule of the PC industry of the mid-’90s. Instead of being modular, it was a self-contained unit (with a built-in handle!). Beige was out, and translucent blue-green plastic was in. The iMac looked like nothing else in the computer industry. But the iMac wasn’t just a rule-breaker when it came to looks. Jobs made a series of decisions that were surprising at the time, though he’d keep repeating them throughout his tenure at Apple. The iMac gave no consideration to compatibility or continuity and embraced promising new technology when the staid PC industry refused.

But the iMac wasn’t just a rule-breaker when it came to looks. Jobs made a series of decisions that were surprising at the time, though he’d keep repeating them throughout his tenure at Apple. The iMac gave no consideration to compatibility or continuity and embraced promising new technology when the staid PC industry refused.

Since the 1980s, Macs connected to accessories via a few standard ports: SCSI (for fast connections to devices like drives and scanners), serial (for printers, modems, and local networking), and Apple Desktop Bus (for keyboards and mice). Mac users had built up ecosystems around all those ports, separate from the incompatible serial and parallel ports in the PC world.

Jobs threw all that stuff in the trash and started again. Instead of old ports, the iMac would use a new standard that hadn’t really caught fire in the PC world: Universal Serial Bus, or USB.

The iMac gets remembered for a lot of things, and rightly so, but it doesn’t get enough credit for essentially kick-starting the USB revolution. (I can type on a 25-year-old iMac USB keyboard attached to a 2023 Mac Mini with no adapters! What stunning longevity.)