How the iMac Saved Apple

August 17, 2023 9:46 AM

On August 15, 1998, Apple introduced the iMac. It's very easy to go all fanboy/fangirl when discussing anything Apple, but it's no exaggeration to say that this 15" Bondi blue, all-in-one computer saved Apple from bankruptcy. The Verge looks back.

Here is a YouTube video of Steve Jobs unveiling the iMac: "Now, this is what they look like today. And I have the privilege of showing you what they will look like from today on. This is iMac." (Direct link to the moment of unveiling.)

From the Verge article: "The original iMac entered a computing world that was in desperate need of a shake-up. [..] 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."

posted by zooropa (57 comments total)

A few memories and opinions of my own:

1. Without the iMac, there'd be no iBook, iPod, iPad, or iPhone.
2. At the time, USB was a fringe technology. Without the iMac, it might not have caught on.
3. These days, internet connectivity is ubiquitous. In 1998, it was still a frustrating experience. If nothing else, the iMac's clever marketing convinced many people that connecting to the internet was indeed simple ("there's no step three!").
4. I can still vividely remember the day the iMac came out. I was living in Phoenix and worked for AMUG, one of the largest Mac user groups at the time. Several of us went to the local computer store (not CompUSA) to volunteer and hand out membership pamphlets. It was a mob scene. The store had to actually limit sales because they didn’t have enough machines in stock to meet the demand.
5. Maybe this is true because I was living in Arizona, but the biggest interest came from grandparents. They wanted a computer primarily for two reasons: to easily connect to the Internet and so they could communicate with their grandkids. I did about 20 demos that day showing how to scan a photo and email it to a grandchild. Minds were blown.

posted by zooropa at 9:48 AM on August 17, 2023 [18 favorites]

I can't edit my OP, but here's a link to the Blue on iMac's 10th birthday.
posted by zooropa at 9:50 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apple doing what they do very well - take existing tech, apply design smarts so that it becomes cool looking, easy to use and your granny wants one, then sell it at a huge premium.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:54 AM on August 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

They're in the computer?
posted by logicpunk at 9:55 AM on August 17, 2023 [8 favorites]

The fact that when the iMac came out the entire Mac platform was only 14 years old and now it's been 25 years since the iMac is sending me
posted by rhymedirective at 9:56 AM on August 17, 2023 [29 favorites]

I was 13 when the first iMac dropped and was very skeptical. By the time they added easy video editing with FireWire ports and iMovie, my family was sold; we got the slot-loading graphite model in January 2000, and haven’t looked back.
posted by supercres at 9:59 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

An old family friend-acquaintance spent most of his long computing career at Apple. He, like many employees there, was very secretive about what he worked on, and I always sorta wondered. One day in college I got it into my head to Google him and discovered he was one of the inventors on a patent for, as a rough paraphrase, "putting all the computer stuff inside the monitor chassis". My immediate reaction was that his very modest suburban house wasn't nearly palatial enough for a guy who invented the iMac.

I thought they were sorta dorky looking when they came out but it quickly became clear they were going to go down in history as iconic regardless of how I felt about it.
posted by potrzebie at 10:02 AM on August 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

...apply design smarts...

They may have outsmarted themselves with that hockey puck mouse.
posted by theory at 10:02 AM on August 17, 2023 [22 favorites]

I forgot there even was a pre-turtleneck version of Jobs. I wanted an iMac so badly but couldn't afford one (though I eventually got an iBook G4 for college). I still kind of want one. I'm a "retvrn" guy but for candy colored computers, CRTs, and the internet before it was mostly used to turn employees into gig workers and information into training data for the AI that will replace us (poorly).
posted by dis_integration at 10:04 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

