Upgrade - 91: iMac Special

Episode Date: May 30, 2016

In this special holiday episode, Stephen Hackett joins Myke and Jason to discuss the product that changed Apple's fortunes: the original iMac.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 91 today's special episode is brought to you by mail route and fresh books my name is mike hurley i have the pleasure of being joined on this beautiful holiday day by mr jason snell hi Hi, Mike. This is our holiday episode. So in the United States, we're releasing this on Memorial Day, which is the last Monday in May. I believe it's defined that way. And that apparently stems from the Civil War.

I looked this up. It's a holiday to recognize the people who died in wars. We also have a holiday to recognize people who served in the military that's veterans day but this is memorial day um and in the uk you crazy kids you just put holidays at the end of may and call them because of the banks is it to honor the banks the holiday? Yep, that's what it's for. We all go to the bank and we deposit one pound each. And that's how we honor our banks on our bank holidays. I understand the bank holiday now.

It's so sweet. What a great tradition that you have. It really is very nice. It's very nice. It's how the banks stay afloat in the UK. Oh, that's good. It's the bank holiday. It's the bank holiday.

It's like Black Friday. It's like the day that the banks get the money so that's why we all need a day off okay so we can all go in go to the bank but you may have heard we have a guest this week we have mrs stephen hackett joining us hello uh upgradian masters welcome you are in the circle now we decided to do a pre-recorded special episode and because we were going to have steven on there's only one thing we can talk about which is the original iMac for people that are not familiar with the story Mr Hackett can you explain to the upgradians why you are now synonymous with the original iMac. So the beginning of April, I think it was, I put out a little blog post saying, hey,

I would like to have one of each color to do some video projects with. And it took about four or five weeks. And now I have all 13. They're sitting here in my office. It's like podcasting with an audience, but they're all facing away from me. So I guess they don't like what I'm saying, but they're all here and I've done some reporting and a video and got some more stuff coming. So, so yeah, it's been playing with, uh, 41 pound computers all month.

Yeah. And it's funny because for me, um, I, uh, boy, nothing makes me feel older than having stuff that I covered and not even at the beginning of my career being nostalgia, which is what this is. But that's what this is. Like I was working at Macworld when the iMac came out. It was after they had merged Macworld and Macuser and I had gone to work at Macworld. And so it's just kind of funny. I mean, it's still, it was a long time ago. It's like, what, 18 years ago now? So it's a long time ago.

But still, yeah, it's a little strange. That's one of the reasons that this episode is putting me and Stephen together. We're being put together because Stephen's got's got the imax and i was there for it and uh and so that's a that's a fun combination steven and i have been talking like in uh slack and stuff like that about imac things and he's been asking me questions about like what was this and why did this happen and what was the reaction to this and and i get to be like an eyewitness to that eyewitness to history which is kind of fun and we said we should talk about this somewhere where would we do that and the answer was why don't we do uh an imac special for uh the holiday and uh and and and put that out because

we're all going to be doing holiday stuff and so uh so here we are we're talking about the imac the not the one that i'm talking to you from right now, the original bulbous Bondi colored and other colors, right? Bondi, did Russell tell us it's pronounced Bondi? That's the word on the street. Yeah. The nostalgia thing is interesting. For me, I was coming to the Mac for the first time in this era. I was in high school and it was, you know, 2000, 2001. And, uh, at that time we had some like 1999 iMacs in the school because we didn't have necessarily new things in the newspaper room. But, um, these are some of these machines are the machines that I sort of cut my teeth on and, and, you know, running Mac OS nine and then

transitioning to Mac OS 10 10 and so for me they they're like right in that sweet spot of not only coming to the mac but also like learning a lot about the mac and like i broke a lot of things in software running on computers you know like these and so for me it's um you know it's not so much that it was like the computer i had at home because we didn't have a mac at home but it was one of the models that really kind of brought me into this world and that's the same for me too by the way like that this computer was around when i was a kid and you know like when i hear uh many people you know mainly seems to happen on the talk show recently talk about like the first mac that they ever used and and kind of how it brought them in and people talk about the macintosh like and i really do think

that for mine and steven's generation it was this imac like it was the same absolutely same thing it was like this was the computer that was like nothing we'd ever seen it wasn't like the gateway computers that we'd used in the cow boxes, right? Like they were, these were like these beautiful, crazy looking things that had really interesting mice and keyboards, and they had really weird, cool software on them. And they were at this point, like starting to become, Apple was starting to become the cool company

that we know them at now. And for our generation, this is our Apple. It started with this iMac i would actually say that it's it's not even just age wise because i think a lot of people uh either came back to apple or bought an apple product for the first time with the iMac and we'll get into like the way they the way it was sold the the you know what why would you buy an iMac what could you do with it but it was um a lot of people this was the thing that made people consider buying a Mac for the first time and so you know would the would the iMac have saved Apple on its own I mean Apple

needed to keep doing new things and and they did but this is the this is the first sign that uh that Apple was turning it around because people saw this Mac and said, I want to actually buy it. And so I think for a lot of people, obviously, for a lot of people, the iPhone is their first Apple product. And for a lot of people, the iPod was their first Apple product. But I do think for a lot of people, the iMac was the first Apple product that they bought or used because how could you forget it it's you know a recognizable computer computer with a personality at a time when computers did not have personalities in a way that they don't have them today as well yeah true so can can you guys put into perspective for me like at this point in

apple's history what's going on so how long has has Steve been back? What is Steve's position at this time? What is Apple as a company in early 1998? Well, I mean, so Jobs had only been back, like the announcement that they were buying, that Apple was buying next, was in January of 97 at Macworld Expo. And that was Gil Emilio and all of that and talking forever. And then Steve Jobs appears.

And the idea there was they're buying next and Steve's going to be an advisor. And that was because they needed a new operating system and the Copeland wasn't working and they didn't want to buy B. So they bought next to get next step and use that as the basis for what would become OS 10. so they bought Next to get Next Step and use that as the basis for what would become OS X. So Steve comes back and, you know, in the Steve Jobs movies, especially the one with Ashton Kutcher, you actually get the scene of him engineering his revenge and getting rid of the board that betrayed him

and taking over as interim CEO. And, you know, there are plenty of stories about him coming in and finding these people, including Johnny Ive, who were working there and still had sort of pride in what they were doing and trying to set Apple on a path to figure it out. And among the things they did is in August of that year, they made the deal with Microsoft to drop the patent lawsuits, and Microsoft gave them some cash.

And Bill Gates appeared on a big screen behind Steve Jobs at Macworld Expo like he was Big Brother, and everybody was creeped out by that and enjoyed the irony of it. It turns out that all of the Mac clones that were there at the end of the Emilio era all had a license for System 7, but not for Mac OS 8. And so they announced that Mac OS 8 would be the next version of the operating system and that there would be no clone licenses, effectively killing the clone program. And there were some lawsuits and Apple bought the assets of power computing. And, you know, presumably there was some other payoffs behind the scenes to shut it down but jobs wanted to shut it down so all that was going on he's like getting his house in order but there was a real question about like okay where are the products and you know jobs put up uh i think i think maybe at uh at uh some event i don't i don't even know but we we had gotten the product grid right steven i mean this is this is no this this is when he did it he unveiled the product grid here yeah yeah so the

the grid of four which what they kind of came to call it you know one of jobs big thing when they came back was just clearing house of all these crazy models of mac running around performas and g3s and uh unix uh servers and all sorts of stuff. It was a mess, right? It was a disaster. Let's get our house in order. And so some of what he did was he killed the Newton. He killed OpenDock. He killed all these projects that were not anything. And he said, let's just go back to making products. How simple can I make this? And, and he would say internally to look consumer professional desktop laptop, fill the four boxes. That's it. Let's do that. And people, you know, we got to see this at that, at this event, uh, that happened in, uh, in April 98. So, but at that point, Steve

had been back running around for more than a year. And so they had had enough time to build a product that was kind of a fully, it's not like they hadn't done some other products in there. He, at that event, he kind of crows a little bit about some of the other G3 stuff that they're doing. But this is the full on Steve Jobs. And actually, as it turns out, Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive product. That's the first tangible example of how apple is not the old apple since jobs came back yeah the the grid of four really is i mean even today such a genius moves like get rid of all this stuff and you are either a consumer or a pro and you either want a desktop or a notebook and they spent really two years filling that box out so they they had the beige PowerMac G3 that got replaced with the blue and

white. They had the PowerBook. But the consumer side, the iMac was the first thing. And then the iBook was months or maybe even close to a year later, I think. It took them time to get all those ducks in a row, but it set forth a very clear vision. So the iBook was in June, 1999 at a Macworld Expo, New York. So over a year. So this is, and this is what I was going to say is not only was this genius in terms of simplifying and sending the message that they were simplifying and genius in terms of communicating that it was a new Apple and that they were going to focus, but it was actually genius in terms of, of promising a product that they weren't ready to deliver.

