iMac G3

In mid-1997 Apple was roughly ninety days from bankruptcy, by Steve Jobs' own later telling. Jobs returned, gutted the product line from dozens of confusing models to a two-by-two grid, and pointed at the consumer-desktop square: this would be a new machine, for the internet age, shipping in under a year. Jony Ive's design team wrapped the engineering in translucent blue-green plastic and gave it a handle — not because people would carry it, but because a handle tells you not to be afraid of something.

The bets were violent. No floppy drive, when every PC on earth had one. No ADB, no SCSI, no serial — replaced entirely by USB, a port so new that almost no peripherals existed for it. The press predicted disaster on both counts. Instead, the iMac became the fastest-selling computer in Apple's history: 800,000 units in its first five months, with a third of buyers new to computers entirely.

The 'i' officially stood for internet — setup to online in two steps — but the machine's real product was optimism. In a market of beige towers, the iMac looked like candy, plugged in like an appliance, and photographed like a fashion object. Within a year it came in five fruit flavors and had spawned an industry-wide epidemic of translucent plastic everything: printers, game consoles, staplers, George Foreman grills.

It carried Apple's consumer line for five years and thirteen colors, long enough to hand the baton to the iPod era it had made possible — the iMac's profits funded the machines that funded everything else.

The iMac saved Apple; that isn't rhetoric, it's accounting. It also single-handedly dragged USB into ubiquity, killed the floppy years ahead of schedule, and established the Jobs-Ive design methodology — opinionated subtraction, emotional objects — that would produce the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Culturally it remains one of the most recognizable industrial designs ever made. The Bondi iMac sits in MoMA's collection, and 'iMac' remains, decades later, the name of Apple's desktop — the longest-lived product name in the company's history after 'Mac' itself.

The first thing an iMac does is chime at you through surprisingly decent stereo speakers, and the second is glow — the CRT lights the translucent case from within, a detail no photo quite captures. Mac OS 8.5 on the G3 is quick and confident, and the machine's whole personality says consumer appliance: one cable to the wall, one to the phone jack, done.

The catch, then and now, is the round hockey-puck mouse, which no human hand has ever loved (it was the first thing most owners replaced). The keyboard is compact but crisp. Today early iMacs are the friendliest possible entry to late-90s computing — cheap, common, self-contained, and running the classic Mac OS's final, prettiest years. The startup chime through those speakers is pure 1998.