No kidding it wasn't modular...my iMac was the first time I injured myself trying to upgrade a computer, managing to slice up my hand trying to get to the RAM. But it played Quake and Marathon, so I suppose the blood sacrifice was worth it!
posted by mittens at 10:05 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ah, the iMac! I didn't even know how to switch it on the first time I had to work with one. The "on" button was nowhere to be seen ... until I found it, cleverly hidden on the back. And that round hockey puck mouse that Jobs is so proud of - it's not shaped for a human hand, and I never found it comfortable to use.
posted by Termite at 10:10 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Don’t forget the easy to use, highly ergonomic ROUND mouse. I was working at a dental school where the student store was an Apple dealer (which was highly ironic as my boss declared all Apple computers anathema on campus, except for the artsy fartsy graphic designers and me ). When the iMac appeared in the store it was a pretty dramatic shift in looks. I walked up to one and grabbed the mouse, and WTF is the cursor doing?? Then I noticed it was a round mouse with little tactile feedback as to its orientation. WTF indeed. Being a former Apple employee I was shocked to see Apple making a design mistake of that level. They fixed it pretty soon, but why hadn’t anyone noticed that this breakthrough design decision wasn’t.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:10 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

But it played Quake and Marathon, so I suppose the blood sacrifice was worth it!

It isn't a proper computer build/upgrade if your blood isn't involved.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:10 AM on August 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

i'm not going to go into details but i am going to note that the first generation imac was how i found out about rule 34.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:11 AM on August 17, 2023 [11 favorites]

dudes really, really, really wanted to have sex with that computer, like wow a lot of dudes wanted to have sex with that computer
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:16 AM on August 17, 2023 [8 favorites]

>At the time, USB was a fringe technology

indeed! Windows support was only default with the OSR2.1 release in August 1997.

I bought my mom an iMac from CompUSA the summer of '98 and knew the puck mouse wasn't going to work well, but CompUSA didn't have a single USB mouse available (everything was still serial).
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:17 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

USB was a fringe technology

It didn't even really work well or uniformly on other operating systems, until Apple effectively made it a standard.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:19 AM on August 17, 2023

I remember that year, that's when I bought some AAPL shares and then got cold feet and sold them. (annoyed grunt)
posted by credulous at 10:19 AM on August 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Like all first-gen Apple offerings, the specs were kinda skimped on, in the iMac's case the Rage IIc. Follow-on iMacs had the ATi Rage Pro, which actually had been released in 1997 but Apple failed to spec it into the original launch for some reason.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:22 AM on August 17, 2023

If you weren't paying attention to tech back then, you might not recognize how dire Apple's situation was. Wired Magazine had their famous Pray cover. The company had a market valuation that was literally less than what they had in the bank.

It's also easy to forget (if you were there) how frustrating computers could be. You had one kind of connector for keyboards and mice, another for modems and printers, another kind for a networking adapter (an ethernet port was too much to hope for) and yet another for hard drives. And these were all temperamental. Heaven forbid you disconnect something while it's live. Apple was as bad as anyone, if not worse, inventing their own standards for connectors that didn't play well with others. USB was pretty inadequate then (and has different problems today), but the idea that you could have one or two standards for everything was revelatory.
posted by adamrice at 10:26 AM on August 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

I know that iMac was a pretty momentous achievement and pivotal in the advancement of home computing technology and was overall amazing... but 100% the first thing I think about when someone brings up iMac is that stupid goddamn circle mouse.
posted by obfuscation at 10:26 AM on August 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

I am typing this from an iMac, albeit a newer one, so I've since become mostly a Mac user, but back then I was a PC hardware tech in a hospital. We worked primarily with Windows and DOS machines (what we used to call "IBM Compatible" but occasionally one of the researchers or doctors would insist on having a Mac. Doctors always got what they wanted so we'd get them one.

Any time I was carrying around an iMac box people would stop me in the halls and ask "What color is it?" That was the only thing anyone ever cared about. It drove me absolutely crazy and every time it happened I hated macs just a little bit more.