Because I will tell you for that year, plus everybody was talking about what the consumer laptop was going to be because the power books were expensive. I mean, they were, they were expensive. And the idea that Apple was, had just put out there a slide that said,

yes, we're going to do a consumer laptop. And it sat there for more than a year with an empty box, like question mark. I think they may have even put literally a question mark in that box. And that was great marketing too, to make us all wonder what was their next trick going to be. In so many ways, 1998 feels like such a long time ago. So you have all the Apple stuff, but you also have like, this is deep in the throes of the like the megahertz war. So all throughout this keynote, it's like racing Pentium computers because that's what

they did in the day. We watched a video that is clips from, it's not the whole thing, but it's a lot of clips from this event, which was at the Flint Center, like the original iMac. And in fact the apple watch was also launched there um and uh so much of that is is is steve jobs and phil schiller brought out to uh talk about how the the you know megahertz for megahertz the the pentium is not as efficient as the power pc at doing work and doing bake-offs, which I had forgotten that they did, but they absolutely did this all the time where it's like, we'll press these buttons and then everybody just sits there and watches as something renders on two screens to show how fast this Mac is compared to this PC that they've ginned up. And of course, that's also amazing marketing, right? Where they're picking exactly what they want to do

because they know they're going to win and all of that. Ready, set, go. There's so much of that, which is just defending the Mac against the perception that Macs were slow and awful and that the PowerPC lagged behind what Intel was doing. What was the situation though? Like, were they faster?

Or like, is this just you know steve jobs spin my my recollection is that they were faster depending on what the what the tests were that that one of the things that i believe that the it went back and forth i think in this era they had added a whole bunch of instruction sets to the power pc chips and if you had that were like the vector instruction sets i believe that um basically uh if your software took advantage of them it was faster than it was on the intel chips but of course intel was working on their special command sets too it would be i think that's what mmx the multimedia extensions stuff was so it was an arms race um i think there was generally a feeling that you know you got you got uh more for the same megahertz

between a pentium and uh and a g3 but um and the g3 is this is also the earlier in the g3 life life where g3 was a big deal because previously you would have the power pc like the 604s and the 603s and the 601s which were these chips that were not uh they were way more powerful than the the motorola 68 000 chips that they had run before but uh the g3 was was uh a rebranding and kind of a generational leap that uh hence the name, that gave them more ammunition against Intel. But they're so Intel focused, right? Because we forget about this now that the Mac is Intel, but at this point, they really need to justify their lack of compatibility and their lack of understandability. Like you, you know, it wasn't the same parts, so you couldn't easily compare them. And so they had

to do lots of spin. So Jasonason i know that leading up to this you know we talked about apple kind of being like messy i know in here there's a lot of like software only events like apple used to have i don't even know like how many expos and stuff they would attend and a lot of these videos you find on youtube from this era just like recycled content yeah um so i mean that was kind of the scene going on so like was there any indication going into this event that there was something like really special uh coming down the pipe or did you guys just write it off as another event uh in fact i would say that there was a real um boy who cried wolf kind of feeling about apple at the time at knack world

certainly we felt like and i wish i could remember what it was but the last event that apple had told us you know apple pr contacts us and says okay we're going to do a thing you should come we're like what's it about well we can't say you know we're not going to say but you should come be there trust me be there and i remember that we went to that and i wish i knew i wish i knew what it was but i remember we all got out of it afterward and we're like what the hell was that like it was just nothing that that it was a waste of our time they didn't respect our time they had something inconsequential to announce or it was nothing new and we're all like why did we why did we do that and really it's like fool me once shame

on you fool me twice shame on me right it's like okay okay apple you got us you got us we uh we came to your thing not knowing what it was and you didn't give us anything new so then they call up and say okay we're gonna do a thing it's gonna be at flint center it's a it's the thing you got you gotta come you gotta come and we're all like yeah pull the other one like no uh so what ended up happening is our editor-in-chief at the time andy Gore, he lived in the South Bay around the peninsula. So it wasn't that far away and somebody needed to go, right. We were not going to blow them off entirely, but we're not going to send like a bunch of people and have them.

Most of our staff was in San Francisco. Uh, we're not going to have them all drive down all the way down to Cupertino and go to this thing when we'd just gotten, you know, uh, kind of, uh of wasted our time with the last Apple events, like more of the same, as far as we could tell. So only Andy went to the event from Macworld. We could have sent as many people. We could have sent the whole staff. We could have sent as many people as we wanted.

Flint Center is huge. And Apple at the time was not a big draw for anything like that. And so only Andy went. And in fact, I wasn't even at work that day. I was working at home. I was working on some story from the apartment that I was living in at the time. And I just distinctly remember getting a phone call from somebody back at the office saying,

you got to come into the office. Andy's called an all staff meeting for three o'clock or something like that, four o'clock. Everybody's got to come in. I'm like, so seriously, I'm going to go into San Francisco? And, you know, in the afternoon and then go to a meeting and then turn back around and come home? That's ridiculous. And they're like, you know, it's a huge announcement. You got to come in. So we all came in. And it was the IMAC, right?

But we all, you know, we all just weren't even paying attention. So Andy had the details and we started working on a story. And if you look at the Macworld from that period, there's a story that we did article that was written in less than a day about the iMac that we dropped in and uh and then we started work on the next issue still because it didn't ship uh still with no product but it's like that that's not going to stop us we're going to put it on the cover again and we wrote more about it but unfortunately i would say this is the last major apple product announcement that i was not in attendance at the funny thing is is here you explain it is so weird because it's like oh it was announced then we had a meeting at three o'clock later that day nobody still knew what it was no like it was just because that's just not how it is now right there was no there was no Internet.

There was no streaming on the Internet of Apple events. There was no there was no live blogging. There was no point in anybody explaining it to you over the phone because it's like it's not just we've got a deadline, which is like a week away. Like, you know, whatever. It'll it'll be in the newspaper tomorrow morning. Well, in our case, our deadline, I think, was the next day. And we did, you know, figure out who was writing it and editing. And I think I edited that story, but it was written by our reviews editor, Anita, and by Andy. And we worked on the cover. I was the features editor at that time. So I worked on it, but I didn't write that story. And we were also planning our attack for the next issue, too, and gearing up for that and all of these things and and it was uh but yeah i mean there was no reporting we we heard it from the person who was there and we started to plan our attack because yeah there was that was it that was that was the

world back then it's kind of hard to believe now but that is definitely how the world was in in uh in 1998 yeah i mean looking at apple's press releases for the spring of 1998 it's stuff like quick time and java and yeah there's one about unveiling a new commercial like it's really just kind of i bet you it was a quick time or java thing that we went to like something where it's like hey we've got because okay i know this is a little little off, but since we're deep in the history of Apple, I will say, in the 90s, the biggest offenses that Apple did in terms of spending money on and wasting people's time on stuff that they were doing that wasn't that interesting, QuickTime takes the cake. QuickTime, the people who were in charge of QuickTime and in charge of marketing QuickTime, and this is before Jobs was back there, but I think it kept going for a little while after he got back. They were so in love with themselves. And they would do like, they had like the QuickTime live conference and they'd talk about how, where it was all about like how great QuickTime was.

