© 2003 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 25, no. 3, May-June 2003, pp. 47.
In March 2003, Apple quietly stopped shipping the “gumdrop” iMac. The powerful flat-panel iMacs are still shipping and still popular, but the original, colorful “all in one” iMac, with the vividly colorful translucent cases, passed out of production. Since Apple made no announcement, the cause isn’t known for certain but it seems safe to assume that the demand for the computers had fallen too low for Apple to maintain them as a stock item. It was the end of an era.
Apple, the world’s oldest personal computer company, has a history measurable through iconic milestones, and the iconic Mac interface is just one of those milestones. In the beginning, there was the Apple II in 1977, with a speedy 1 MHz processor, 4K of RAM and color graphics, for $1,298. It was the first personal computer that was pre-assembled, it had a beige plastic case (most competitors had metal cases), and it had color graphics, if you hooked it to a color TV. A few years later the Mac era started in 1984 with the original Macintosh, complete with a revolutionary bitmapped black and white monitor, high-capacity 400K 3.5- inch disk drive, 8 MHz processor, 128K of RAM, and a $2,495 price tag. It, too, was beige.
Apple changed the rules- the rules it created, with the iMac. Announced in May 1998, this electronic gumdrop played the same role for Apple that the Mustang played for Ford. At a time when Ford sales were uninspiring, the Mustang came along and offered a relatively cheap, fast, attractive- looking car that didn’t look like anything else out there.
Similarly, at a time when Apple wanted some attention from the computer-buying public, the iMac offered a fast, colorful computer that looked like nothing else out there. A personal computer was supposed to be angular; the iMac was rounded. A personal computer was supposed to be beige; the original iMac was “Bondi Blue,” and later models were named and colored as if they were giant translucent fruit. Apple had introduced the first personal computer floppy drive on the Apple II, and the first 3.5″ floppy drive on the Macintosh; the iMac had no floppy drive at all. At a time when CD-ROM drives were still optional on many computers, every single iMac came with one. At a time when few Windows PCs offered an Ethernet card (all Macs had them), the iMac not only had an Ethernet card, it had a card ten times faster than average. The iMac had 32 megabytes of RAM, a 233 Mhz processor, and a 4-gigabyte hard drive, all for $1,299. No part of it was beige.
Apple even put up signs at the 1998 Macworld New York Expo saying, “Entering a beige-free zone.” The iMac was compact, famously easy to set up, had a handle (which at least implied it was transportable), and was obviously not a Windows computer. It became the darling of not only students and new computer users, but also movie, TV, and advertising set designers, cartoonists (far more iMacs appear in the daily cartoons than any other identifiable computer), computer lab managers, and schools. Later models offered not only increased speed, but also popularized DVDROM drives in computers, popularized FireWire devices, and serve as the most common platform for creating iMovies.
The move away from beige also had a startling effect on the rest of the computer industry, with a great many very unattractive (but non-beige) computers introduced as a result. Oddly, Apple’s most recent computers have drifted back to more neutral colors, white and gray (or “platinum” and “ice”), but the computer industry as a whole has changed so much that any beige computer is instantly recognizable as being “old.”
Apple has taken the color from the computer case to the desktop with Mac OS X. Have you ever wondered if Mac OS X’s Aqua interface, with its “lickable” buttons and scroll bars, would have seen the light of day had it not had the gumdrop iMacs as inspiration?
Do not mourn the passing of the gumdrop iMac. Instead, bump that original 32 megabytes of RAM up to 160 megabytes or so, add Mac OS X, and you’ll have a state of the art computer. Still beige free.