But these days I can't imagine using anything but a Mac. I still work almost 100% on Windows machines at work but I do it remotely from my home office on my beautiful 27inch iMac that I bought about a week before they introduced the latest models. I'm not bitter about that.
posted by bondcliff at 10:27 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The iMac came out at an interesting time since 1998 was when the Intel x86 platform actually started getting *good*, with the 440BX, and Windows 98 solidified Windows as a very deadly threat to the classic Mac's relevance as a desktop OS coming into the 2000s.

The '99 - '01 wave of consumer adoption gave Apple the momentum to grind through the OS X transition and also the capital to pursue the iPod & iPhone products.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:33 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The math dept. at my big state U had these in a lot of their labs and all grad student offices by 2000.

It was a fantastic machine for all the old Unix codgers, as well as accessible and fairly powerful for newer users.

For me it was more about OS X than the iMac per se, but for scholarly work and easy access to *nix stuff for scientific computing, it was the best game in town for a few decades.

We'd have never had this whole renaming genes debacle if more people had looked past the 'free' MS office suite and realized those tools are not fit for scientific work.

Sadly OS X is now almost as badly bloated and messed up as windows, so I'm back to Linux for my home machines, though I still may take a Mac if my employer is paying.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:39 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had one - and I'm surprised that no-one mentions how much better they sounded than any other computer at the time. I loved that I could just play an mp3 without any sort of fuss- eventually I wanted my music much louder than it could muster so I got speakers.
posted by zenon at 10:45 AM on August 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was mostly a PC person, but have always had a Mac around to play with -- a Powerbook G3, a white eMac, and a tangerine iBook -- but recently bought a top-of-the-line M2 Macbook Pro for my daily driver. One of the first accessories I had to buy was a Mac keyboard, since alt/ctrl/etc buttons don't map to a PC keyboard the way I want, and was very disappointed that most of my choices were either chiclet keyboards or figuring out how to map keys in a gamer keyboard.

So, to eBay I went and bought a NOS A1048 -- the keyboard that came with everything from iMacs to newer -- which had actual keycaps and feels like I'm actually typing when using it. This is a very good keyboard, the only thing is it's ever so slightly smaller than the PC keyboards I've used so my fingers don't line up as naturally as I'd like, but at least it feels like I'm actually typing when typing now.

Somewhere I have one of those puck mice in a box, but, well, f**k those.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:26 AM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I sort of missed this phase of Macs (very broke) and mostly use Windows now but if they rolled out something new that was half as visually appealing as these were, I would seriously consider switching back. It's shallow but I'd love to have computer that looked fun again.
posted by emjaybee at 11:31 AM on August 17, 2023

I never had one because I needed a tower at the time, but deep down I wanted one. I did have a Cube though. I still have it in storage. It was a mistake, but it was a glorious one.

But I really love the look of the iMac. As soon as I have the space and can narrow down to a color (tangerine! no! blueberry!) I am so getting one of these.
posted by Mchelly at 12:32 PM on August 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

You can play with Mac OS 8.5 at Infinite Mac (with a boring beige monitor though).
posted by credulous at 12:35 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

My favourite iMac case design has to be the Flower Power. Apple's adventurous design era seems to have ended quite some time ago. Incidentally, I worked at a Mac retailer (this was before the Apple Store) during the heyday of the various models of iMac and sold a lot of 'em and what I really miss is Mac OS 9. Pre X MacOS was such a beautiful, friendly, efficient design. Truly a pleasure to use.
posted by signsofrain at 12:40 PM on August 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Heh. I still have my external USB-powered floppy disc drive that came with swappable covers in all the iMac colors. Still runs on any Mac with a USB port.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:55 PM on August 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

I associate these things with my college years, which started in '96 but thinking back I realize the only Apple user I knew freshman year had what I think was called a "power PC" or some other sort of patched-together hardware using a mac OS. Was that a thing? These would have only come in with the freshman class when I was a junior, which is exactly when the underclassmen started crashing our network on a regular basis with their profilgate Napster pirating. Come to think of it, those class of 2002s would be the first year of what we now call millennials (but which at the time I think were called Generation Y?).
posted by St. Oops at 12:57 PM on August 17, 2023

some other sort of patched-together hardware using a mac OS

There was a time when there were licensed Mac clones made by other PC manufacturers, based on the PowerPC CPU which Apple used in their own computers.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:02 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

They may have outsmarted themselves with that hockey puck mouse.