And they had, they had a, I wrote about this for the Apple 40th. wrote about this uh for the apple 40th uh macworld did a slideshow of like 40 things we remember about apple and one of mine was uh how much money old apple used to waste uh we went to this it was like a hotel on the peninsula and it was like a party slash event and i think i could i could swear to you i think it was about quick time and just like all the cool stuff they were doing with quick time like quick time vr and quickTime 3D and CD-ROMs that you could click on and they used QuickTime. And so I would bet you that that early 1998 event that made us all roll our eyes was something about QuickTime.

That it was like, oh, we've got this new thing and isn't it great that people are going to be able to do more cool things that are impractical and that will largely not be actually done with quick time it was very much like we see the future and the future is quick time well guess we're brilliant scientists who've invented quick time um there was just so much of it back then i can't i can't even properly describe just that was the biggest eye roll for me of of that period of apple was that they were just so there was a strain in Apple at that time that was so enamored of their genius with the future of computers and media and how they were they were making it all happen. And, you know, literally nobody else was using QuickTime.

So, yeah, it was so that would be my guess is that that press release about something related to QuickTime is probably related to whatever event it was where the where the the boy cried wolf yeah i just found a 20 page white paper that you know there's actually a whole quick time pr page in the wayback machine this is really really painful but no it i think all that's important to say like this the world the imac entered right that even yeah you guys like, it was your job to cover Apple, and even y'all really... We didn't bother going. Couldn't be bothered. Like, oh, great, they're doing another event. Like, Mike's right.

Like, that is so crazy to think about now. But that's the world that Steve Jobs had stepped into when he came back. Yeah, yeah. And so instead, and this changed everything, right? You didn't miss an Apple event after this. This was them delivering. This was them saying, when we call an event. And that was a lesson I think Apple had to learn, too, is you can't call an event for just anything.

And to this day, we spend time, Mike and I do it every Monday, right? We parse, like, what would be in that Apple event and was that enough in that Apple event? And would they, you know, what will be in the WWDC keynote in a few weeks and all of that. But at the time, I think they learned their lesson because after this, every event that they invited us to was basically relevant. They didn't cry wolf anymore. They realized that they had trained us badly they had trained us to ignore them because we couldn't trust that that what they were doing was newsworthy and uh it all changed after after this event um so yeah so

we should we should talk about these bulbous blue beasts that they unleashed on the world and in uh they didn't unleash them in April. They announced them in April. Yeah, it shipped in early August. Yeah, see? So that's another thing that people miss is that it was mid-August before they shipped, even though they were announced in April. So imagine four months where everybody's really excited about this new thing that Apple's

finally doing. And we'll talk about what happened in those intervening four months where everybody's really excited about this new thing that Apple's finally doing. And we'll talk about what happened in those intervening four months. But it was a weird time. Today's very special episode of Upgrade is brought to you in part by FreshBooks, the company that is on a mission to help small business owners save time and avoid the stress that comes with running their businesses. And they do this by focusing on pain-free invoicing. I can speak to the fact that FreshBooks makes my job and my business run better and easier. And it helps me also get paid faster too. It takes just 30 seconds to create and send an invoice with FreshBooks. You can even add your little logo on there so it looks even more professional. And the way that you get paid faster with FreshBooks

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And please enter upgrade in the how you heard about us section so FreshBooks knows that you came to them from this show. Thank you so much to FreshBooks for their support of Upgrade and RelayFM. After they talked about Pentiums and Megahertz and things like that, After they talked about Pentiums and Megahertz and things like that, they finally got into why they were all there, why Steve Jobs had invited everyone there. Steve wearing a white shirt and a suit jacket, by the way, not his soon-to-be traditional turtleneck and jeans. Yeah, it's always funny to see what I like to call formal Steve on stage in these early events. But he really starts, and what's maybe the most fascinating thing to me about watching this keynote is that all the elements of later keynotes are here, right? That he starts with sort of defining a problem, and the problem is that there's not a

great way to get a Macintosh on the internet. Like there's not a Mac built for internet use. And then he talks a little bit about kind of what the product means and how it will change the world. And then he, you know, pulls quite literally in this case, pulls the sheet off of it and shows it to everybody. There's a big unveil. I was also shocked by and fascinated by if if you're a an aficionado of apple events you really should uh you should watch this because you can see that it's a proto you know proto event it would evolve into into something else but also it is so bizarre to see like the the terrible fonts and the terrible charts that are

on the screen like and like clearing throat stumbling steve yeah it's not all there it's like clearing his throat constantly like he stumbles his words in a few places which just shows like he has i think at this point a real understanding of what makes a good event but what he hasn't nailed down at this point is how much he needs to practice that right nor has he exerted um enough art direction over the slides and stuff yeah like the slides the slides feel like you know the marketing team slapped them together and he ignores them or uses them at will but it's not at the point yet where he's like going to take complete control of the art direction of those slides and say they need to you know they need to be better also it's i think i think the slides are using like garamond which was the apple font at the

time which they went away from but it's weird to see like these uh serifs on apple slides yeah like no what's better than the chalkboard they would use after this the slides got worse before they got better i think that's true that's true that's true but i mean so so this is a time when when the internet became relevant to people dial people were dialing in to aol or or uh other online services or just direct directly into the internet and uh that became a thing that people wanted to do like why do you use a computer went from being well maybe you'll keep your books or you'll type up reports or you'll do things like that too i want to get on the internet i want to use a web browser. I want to do email.

And that's how they conceived the iMac. The i, which now lives on as the letter that was in the iPod and then went to the iPhone and the iPad. But initially it came from the iMac. And on the iMac, it really meant Internet. Because the idea was this is a single device. You pull it out of a box. The way the ad, which I would say is maybe the best Apple product ad it had done in years, if not a decade, is famously the there's no step three from Jeff Goldblum.

The idea here is you take the iMac out of the box and you plug it in and you plug in the phone line into the modem port and you're online. That's it. That's all you have to do. Presenting three easy steps to the Internet. Step one, plug in. Step two, get connected. Step three, there's no step three. There's no step three.

And that was the idea they used. And they had to build around a huge CRT. And so they did. And so it's all bulbous and everything. And they used it to their advantage by putting it in, you know, covering it in translucent plastic at a time when, as Steve Jobs hilariously says in this video. And these things are ugly. And, you know, going back to the eye for a second, I felt like there's a little hedging on the Internet bet a little bit that he says, well, what does the eye stand for? And he says Internet individual instruct inform and inspire like a that's a terrible

bulleted list of words um could be like i feel like the apple that would come out of this like the more confident apple would say it stands for internet like that's all like that's it and it totally did right i mean you could tell that that's actually what it stood for and they said that's what it stood for but that slide was a super weird hedge of like it means whatever thing starts with i that you like yeah exactly and you know and like i said that i in today's world just means apple product right like it's that that of course that meaning is gone he opens it up and he says look you know the best consumer pc out there and he you know has a picture of a compact or something that looks like junk it could just as well be the power mac g3 which is also true just i mean not cheap but just as ugly

and right looks awful beige tower beige crt wires everywhere and, look, we're going to beat this thing in speed, display size, networking, IO, and design. And that's very, very similar to how he introduced the iPhone years later of like, hey, look, these phones have like crazy crappy hardware buttons everywhere, and the software is not very good, and they're slow, and we're going to blow them all out of the water. Like that parallel jumped out at me big time in watching this video. them all out of the water. Like that parallel jumped out at me big time and watching this video. Yeah. And, and I mean, the simplicity of the product is its greatest advantage. If you think about PCs at that time, you know, like, like his picture of them, it is a beige, it is a beige box. It's probably a mini tower. So it's a tall, ugly beige box sitting on or under your desk.

