![]() Heck, the M1 iMac even starts at $1299-the exact same price point as its progenitor, a quarter of a century ago. The product has, in some ways, come full circle, the purest distillation of the iMac identity since that original version. Similarly, though those original USB ports gave way to a host of different options in the mid-to-late 2000s (FireWire of different flavors, video out, audio in), the connectivity has more recently also been whittled back down to essentials, with just the latest flavor of USB on the basic models. (And it does make me smile to see the default color pictured in the product’s tech spec page is, yes, blue.) The iMac went from a colorful gumdrop-shaped desktop to a hovering flat screen, moving from plastic to polycarbonate to aluminum, and though there was a long trek through the land of monochromatic white and silver (excepting a brief dalliance with black in the one-off iMac Pro)-the current M1 iMac has finally returned the device to its roots as a whimsical, colorful machine. Outwardly, of course, there were plenty of changes. It’s the only Mac model name that has survived, unchanged, since the company’s resurgence under Jobs, and though it has itself evolved over that time, the product’s core identity, as a powerful but easy-to-use all-in-one desktop, has remained unchanged. While the evolution of the computer market over the past decade has shifted decidedly in favor of laptops, the iMac has remained, in many ways, Apple’s standard bearer. And while the iMac may not have accomplished that adoption single-handedly, there’s no doubt that it sped the process along-transforming the computer industry in the process. Gone were Apple’s legacy serial and Apple Desktop Bus ports, replaced with this strange new rectangular connector that, over the next two decades, would become as ubiquitous as a standard power outlet. Likewise, the iMac ushered in the era of USB, a new protocol that was just getting its foothold at the time. When I went off to college that fall, you didn’t have to look far to find a freshman toting one of any number of new PCs that included small colorful plastic accent pieces-almost always in blue. RedHand is a pretty powerful Mac security app with a creepy icon that locks your computer using a myriad of protection options and scripting support, but I think the two best features by far are these: Bluetooth detection locking & unlocking, and the ability to take iSight pictures on failed login attempts. In that, it was very much an echo of the announcement of the original Macintosh in 1984, right down to its unveiling on May 6, 1998, by recently returned Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.Īs much as it was derided for being an underpowered toy, the iMac’s influence on the industry was undeniable. ![]() The original iMac on the cover of the July 1998 issue of Macworld (the printed version).
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