I had seen that comment featured on many of the lesser discussion boards on this topic. I bet myself that MeFi would have been above mentioning that on the anniversary celebration. I lost.
posted by fairmettle at 1:24 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

AzraelBrown There was a time when there were licensed Mac clones made by other PC manufacturers, based on the PowerPC CPU which Apple used in their own computers.

A moment of silence for the best Mac I ever bought: the Power 120 from PowerComputing. Yes yes, I understand that without killing the clones, Apple wouldn't have survived. But it's hard to overstate how sweet it felt to order a Mac from MacWarehouse for $1500 that was leap-years better than anything Apple was selling at twice the price.

I bought one for me and was personally responsible for at least four other families buying one. Yes, I was part of the problem.
posted by zooropa at 1:34 PM on August 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

SaltySalticid: "For me it was more about OS X than the iMac per se"

This is an important point. Really, both the iMac and OS X were manifestations of deeper changes occasioned by Jobs' return to Apple, which could probably be boiled down to one word: discipline.

It's been said there was no adult supervision at Apple before that, which is kind of weird when you consider the last four CEOs before Jobs were traditional corporate suits. But (and I say this as an outsider with no special knowledge) it seemed that if you had an idea for a project at Apple, you could get resources for it, whether it fit into a broader strategy or made sense at all. A lot of technically interesting software and hardware did ship in this era, but a lot of it didn't really make sense in the real world.

In the interest of being more consumer-friendly, mid-90s Apple had a dizzying number of SKUs, where the same hardware was sold as a different product only because it came with different software packages pre-installed (in fairness, there were naive computer users who didn't realize you could install software after purchasing the computer). Even looking at only their distinct pieces of hardware, they had a lot.

Apple had not one but two next-gen operating systems in development, neither of which ever saw the light of day. It was widely acknowledged at the time that Apple needed something to bring its OS into the modern era, and there was a lot of speculation that they would buy out a company started by a former Apple executive and adopt its OS…but maybe not the one you're thinking of: BeOS, started by Jean-Louis Gassee. Instead they bought NextSTEP and brought Jobs back.

When he became interim CEO, he went through Apple's sprawling technology portfolio with a machete—having your project nixed was called "being Steved". He simplified the hardware line to two laptops and two desktops. And now here we are.
posted by adamrice at 2:24 PM on August 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

Dude that mouse was an unusable fucking travesty. Apple deserves shit for that one.
posted by obfuscation at 2:40 PM on August 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I had a tangerine iMac, best computer investment I ever made. Made my 7200 look like a piece of junk!
posted by monkeymike at 3:00 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

When he became interim CEO, he went through Apple's sprawling technology portfolio with a machete—having your project nixed was called "being Steved".

I also heard, but entirely unverified, that engineers who spoke with the prodigal Steve and went on at length about how great it was going to be to get back to doing things "the old skool way" (or words to that effect) were pushed out/asked to leave or at least not included in new projects.

[Oh, and the graphite iMac DV SE was my first Mac. I still have that "Bug's Life" DVD in it's cardboard sleeve kicking around.]
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:05 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I started grad school in 2001, and iMac and its lesser cousin the eMac both with their hockey puck mice were ubiquitous in the computer labs at both universities I attended. It was kind of weird in the late 00s when computer labs started filling with things that weren't bright colored boxes.

I just discovered that the current iMac desktops once again come in a rainbow of colors, and I for one am thoroughly delighted.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:16 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still have a G3 indigo iMac in the next room... sitting on top of a Mac IIfx.

Both rather dusty, but I'm not parting with either.
posted by delfin at 3:46 PM on August 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

>play with Mac OS 8.5 at Infinite Mac

Must not click the Civilization icon
_{Must not click the Civilization icon
Must not click the Civilization icon}
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:47 PM on August 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I did have a Cube though.