There's a big beige monitor. It's a CRT monitor, so it's going to be huge, and it's in your face, and it's beige. And then there's wires everywhere, right? You've got cables going to the keyboard and the mouse. You've got cables going from the monitor to the computer. You've got cables coming from the computer to the modem. You've got cables going from the modem to the phone box. It's messy. It's messy. And you've got to going from the modem to the phone box. Uh, you've got, it's just,

it's messy. It's messy. And you've got to set it all up. I remember we had a, um, for my wife's job, she had a Pentium, like a P100 PC at one point.

And, uh, we set it up and it was, uh, I don't even know if it's a Dell or a gateway or whatever, but it was, uh, they had like all these color coded wires.

All the cables were color-coded because they were trying really hard to make it easy to figure out what to plug in where um so i appreciate that they made the effort but uh when you look at the imac it's just like there it is and there's it's so clean and clear and the number of wires is dramatically reduced because it's all in one um which I guess we should mention the molar, because people don't know about the molar, which is one of my favorite weird Macs of all time. The Power Mac G3 all-in-one was sold only really to education.

It looks like a... Well, it kind of looks like a giant monitor, but we call it the molar because it also looks kind of like a big tooth. And it's got a translucent bit of plastic on it, and it totally was a johnny ive thing he was experimenting with this before they got to the imac and it's almost like a proto imac where it is an all-in-one computer and the idea there is you plug it in and you got a computer and for schools what they were saying is you put this on a cart or you put this in a classroom you don't have like the monitor and the and the and the pc and the peripherals all kind of mixed up and getting tangled. You just have this, it's a computer all in one, like the original Mac, right? The inspiration was clearly the original Mac. It is

a monitor and a computer all together and it goes with you and it is self-contained. And, and so they went from something like the molar, which was like the proto iMac, the iMac zero to this iMac. And it had all that, all those same characteristics of, of not having all the wires and stuff, um, which let them do that Jeff Goldblum ad. And, and, uh, and, uh, I guess we should dive into what else is in this thing. Cause it was not just that it looked, it looked good. It has that transparent, you know, aqua, you know, it was blue, blue with a tint of green plastic, which everybody aped. Everybody put like panels, translucent plastic colored panels on their products after this. But in terms of even if it looked like a regular PC, in terms of specs, it was unlike any Mac that was ever made.

It was such a big break right i mean like you said the g3 had been around but this is the machine where apple basically wiped or got to hit the reset button on all of their io so yeah it's all the io since since the mac it really since the mac se like the mac se uh brought on adb and and uh regular mac serial i think or maybe that was the Plus had Mac serial. I don't know if the Plus had ADB yet or not. Forgive me. Turns out, I'm unclear on the differences in the exact ports of the 128, 512 Plus and SE

because there's an error in an issue of Macworld from this period that is my fault that nobody has mentioned to me until Steven noticed it last week. No way. Yeah. Yeah. I made reference to some like, you know, and it's not even, I don't think it's even my byline, but I know that it's me who did that. And it's something like, you know, the iMac gets rid of all these ports that, you know, you've loved since the since the you know mac 128 and it's not accurate because those ports weren't in the mac the 128 and the 512 didn't have adb on

them i don't think they had mac serial they had a different kind of serial port on them um but by the by the time the se came out which is the first mac that i had those were there and they stayed there from that period which you know for know, for me, I got my Mac SE in like 1990, early 1990. You know, they had been on every Mac from that point forward, certainly. So maybe not quite a decade, but for years, you know, every single peripheral that was sold was ADB for keyboards, serial for modems and printers and things like that. Those were how you connected peripherals to your Mac. And they got rid of all of them at once. They got rid of the floppy drive at once.

This thing had no writable storage. It had a CD-ROM drive and it had USB, which was at the time esoteric. Nobody made USB devices. It wasn't on PCs really either. It really struck me that Steve kept kept calling it universal serial bus yeah like he didn't call it usb like it was it was interesting to me to hear that i was like oh this must be because again i didn't have the context like this must be really early on in this because he he keeps referring to it. He never uses an acronym. He just keeps calling it Universal Serial Bus. We are going to the new generation of I.O.

12 megabit Universal Serial Bus, two ports. We're leaving the old Apple I.O. behind. Yeah, it wasn't a thing that anybody knew, really, or had used. Oh, I didn't mention SCSI. Steven mentioned SCSI. SCSI, how you hook up hard drives. Gone. Gone.

Gone. Gone. It's all gone gone it's all gone it's amazing but it had a modem built in right so there's like just a phone jack on the side of this thing and there's a little door that you could fold down that had the ports inside and it had a little hole in it right very very steve jobs johnny i right little hole in it so you could like pass through the cables so you could close the door and still have your cables come out. Amazing. So they had a modem and an Ethernet port.

And in the video, in the in the in the event, I think it's really funny that Steve Jobs has to justify why he thinks having Ethernet on the computer might be a good idea. It's super awkward, though. Yeah, it is. It is weird. But what there was no Wi-Fi. awkward though yeah it is it is weird but what there was no wi-fi and he's like you know more people are hooking up uh ethernet networks at home which i'm not sure if that's true or not that felt weird i think that's still weird today but but you know it jobs was big into like the networked home folder thing and obviously they were working on server side stuff so like i think

maybe it was a it was a bet against the, but also it made a big difference in education, like computer labs and schools and stuff where these things would be sold also. So maybe it wasn't for like the home user, but for education and businesses, it made tons of sense. think worked on worked on stuff at this point um yeah is that one of the concepts they had was for a discless iMac that the idea that in in that you could actually you know buy these and put these in schools and they would have no disc at all and they would boot over the network and that was that was part of the strategy and it sort of never really happened um with this product but uh that was a part of it also I mean I think Steve Jobs felt like networking was always a good idea and that you never really knew what you were going to do with it, but that it was good to have it on board. Because that goes back to the original Mac, right? I mean, the original Mac had network capability at a time when that was like, why would you even bother with that?

But from the original Mac on, networkability was in the box. It was part of the thing. And people used it. And over time, some people didn't use it, but a lot of people did use it. And I think maybe philosophically that became part of Jobs' thing. It's like, well, why not do that? That makes this device more – yes, it's a little more expensive this way, but it makes it much more flexible than – and also, let's not forget, this is a device that they want people to be able

to use it out of the box and you can't open it up right you can't open it up and put an expansion card in it so if it's going to go into offices and schools maybe we should just put ethernet in it so they did yeah it's such a it's such a a big break from where they were but it's also like a return to form like you said with the original mac where you couldn't open the box. It was like what you bought is what you had. That's it. That's it. And, you know, from such a change of pace from even that molar Mac, you could slide like cards in. They were called profile cards. You could do like audio stuff or video stuff and just like take the back off and put this big thing in it and

put the back back on. And suddenly you had new capability uh where the iMac really the the vision was to offload all of that uh onto USB devices and like you said that stuff just didn't exist when they announced it yeah that that's something I mean we we definitely need to talk about the universal serial bus thank you Mike yes it's the new it's universal serial bus which replaced adb and serial and scuzzy right so all of those things that we use to connect devices to the mac in different ways were replaced by usb that was it we had never seen it before um and so that was what this that was what this had and and the funny thing is that the devices didn't exist. So fortunately, we did have those four months or whatever where Apple announced this, where basically Apple saying, people are going to want this computer.

You should build USB devices for it. And everybody was scrambling. There were a lot of companies that were working on USB peripherals for the PC market because it was starting to happen. But this was the impetus for people to use USB. Like USB as a standard really owed its existence to, maybe it would have happened anyway, but the iMac made it happen. The iMac made USB a thing. This reminds me a lot of like Thunderbolt and the Mac Pro, right? Like, we've got the thing and it's awesome. No peripherals.

