iMac G3

Steve Jobs reduced the company's large product lines immediately upon becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997. Toward the end of the year, Apple trimmed its line of desktop Macs down from ten distinct models to four models of the Power Macintosh G3, which included the iMac's immediate predecessor, an educational market exclusive called the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One. Having discontinued the consumer-targeted Performa series, Apple needed a replacement for the Performa's price point. The company announced the iMac on May 6, 1998[1] and began shipping the iMac G3 on August 15, 1998.

Internally, the iMac was a combination of the MacNC project and Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP). Although the promise of CHRP has never been fully realized, the work that Apple had done on CHRP significantly helped in the designing of the iMac. One change from CHRP for example was to boot classic Mac OS using a 4MB Mac OS ROM file stored on disk. The original iMac used a PowerPC G3 (PowerPC 750) processor, which also ran in Apple's high-end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds. It sold for US$1,299, and shipped with Mac OS 8.1, which was soon upgraded to Mac OS 8.5.

The iMac was continually updated after its initial release. Aside from increasing specifications (processor speed, video RAM and hard-disk capacity), Apple replaced Bondi Blue with new colors. Throughout its lifespan, the iMac was released in a total of thirteen colors.

A later hardware update created a sleeker design. This second-generation iMac featured a slot-loading optical drive, FireWire, "fanless" operation (through free convection cooling), a slightly updated shape, and the option of AirPort wireless networking. Apple continued to sell this line of iMacs until March 2003, mainly to customers who wanted the ability to run the older Mac OS 9 operating system. USB and FireWire support, and support for dial-up, Ethernet, and wireless networking (via 802.11b and Bluetooth) soon became standard across Apple's entire product line. The addition of high-speed FireWire corrected the deficiencies of the earlier iMacs.

The iMac CRT model, now targeted at the education market, was renamed the iMac G3, and kept in production alongside its iMac G4 successor until the eMac was released. As Apple continued to release new versions of its computers, the term iMac continued to be used to refer to machines in its consumer desktop line.

All thirteen colors of the iMac G3

The iMac was dramatically different from any previous mainstream computer. It was made of translucent "Bondi Blue"-colored plastic, and was egg-shaped around a 15-inch (38.1 cm) CRT display. The case included a handle, and the peripheral connectors were hidden behind a door on the right-hand side of the machine. Dual headphone jacks in the front complemented the built-in stereo speakers. Danny Coster was the original designer of the product, and Jonathan Ive helped further the process. The iMac G3's unique shape and color options helped ingrain itself into late 1990s pop culture. The iMac was the first computer to exclusively offer USB ports as standard,[2] including as the connector for its new keyboard and mouse,[3] thus abandoning previous Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI and GeoPort serial ports.

A further radical step was to abandon the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive which had been present in every Macintosh since the first in 1984. Apple argued that recordable CDs, the Internet, and office networks were quickly making diskettes obsolete; however, Apple's omission generated controversy. At the time of iMac's introduction, third-party manufacturers offered external USB floppy disk drives, often in translucent plastic to match the iMac's enclosure. Apple had initially announced the internal modem in the iMac would operate at only 33.6 kbit/s rather than the new 56 kbit/s speed, but was forced by consumer pressure to adopt the faster standard.

Components such as the front-mounted IrDA port and the tray-loading CD-ROM drive were borrowed from Apple's laptop line. Although the iMac did not officially have an expansion slot, the first versions had a slot dubbed the "mezzanine slot". It was only for internal use by Apple, although a few third-party expansion cards were released for it, such as a 3dfx Voodoo II video card upgrade from Micro Conversions[4] and SCSI/SCSI-TV tuner cards (iProRAID and iProRAID TV) from the German company Formac. The mezzanine slot was removed from later iMacs, though according to an article in the German computer magazine c't, the socket can be retrofitted on revision C iMacs.[5]

The keyboard and mouse were redesigned for the iMac with translucent plastics and a Bondi Blue trim. The Apple USB Keyboard was smaller than Apple's previous keyboards, with white characters on black keys – both attributes that attracted debate. The Apple USB Mouse was mechanical, of a round, "hockey puck" design which was derided as being unnecessarily difficult for users with larger hands. Apple continued shipping the round mouse, adding a divot to the button in later versions so that users could distinguish proper orientation by feel. At the 2000 Macworld Expo in New York, a new capsule-shaped optical mouse, known as the Apple Pro Mouse (and later renamed the "Apple Mouse"), replaced the round mouse across all of Apple's hardware offerings. The Apple Pro Keyboard was introduced at the same time; it was a full-size keyboard,[6] with an extended layout not seen since Apple's last ADB keyboards.

Apple protected the distinctive iMac design with legal action against competing computer makers who attempted to imitate the iMac, such as eMachines' eOne.[13] Some manufacturers added translucent plastics to existing designs after the iMac.