Cube Club!
posted by atoxyl at 4:07 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I bought the Bondi Blue iMac after having started out on a Macintosh SE in '88 - got a matching iBook soon as they debuted. Just replaced my 2018 MacBook Pro with a new MacBook Air this past weekend while updating our iPhones. What an incredible trip in experience, performance, discovery and brand affinity.

For some reason Apple sent me two tubes of the original Think Different posters after I purchased my iMac, so I had most of the highly sought afters - I'd had the Dylan one framed early on and the rest in their tubes since they arrived - I sold all of the originals to a NYC gallery last year for almost $4K. And the $25K I transferred from my 401(k) into Apple stock in December 2010 is now worth more than our house we bought in '91.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:24 PM on August 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

(I liked the hockey-puck mouse. Yeah, it’s a little over-designed, but in a way that’s kind of charming. It’s been twenty years, I am not interested in having someone change my mind.)
posted by box at 5:13 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

If nothing else, the iMac's clever marketing convinced many people that connecting to the internet was indeed simple

So I didn't need an account some where or needed to enter that info into the Mac's preferences? It just was plug it in, connect phone line. Damn.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:04 PM on August 17, 2023

> Yeah, it’s a little over-designed, but in a way that’s kind of charming.

i remember it having, like, a pleasant handfeel? not sure how to describe it. it wasn't that great as a pointing device and if you expected it to fit any particular human hand well you would be disappointed, but once you abandoned that expectation it was a fun little thing to push around. it was very much

a e s t h e t i c

focused rather than functionality-focused, but in a sense the style itself was a form of functionality. i guess what i'm trying to say is that the mouse had, like, two functions, it's just that being stylish was one of the functions. it was okay at functionality #1 (being a pointing device) but great at functionality #2 (making you feel like you live in a friendly future).

i do have one critique of the mouse, though: the imac as a whole looked about 25% anime, i think, but the mouse looked about 80% anime. there is nothing at all inherently wrong with that — the mouse looked 80% anime in a cool way, like, i just spent two paragraphs talking about how a e s t h e t i c the mouse is — but (i argue) it's the anime quality of (especially) the mouse that is what first inspired so many visual artists to create so many imac-themed images designed for use in one's special times.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:36 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

The puck mouse looked great, but the problem was, it would rotate if the cord pulled at it wrong, and because it was circular you couldn't tell by handfeel that it was pointing the wrong way. I'm a kneejerk defender of basically all things Apple, but I just can't bring myself to defend that mouse.
posted by rifflesby at 7:40 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

the executive summary of my last comment is, more or less, "despite its failures as a pointing device, my only problem with that mouse is that some people wanted to have sex with it."

i stand by the comment.

this has been your bombastic etc. etc. for the day
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:43 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

bondcliff: ...that I bought about a week before they introduced the latest models. I'm not bitter about that.

Which of course is the traditional method by which many people buy their Macs!
posted by wenestvedt at 8:02 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

bombastic lowercase pronouncements reminded me of something I saw long ago. A bit of Google Image Search turned it up again, TOYBOXARTS' iMac girls based off of Lum from Urusei Yatsura, which I'm surprised are still findable on the web somehow, a relic at least three long ages of the internet old. While not explicit or really NSFW, if a coworker sees it on your screen you'll probably have to answer uncomfortable questions. (And other things on that site, which doesn't seem to have updated since 2010, are definitely NSFW.)
posted by JHarris at 10:24 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

this better not awaken anything in me.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:50 PM on August 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I was a university network administrator for a long time. I had root, I had many machines, I had powers... Our standard internal RFC-like naming convention was stellar objects (stars), and endless supply of machine names... When I got my workstation I named it after an internet friend one night stand that had a wonderful online name (never told anyone how my machine was named, but it was a very appropriate name). My boss named our group's specialized one purpose machines after university football coaches, took me a while to figure that out.... I was in this sorta never ending fight with the systems people about collecting cool names that should be reserved for ME (dammit) and had aliases for """ping pong tick tock xyzzy one two ... nine ten""". I named (and still do) my personal machines after characters from the cartoon "Invader Zim" because they're all simple three letter quick and easy to type names and are enough to meet my needs (posted from 'gaz').