Right. Like, we've got this thing and it's awesome. No peripherals. Right. And this was, so some of them were out there or were being worked on. And so we ended up in the months following this, some hilarious things where we would get, we were trying to do a feature about USB stuff. We literally, in the next issue of Macworld, had a table of like, here are products that people say they're going to make that are USB. And it's not that big a list. I remember it as this huge table. It's like 25 products. Like literally, here's every USB product that anybody has announced. And we had a couple of them, like

two, three of them that we got in non-working. We didn't have any USB devices to plug it into anyway. iMac hadn't shipped yet non-working samples and they were generally like like iOmega sent us a zip drive where instead of it being the um the opaque blue enclosure it was translucent blue plastic enclosure around the zip drive and they said see it's for the iMac um that's how you know it looks just like yeah it's there's plus and there was like a printer that a USB printer was announced because that was a big thing it's like how are they going to print it's like well there will be USB printers and it was like literally just a regular printer it was going to have USB on it

and what they did was they the um the little lid that you would lift to do the ink and stuff they replaced that with a with a translucent blue plastic panel so now it's for the imac and i think they called it it was instead of the 880 uh it was the 880 i because it had that little plastic thing or inspire it could be it could be ordinance or instruct who knows who knows so so yeah so usb was strange and weird and we didn't really understand it and they're in that mac world issue there there are some hilarious diagrams because uh hot plugging wasn't a thing um like with scuzzy if you wanted to plug in a hard drive you were supposed to turn off your computer plug in the hard drive and then turn on your computer and then if you need to unplug it you need to turn off

your computer and then unplug it and then turn on your computer and with usb it was like yeah just uh we have a little diagram like you could have a hub and then you can plug things into the hub that works all the stuff we take for granted now but at the time it was like mind-blowing kind of things because you were never supposed to hot plug unplug anything not a keyboard not a mouse not a certainly not a hard drive um and that you could chain things on the hub uh which was a much different approach than scuzzy where they kind of like all had to chain one after another this you could plug in a thing and then plug five things into it um it was a it was it was a big deal the downside was you lost or you needed an adapter for ADB keyboards and mice, for serial, for modems and things like that, or whatever else you would use with serial.

All your floppies were now useless because there was no floppy drive on this thing, only a CD-ROM drive. And that freaked people out. That's famously a panic, but it was true. People were really blown away that there was no floppy drive on this thing only a cd-rom drive and that freaked people out like that was that's famously a panic but it was true people were like really blown away that there was no floppy on it it's true any other questions children oh you want to know about infrared yeah so so the front of this thing uh on the so you had you had the stereo speakers and on the left one there's a little cut out with a with an ir window yes And I could only think of two things

that you would use this for. One, a bunch of the Newtons had a little IR window at the top so you could like beam information to your computer. I mean, nevermind that your keyboard was in the way, move your keyboard, put the Newton down and do it. And then I seem to remember, but maybe this is just a hallucination from moving iMacs all day,

that some cameras had this as well. So you could transfer your photos, but did that, I mean, I know for a fact, cause I have them all here. This didn't last very long. What was the deal? This was how, this was like the Bluetooth of the day was how do you do simple peer-to-peer data transfer? So in the presentation, Jobs chalks it up to like

transferring your photos. Although I never, ever did that. I don't remember that happening once people who had like a Palm organizers and stuff like that. You could like beam your business card to somebody else who had a Palm by holding down a button. And what palm did is palm actually wrote software that let you use the ir port on the imac to uh sync with the imac it was slow because you are literally blinking a light to do data transfer it is light blinking data transfer. But it was, yeah, I mean, it was really not that reliable and it was super slow. And I don't think people really ever used it. I'm surprised that it got in there at all. I suspect this is the flip side of Steve Jobs being open to, let's put that in there. Who knows what people will do with it. And in hindsight, what happened is this is not a

thing people did anything with and they took it off. But that's my memory is that the IRDA port was – I think you could sync like your Palm – update the Palm contact information from the iMac. It lasted exactly one revision. Yeah. So not a winner compared to something like USB. I mean so much of this computer is so forward thinking. It's true. And it's one of those things too, like it's really hard to separate. So there's like two parallel thoughts in my brain about this.

One is that like Apple and through Steve Jobs, like saw a vision for the future of consumer computing and they built the iMac and the future was going to be that, right? They met the future. But there's also this thoughtMac and it, it, the future was going to be that, right. They met the future, but there's also this thought that it's also kind of the future that Steve Jobs wanted to see happen. And so they brute forced it. So like,

you know, if Steve Jobs, uh, says you don't get a floppy drive or in 2008 with the MacBook air, he says, you don't get CD drives anymore. Um, then floppy disks and CDs kind of die,

right? Like, um, yeah, there there's a there was a huge market momentarily for usb floppy drives like us oh god we need a floppy drive usb floppy drives and it very very quickly it went away but but uh but yeah that was that that was that moment of like can i just be unburdened and make a product and this is still in apple's dna to this day it's like let us be unburdened by the past and make a product that we think is the best product for the future even if the future is not here yet because it'll be here soon and we will have been ahead of the curve i mean look at the macbook but so i mean i guess my question in that is like where where did

this seem to fall between those two things like i mean was it a big pain or did people kind of very quickly get over it and fobby just went away overnight? I'd say, well, I mean, so I'd say it's kind of like now or like with a MacBook or something like that, where there are people whose worldview is like, this is something you have to have in a computer. And then there are people who were thinking about things a little bit more deeply and would say do you really need that in a computer are who's using that is that something that most people are using or almost nobody quite honestly one of the reasons that i

think people were skeptical about the floppy is that the floppy was much more necessary on the pc i mean this was this was the era where still the pcs needed to have floppies because sometimes you would need to boot off of the floppy right um and so how could you not have i i believe at this point you literally could not have a pc without a floppy because the floppy like the floppy drive had to be there uh that was your emergency boot solution was a floppy drive um and so uh some people just couldn't get over that. It's like, well, how could you have a computer that doesn't have a floppy drive? But, you know, this is the zip drive era.

People are already buying external storage with way more than the one megabyte that you could fit on an HD floppy because that wasn't enough space. Like System 7 came on, what what 10 floppies or something yeah it's a whole it's a whole like little booklet of them yeah a little envelope full of floppy disks because it and you had to put them in one at a time to install it on your hard drive because it was just they so so that technology had already um outlived its usefulness i'd say the the trick of this timing is that cdr wasn't ready yet and so there was no writable storage on this device at all like for portability reasons and that that bothered people because there was still a lot of sneaker net there was still a lot of taking things to your friends

and how could you do that on your iMac now like how do you get data somewhere else and people didn't know and and you know, there weren't just USB keys back then, right? It's like, maybe you get a USB hard drive, and you copy it to the hard drive. So, so I think that was painful that this landed before you could even like burn a CD-ROM to give to people. So you could how do you get data out of this thing other than by like emailing it to somebody from a from your AOL account, I guess. So I I'd say that was the,

that was the reaction to that. And the same ADB, I mean, USB was very clearly superior to ADB and, and serial, but you, you definitely had everybody complaining. Like people are worried about their headphones with their headphone jack.

Right. They were like, man, I'm going to buy adapters and it's going to be, you know, I'm going to have to do that. And I wager that they made so many ADB and serial adapters for USB back then that you can still get. They probably were all made in 1998.

And you hear about people who use the Apple extended keyboards to this day, like John Gruber. They're all using an ADB to USB adapter to do that. You can still get them on Amazon. Sure. They're out there. And serial, I used Mac serial to USB adapter for years with my weather station because it had a serial port on it.

And then it had a little Mac adapter for it. And it was just a Mac serial. What the heck is this? I got that in 2004, and they still were just like, here's a Mac serial adapter. I'm like, okay. And there's a, yeah, there's a Keyspan USB serial adapter that I put in, and that gave me the access that I needed. So, yeah, I think it was, in hindsight, it was largely a great move. The infrared didn't carry off, but the rest of it, they were correctly envisioning what the future was going to be like and what the needs were.

And the biggest hit they took was not having writable storage on it, like removable writable storage. You couldn't get data out of it in any good way to a disk. Yeah. It really is just fascinating. You know, we obviously have the benefit of time now but i like to play this game even now we can get the macbook of like is usbc the thing like is that where we're going and you know sometimes apple gets it right sometimes they don't or sometimes they're too early um but it's always like this repeating cycle with the company and clearly the

iMac is one of the biggest examples oh yeah it's it's the it's like the root example so with a lot of Apple products that this thing came with uh you know a new keyboard and mouse and of course they were using the new fangled USB and they even um they even have a a little side of like you can put the plug the mouse on either side so if you're left-handed you can use the mouse on the left side because the ports were on the right side of the computer yeah i mean the adb adb did that too i mean the adb keyboards for apple had the left and the right too but still look at this mouse it's the most it's the it's the most wonderful mouse you've ever used yeah so this mouse i mean we'll put a picture in the show notes it it is perfectly round and it's very i mean i've got a whole stack of them.

It is very difficult to use it because it's easy to get it like turned and suddenly going up or down isn't quite up or down. It's diagonal. And for me at least, and I just have like, I guess like normal sized human hands, it's pretty small. And so it's uncomfortable for me at least to use for long periods of time and they what kills me about this is they stayed with it and as they moved on they did like the five flavors they introduced this mouse in a bunch of different colors but they didn't change anything it was just like oh now it's an orange um eventually they moved away from it but it's it's definitely a mess in the uh in the design department did people hate it i mean i think it's

good looking but when you say from the design it was like economically and just to use it people didn't like it but was that the thing feeling at the time yeah i think when people started using it there was a feeling of like oh i don't know about this thing but you you want to give it you want to give it it's uh a chance i think when people were looking at it, they were just like, well, that's really cool. It's all like translucent plastic. And isn't that awesome? And it's USB. And it's very different from the old mouse.

And always people will be like skeptical because they like their new thing. And that's why they rushed out to buy an ADB adapter. But once it came out, it became clear very quickly, I i would say that you couldn't orient it properly right you pick it up you know it's turned a little bit but you haven't noticed and you just reach your hand down and you start to push it upward to move your cursor upward and your cursor goes left you're like oh damn it mouse and then you gotta like reorient it to get it back to upright because you can't and that was that was. It's like, it's not comfortable in your hand. My favorite accessory at the time was there was a plastic shell that you

basically snapped onto it that made it shaped like essentially like the old Apple mouse where it made it oval. And it was like, literally it just made it so that you could tell you it was bigger to grip and you could tell whether you were using it up and down or not. The fact that that exists is just really sad for the people who designed this mouse. Yeah. Yeah, it looked great.

I mean, it looked great, but it was a mistake. And obviously they did correct the Hockey Puck mouse eventually with the one that they, I think in 2000 maybe it was that they did at Macworld Expo that was the new. Yeah, the one that uh like a big dome and it was it was mouse shaped it was elongated and uh had the little uh like laser underneath and uh and that that was that was that design is still in use i mean essentially apple's mice today are the same sort of design as that. Today's episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by our friends over at MailRoute. IT departments are always expected to do more, but with less money. This can be really difficult,

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Yeah. Was it just mayhem to get your hands on one, or did it take time for people to catch on? No, I mean, there was a huge, my recollection is there was a huge pent-up demand. People were really excited about it. It came out in the fall. I think the idea that you would buy these, keeping in mind the internet at that time,

like the idea that you could buy a computer, like I said earlier, and just do it to get on the internet, do it to do email. They were selling to people who finally had a reason to buy a computer or, or had a bought a computer in the past, but had been frustrated by it. And the idea was, this is like an internet appliance, use it to get onto the internet. And that was a powerful message because then it doesn't matter about compatibility. Like it'll do email and it'll do a web browser. Um, and that's all you really need. So you can you can buy a Mac, you don't have to worry about not it not running Windows. And and so that was successful. The fact that they had product

focused ads, beginning with the original one with a, you know, there's no step three. But in for the later editions, they also did ads that were you're like, I see now this is like Apple, like the multicolored iMac ads feel very Apple and and point the way to the iPod. So I think, yeah, I see now this is like Apple, like the multicolored iMac ads feel very Apple and point the way to the iPod. So I think, yeah, I think it was very successful with a broad number of people. I will say that people, you know, power users were really not a fan of it because they were Power Mac users and this was a toy. It was not as powerful as their Power Macs. It didn't have the ports. And so I think in the install base,

there was an enthusiasm for it because it got people excited about it. But in the like grizzled veterans who were Power users, they were not impressed by the iMac because, and it took years, I think, for Apple to drive pro model users down to the iMac to the point now where very few even like high end Apple users are actually using the Mac Pro. But it took it took a while because this was as many nice things as they say about it. It was kind of underpowered, like it was not super fast.

It was OK. It was not cutpowered. Like it was not super fast. It was okay. It was not cut rate, but it was not super fast. And it was super, super incompatible. So it took time. It took time for that. Also, lots of adapters, lots of USB floppy drives sold. Lots of USB products rushed to the market, some of which were super buggy. They were arriving oftentimes after the imac i think there was a printer that arrived about when the imac did but a lot of times

you'd get the imac and then there would be months where uh you were still waiting for your additional usb products because they just weren't ready because it was an entirely new market and there was not a lot of usb stuff for it and then of course there was the mezzanine slot which i should mention which was there was like a testing slot inside and people took it apart and discovered this thing and they tried to make some products for it and it was like to add a port or to add video out or all these things that that people tried to do with it and the problem was like to crack the iMac case was not something anybody should try to do. It was not good. So people tried and Apple learned its lesson

and did not leave an open testing slot on future editions of the iMac. But I remember we had at Macworld, we had one where we had done some mezzanine hack to it where there was like a port that was like added on to the existing ports on the iMac where we had added whatever thing turned that mezzanine slot into something useful. It was super weird. So people were enthusiastic, but they were also, I think, frustrated,

longtime Mac users by just how untouchable it was. It was, you know, people complain about that today, but this is like where it really started, Where it's like, no, don't open it. Don't change it. Don't modify it. It is what it is. Just use it. It's an appliance. That appliance mentality is really what sums the whole thing up for me.

Like we spoke about earlier with the original Mac, but this thing was designed as something you bought. You sat on your desk and you didn't have to be some sort of like really nerdy or like technical person you could just sit down and use it and i think yeah that this computer for so many reasons like it just nailed that a hundred percent and it is what like without a doubt like i wrote this thing years ago and called it the mac that helped save apple like, it absolutely is because it returned them to that, um, that demographic of user, the computer for the rest of us,

right? 14 years later here, here's Steve jobs again with a computer for the rest of us. And it's the same rationale. Yep. And it was one that really, I mean, uh,

so many of these things result education. It really returned them to that world as well. And in a, in a big way. And, um, you know, this,

this single computer would spin off like depending on how you count them, like three or four or five generations after it. But, uh, this moment in 1998 is like one of the purest, uh, looks at like Steve Jobs vision, not only for Apple,

but for computing in general that it's simple it's easy to use and you don't have to like deal with all these antiquated connectors with pins and like terminators like you could just plug something in and use it and unplug it when you're done like just simple yeah I mean it was it was uh uh and having new stuff like that right I mean, it was, it was, uh, uh, and having new stuff like that, right? I mean, often the cutting edge stuff doesn't go on the computer that regular people buy, but on the iMac, it did like, this is the, for regular people. And, but it's got the USB. It's a lot easier to use with USB. You don't have to, these people don't care about legacy hardware, right?