So I had these three spare rack mount computers that I had appropriated from the High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) upgrade cycle and was running Gentoo on them using them as a 'distcc' mini cluster.........

I named them after characters from FLCL.... So my Boss once asked me what 'raharu' meant and I went out and dug up a picture of Raharu in a bunny suit riding her guitar like a surfboard in the homage to old Gainax convention specials (you know what I mean)...

Put it up on 'raharu's web page and pointed my Boss there.....

He *never* asked me again about machine names............
posted by zengargoyle at 1:35 AM on August 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

The iMac was very much part of my move to the Mac/iOS platform. I was lucky enough to start on Snow Leopard which just simply worked and never complained, or thrashed the disc, or crashed, did any of the other things that Windows used to do - in my experience. It was like a buddha, kinda immovable, omnipresent almost. Ten years on my iMac still just works - although I did replace the fusion drive with an SSD. I will, however, buy a M3 iMac whenever they are finally released. It will, in all probability, be my last desktop computer ever, as I approach my 70th year. No shade on those that prefer a Windows or Linux computer, but I just love the iMac.
posted by vac2003 at 2:02 AM on August 18, 2023 [9 favorites]

JHarris: " TOYBOXARTS' iMac girls based off of Lum from Urusei Yatsura"

Yeah, that's a whole thing (SFW). I'm surprised this article manages to avoid mentioning Hatsune Miku.
posted by adamrice at 5:51 AM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think these were the gateway to the laptop takeover and mentality that's ubiquitous now. Prior to the iMac, there were a bunch of different pieces that had to be connected with different cables. The iMac was amazing partially because of its color and design, but also because you bought it from the store, plugged it in and just used it. Sure, there was an external keyboard and mouse, but no separate monitor meant it was easy to move around. I used a very early iMac (might have been first gen) for my first advertising job as an art director (with a 15" monitor!) and I remember being able to take it to the conference room and back to my office with ease. I used to do this once in a while, and being able to work in a different room than my office was extremely cool. Gotta remember how gargantuan and heavy those old "large" CRT monitors were! (Yes, there were laptops existing then, but none of the art directors used one.) Everyone was envious, but they got it for me because I was the new person, and the youngest person there, and I needed a computer.

(and yeah, the hockey-puck mouse sucked even back then, even after "getting used to it."
posted by SoberHighland at 6:02 AM on August 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

The lingering furor about the puck mouse always makes me laugh, because I bought myself an iMac the second they came in tangerine and yeah, the mouse was annoying, which is why after I'd used it for a week I ponied up a few bucks for a little tangerine-colored shall that snapped onto the puck and depucked it. Having moved up from a well-loved SE/30 compact Mac to an at-the-time screamingly fast G3 that could do a seemingly infinite number of things changed everything for me. I suddenly had a recording studio at my disposal, for one thing, and that was huge. Pretty soon I could burn my own CDs with a can't-believe-this-kinda-works USB CD burner, and I could teach myself prehistoric HTML and make websites and communicate with people all over the world and jump into the world of digital synthesis with amazing open source software and man, that design misfire mouse sure was annoying, but if that's what people were noticing about the iMac, there was a lot being missed. It was legitimately the affordable bicycle-of-a-computer that Jobs was trying to force into being since the first insanely expensive Mac 128—I could buy one with my <20K salary, and I kickstarted a lot of my life with it.

Then, when they came around, I bought a Microsoft mouse despite ew ick Microsoft because they really make great mice, and the puck's in a drawer somewhere, waiting to go into my little museum of failure with my Swisstel phone and a bunch of other seemingly good ideas that flopped.
posted by sonascope at 3:11 PM on August 19, 2023 [5 favorites]