These new, new Mac buyers, iMac buyers do not care about that. They just want to have a thing that lets them get on the internet and they can just plug it in. Or a school or a business just wants to put it down and plug in an Ethernet cable and they're on the internet and they can use this Mac. And it's got all the Mac software and they can use the CD-ROMs. And their software story was still in flux at this point. But yeah, it is the Mac that saved Apple. This is the thing that turned it around uh and then the the growth really kind of followed as they as they cleaned up the rest of the product line and then

they eventually went to the ipod and the rest is history but this was the start of it this was the artistic statement in addition to being strategic by steve jobs about what they were trying to do it fits in with the story of all the products that he made before and after really. And, and from here, the question and you, you sent me a little clip from that Macworld article that I was talking about earlier about like what, what is missing? What could we, where could we go from here? And I feel like the two things that were obvious were more colors and,

and more, you know, writable storage, like I mentioned, the ability to like do CDR or something like that so you could get data out of this thing in some way. And when we look at the history, I mean, we've been talking

about the initial Bondi iMac, but as you look at the history, that's exactly what happened. The next generation was the famous five flavors. You can go look at them right now in the room that you're in, right? Blueberry, strawberry, lime, tangerine, and grape.

Yep. Aw, how cute. And they did that, took out the infrared, took out the mezzanine slots, stopped messing with our computers, right? And then later that year in 99, they did the iMac DV,

which was a big deal because that was the one where they got slot loading. That had CDR, right? Some of them did. Some of them had CDR. Right, sure. So that Firewire, some of them had CDR um on the imac dv and then uh and then the there was the graphite special edition which was like the fancy high-end imac for 14.99 you got you got more ram and oh and it had video

out i mean they added that was when they really kind of like turned the turn the product over and they made the slot load because the first imax just had the little slide out like you had to pull the drive out, a little drive. It was a compromise. I mean, I think Steve Jobs didn't want the tray loading CD, and I think he wanted them to be CD-R, and it just, they couldn't make it work. Yeah, I have that feeling as well,

because they did it really as soon as they could. And, you know, so as they're adding all these things on, and adding Firewire, and a big push in this machine later in its life was iMovie, right? You have FireWire, digital camcorder, and you can come in, you can edit your videos in iMovie, which is... That's what the DV is. Yep. The whole idea here is you sell people digital camcorders, they edit their camcorder files on iMovie and output them. And that's how you make movies in in 1999 that's I made a lot of iMovies in 2000 and 2001 but you know seeing all these

things together the the heart and soul of the machine is the same even the way like one of the little details that I love in the later ones when they added the VGA out so you could you know you could uh if you were like a teacher and you wanted to put it on a tv or projector it mirrored it yeah but there was a little there were two covers for it and so if you didn't want to see the port you could snap a cover on the back and not see the port sticking out or if you wanted to use it put another cover on and the port was exposed like even then adding that that expand you that simple expansion, Apple did it in a way that still kept the product as a whole clean and neat and sort of unassuming. And if you didn't know what you were looking at, it's really kind of hard to tell besides the case colors, the evolution of these things, because that shape was A, so well-defined by the CRT.

of these things because they uh that that shape was a so well defined by the crt but they kept it so similar over the years where if you sat down to imac from 1998 or 2000 you know you felt uh familiar with it yeah and i think a part of that a big part of that is how fast they turned these things over so in their heyday they were revising these things every nine months and And you would have new colors, new technology coming at the top of the line. And just like the iPhones today, the previous best case iMac would sort of drop down to the middle slot. And sometimes they would have a really cheap one. If you look at 2000, which I remember clearly the Macworld Expo in 2000. I remember this is when the G4 Cube came out. I think this is like a year after maybe the iBook came out.

So this product line, they've got a generic iMac at $799. That is your low price leader. It's old tech, basically. No airport card slot, no video out, no FireWire, CD-ROM instead of DVD-ROM. But, you know, that was the $799. Then at $999, you get something a little bit better. That's the iMac DV. And at $1299, you get the DV Plus. And at $1499, you get the DV Special Edition. And the colors are variants of each other. This is when they've got, And this is when they've got new names.

This is the Indigo, Ruby, Sage, Graphite, and Snow iMacs that they did. So the colors are a little bit different and they've got different names. But they still have that product line spread. Seems like the complication came back, though. Like some of the complication that Steve tried to get rid of with this product seemed to come back. I don't know. I mean, because it's sort of like now, right, where, you know, you can get Macs in different SKUs with different features, but essentially it's sort of like, you know,

good, better, best inside a single product line. There's some more complication, but it's more about like, we have lower margins on this one and we can blow it out for $799 and get it off the price list. I think why it seems messy now is that, you know, Apple has for a very long time done good, better, best. But they, in this era,

they were naming those things. So right now, if you go in and you want to buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro, you know, Apple sells several default SKUs of that, but they're all named 13-inch MacBook Pro, where in these days, they labeled each of those steps in between. Yeah. And- DV Plus. Yeah. DV Special.

DV SE. Yeah. Okay. That's what I think. Because I'm like, I'm hearing you list these, and I'm like, this is horrible. But that makes sense. But they're really just, yeah, good, better, best kind of SKUs. Yeah.

And sometimes it'd be like a real cheap one down at the bottom. And I think they learned from that, right? They did this in the iMac and they did it in the iBook G3, but by the time they got the G4 era, all that was gone, and it was just iBook G4, and there were a couple different default SKUs, and you could custom build one in between. Did they not have the facility to custom build them?

Was that maybe why they offered more kind of SKUs on the shelf? Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Steven, we need to talk about 2001 and what happened that year yeah um but i want to start with an anecdote which is we did an we did a customize your mac feature early in 2001 late in 2000 customize your mac idea was like you know utilities to change your menu bar and your backdrop and sounds and whatever it was just a little feature about ways you can personalize your mac and we thought what is the cover because that was going to be the cover story and we're like what what is the cover and um we decided to do something fun with the cover which is actually hire a couple of models

do something fun with the cover which is actually hire a couple of models and do like um fanciful ideas of of like fancifully decorating an iMac so we had one like with a cowboy lassoing an iMac that had like uh like cow spots on it wow and I think and I think we had a hippie with like a hippie iMac we did multiple covers so depending on where you are you got different covers and this issue came out in late 2000 early 2001 and we got this furious call from somebody at apple and we couldn't understand it they're like how dare you deface our computers they made this argument like we didn't have the right to change the appearance. It made no sense. Like the appearance of their computers, that that was their trademark and something like that.

And, you know, they were it's Apple. So, you know, the CEO of the company and the editor in chief, I think, were concerned about Apple being mad about this. But we were all baffled. Like, why is it that you don't want us to do that? Do you not like the photos? Do you not like our silly kind of customized Mac designs? They claimed that that was their reason. And then what happened is they announced

the Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power iMacs. So you beat them to it. And we went, oh, because we beat them to it. Yeah. Yeah, turns out we just stepped in so and it's fine because those are really really ugly computers yeah they're not they're not great the flower power one is the weird one to me because like the flowers are all like weirdly oriented and they're like different sizes and stuff very strange strange. And it's interesting to note too

that these aren't like vinyl wraps. Like they are embedded in the plastic. In the plastic, yeah. It's very strange. And thankfully they only did two of them. It surprises me you could find these ones as easily as you did, Stephen. Yeah.

Like it feels like they couldn't have sold that many of these, surely. I tapped into some weird macintosh gray markets there's also some other weirdness like uh the cases have uh apple logo embedded in the top above the crt and then one like right on the back and so like the ruby one which i can see right now that apple is red to match the rest of the case the blue dimension of flower power they use like a baby blue and a white but they don't match so like the one on the top is white and the one on the back is baby blue and then vice versa on the flower power like why did you change it like why did you think that was an important thing to do

but they're so strange and what really kind of is most upsetting to me about it is that the ones right before it looked so good like the sage and the indigo and the ruby and the graphite like are very subdued like you could see them like in an office right like if you walked into your attorney's office and he had a graphite imac you want to think twice about it but if you walked in he had a flower power be like what what i like about that that that addition like the graphite sage ruby ones, is that the plastic is clear. Yeah, so a big change when they went to the slot-loading optical drives, the case got just a slightly bit smaller, and you would never know unless you had two of them side by side.

The case gets a little bit smaller. Do you know? I do know. They also got lighter. they got substantially lighter like i think they dropped like six pounds and the reason for that is the the early ones had some electronics that were vertically oriented kind of next to the crt and they had to shield those with metal and so if you look at the side photos of those early ones you can see through the plastic and all you see is like a big sheet of metal and they were able to get rid of that over time and with the slot load it was it was gone altogether you could see right through it and so

you could see the crt which i think is really like a beautiful way just to embrace the technology and they decrease the opacity on the plastic so you could actually see through this the graphite probably being the best example you can just see through the thing i think graphite's my favorite looking at your photos for sure i you know this will make me unpopular but i i didn't like it because all you can see is the back of that crt and i think it's better imagined than seen what's your favorite jason i don't have I don't have a favorite I guess maybe snow because it just obscures the CRT as much as possible I would not have said this I would have said graphite until I unboxed my tangerine and something about that

bright orange just speaks to me it is a very good looking one and I know it's like the one that you picked out was like for the video that you did like it's the the thumbnail animation and stuff like that yeah that is a beautiful one the tangerine the orange is great and keep in mind that the that the colors that they decided to import into the ibook were blueberry and tangerine yep they decided that they were only going to do two colors of ibook and those were the colors that they chose so you could get it in blue or orange. Yeah, they eventually brought graphite and then a variant of the Lime iMac and the Key Lime iBook are slightly different. But they did bring them eventually. Eventually. But when they launched them, they launched them with two colors.

And it was blueberry and tangerine. So the thing for me is like these things have a lot of personality, right? And I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing some of that come back. I mean, now you look at a MacBook Pro and you have no idea how old it is because they all look the same. And they just, they're very, they've become very utilitarian in design. And I'm not saying that I want a blue Dalmatian Mac mini, but I do think there's room for like some, some whimsy and some fun and the hardware that we just don't see anymore. So like the funny thing is when you, when, when people talk about the, uh, unibody aluminum computers, they talk about them as like a timeless design, right?

When they're introduced, you know, like, Oh, this time's design. I actually think this is more of that, right? This personality personality i think is making these really stand out and be like i would love something like this right now yeah i think that the unibody aluminium style will become boring and old quicker than this will my also there's about something about personality and making memories i mean mike you you stick your your stickers on everything right uh-huh um i remember, like, I never owned one of these because I was one of those people, one of those Power Mac people.

But, like, I remember my blue and white G3. I remember my graphite G4. It had some personality that, you know, those models got the plastic treatment and the color treatment and all of that, although only one color. And I remember, remember like my mom um when she uh when they my parents sold my uh my childhood home and they moved into a motor home and started traveling the country you know she had a series of laptops over

the over the years but the first one she had was the tangerine ibook and i remember that i remember that that it's tangerine i remember the personality of that laptop because of that. And I feel like Apple's designs are missing that. And the shame of it is that they had it with the iPods with all the colors. And I feel like they're getting there, right? They're bringing it back slowly with the MacBook having the color options, the four color options. I'm hoping the MacBook Pro will get that too.

But boy, I would really like it if they would go to colors again and let people... You know what? If somebody wants to get a blue MacBook, let them get a blue MacBook. It would look great. I want a blue iPhone though. That's what I want. Yeah, that's true too.

And I know people can do cases and all that, know the ipod taught us the anodized aluminum is beautiful it's just like an apple can do it apple can do beautiful colored anodized aluminum shells on these things so i would love to see more of that i've been looking at white plastic and blue plastic for the last nearly 10 years yeah you, I would love to see a blue here or an orange here or green. Well, and silver and black, it's black glass and silver aluminum forever, right? For so long that a little more personality,

that's something that I think I too take that away from this, Stephen, is I, I, I too take that away from, from this Steven is, is they Apple when it was not a, uh, a supply chain powerhouse, Apple managed to sell iMacs in like six, seven, eight different colors. Uh, wouldn't it be nice if the Apple lift today could, could, uh, could do some of that because it's fun. It's just fun to have computers with this personality. And then you remember it. Oh, that's my blue iMac, right? Instead of like, that's the latest in a series of silver laptops.

You mentioned me and the stickers, right? And it's a bit of a joke, but that's like kind of what it is for me. These machines are my machines and I decorate them with stickers of things that mean something to me or things that i enjoy and that's why i do it because now these are like my ipads because they're decorated in my way and i think i think we're missing that now you know everybody has the gray one there's definitely something to that and you know the idea that um you know the the computer for everybody like part of that was having something that you could connect with on an emotional level. And it's funny in posting,

I posted a bunch of images of these things and at several emails and tweets and people saying, oh yeah, like I totally had, uh, you know, a Ruby one in high school that my parents bought. And like every single time I hear about anyone about the iMac they use, the color 100% of the time is in their comment because it was so important to people. Yeah, well, it's important to Apple's history. They made products of personality that were important to people's lives. They reached a lot of people who Apple had never been,

Apple had never made a product that was fit in their life in any way. It reached into education. It reached into the home. Yeah, it was a hugely influential product. Since the original Mac, the most influential Mac that was ever made was this one. It was just a huge thing for Apple and the culture. And Apple's future was really saved by the existence of this product.

And yeah, when you think about it, you kind of want Apple to embrace its whimsical, colorful side. I don't know whether Johnny Ive got really just sick of colors after a while or what, but Macs have been monochrome for way too long. And although the MacBook shades are a little bit better and people are squealing over the fact that there's the rose gold MacBook now, which is ever so vaguely pink. Like, yeah, but you haven't seen a Ruby iMac. You haven't seen a tangerine iBook. Those are serious statements. It's trends, right?

I mean, and that's why I think that we have these four colors of aluminium right now. But, you know, fashion is cyclical, and I think we're going to see colors come back again, and I hope that they do. Yeah, I think so. I think they're putting their foot in the water with those four variations

on the MacBook, and that it will eventually be everywhere, and then they'll give us, they'll give us some, they're, they're, they're moving in that direction, but it's interesting to look back and see where we've been and,

and see how Apple succeeded so wildly by, you know, giving people the choice of six colors of iMac. Nice plug there. I like the, you should throw the six colors in there. Oh yeah. I,

Oh, look at that. I didn't even do that on purpose, but yeah, totally. That was yeah. Look at that. I didn't even do that on purpose. But yeah, totally. That was it. Yeah. Apple historian with iMac speciality,

Mr. Stephen Hackett, thank you so much for lending your thoughts and images and everything for this special episode. You are continuing to chronicle your time with the family of computers that you have amassed where can people go to find uh all of this interesting uh content that you're creating i've got it all up over at 512pixels.net and uh you can search for that name on youtube i got some videos up over there as well yeah i think the youtube stuff is the best stuff. I mean, I prefer video anyway, but you can read about these things, but you've got to see

them. And you have bunches of great photos as well. We'll put those in the show notes. And it's really interesting to see. It's a very peculiar project. But now that you're kind of in the part where you're doing stuff with it, rather than just finding it, I'm starting to see a real value in it which i didn't expect i would initially so it's really great um we mentioned six colors go to sixcolors.com for jason's stuff you can find jason on twitter he's at jsnl j-s-n-e-l-l steven is at ismh and he hosts connected with me on relay fm and jason and steven together host liftoff if you want to learn more about space.

Are there colored space rockets like this? Do they do this? Oh, don't even know. There's not enough time. I'm sure we'll discuss that on a future episode of Liftoff, but we can't. We're going to start talking about the space shuttle's external tank and it's another rabbit hole for us to go down.

If you want to find the show notes for this week which you should go and check out go to relay.fm upgrade 91 uh we thanks again to our sponsors for this week the fine folk over at mail route and fresh books and we'll be back next time until then say goodbye guys happy memorial day go to the bank and give them a pound. Bye. Deposit your money quickly. Bye.