Twenty years ago, the iMac saved Apple and signed the return of Steve Jobs

1997-98: While Apple is on the brink of bankruptcy, Steve Jobs returns to business. He reorganizes the troops, relaunches the communication of the company and initiates the design of new products. The iMac is born.

Personal computers are no longer young. Some are born with the Macintosh, others before, others claim that she died with the advent of smartphones, computers invisible and ubiquitous. Whether she is dead or has just evolved, her story has some great dates. That of the announcement of the first iMac is one. Although marketed for the first time in August 1998, the iMac G3 was introduced by Steve Jobs on May 6, 1998. If the date is not symbolic, the computer is.

A return, a meeting

In 1996, NeXT, the structure that Steve Jobs created on his ouster from Apple, was bought by the Cupertino company. The following year, the two entities merge.

Very quickly, in July 1997, Steve Jobs is appointed acting CEO of Apple, after the forced departure of Gil Amelio. The year 1997 will be an intensive year of change and challenge. The co-founder of Apple will lay off nearly three thousand people, succeed in convincing the legendary advertising Lee Clow to come back to work for his company and, finally, will meet a young talented designer, on the brink of giving his resignation: Jonathan Ive.

Entering Apple in 1992, became head of the design department in 1996, the young Brit was not happy in his work: "we paid no attention to products, because all that mattered was to increase margins . Remembered Jonathan Ive in an interview with Walter Isaacson. With Steve Jobs, the deal is completely different. Design is king and at the service of a product.

This change of policy is not done in a serene setting. It's urgent. Apple is bad, very bad. In the course of 1997, the company lost more than a billion dollars and is close to bankruptcy. "We were three months out of bankruptcy," Steve Jobs explained to his biographer.

With the iMac, Steve Jobs not only speaks of a unique and new product, whose "back is prettier than the front of others", but also a way to stabilize the results of his company.

For Apple, the iMac is as much a lifeline as the first fruit of the meeting between Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive. It is also the perfect materialization of the Lee Clow Think Different campaign, which marked the return to the forefront of the Californian society. For Apple, the stars were lining up again. The hour of refoundation and reconquest had sounded.

The iMac: the anti-PC

Rethink the PCs as you grew up. Beige, rectangular, entangled with threads, weighted with antivirus ... The iMac was the antithesis of this reality. Certainly, his OS, Mac OS 8 and 9 (and finally 10) have not necessarily left only good memories, but this all-in-one, the first of its kind for the general public, has marked the spirits.

Colorful, translucent, fun, easy to carry, indestructible, equipped with a cathode screen rather large for the time, with its 15 inches (of which only 13.8 inches are really usable), he abandoned the diskette drive in favor of the CD-ROM drive and offered two USB ports!

Equipment that has something to smile about today, but which clearly represented a foretaste of the future at the time. A time when, already, Apple's mice were not necessarily the best part of the proposed experience!

The iMac was also a tool of choice to connect to the Internet. Think about it, it embarked at the same time a modem 33,6K then 56K and an Ethernet port. For many, it was the first time that their apartment seemed smaller without gaining a square meter. The arrival of the Internet, despite the slow connections of the time, has changed everything ... and the iMac was one of these machines designed primarily to ensure access to network networks.

Originally, it did not even have to integrate hard disk, to stick to the spirit of the "network computers" that vaulted Larry Ellison, boss of Oracle, at the time. The "i" iMac is also borrowed from the Internet, as confirmed Ken Segall, talented advertising behind the name of this Mac, who worked with Apple for a long time.

Anyway, Apple's teams managed to adapt the bowels of professional machines, the Power Mac G3s, to this clear plastic case that we saw all the components, to make it a powerful all-in-one for the time. It still shipped a Power PC G3 clocked at 233 MHz. All for 1299 dollars.

Tons of colors and iterations

Faced with an undeniable success, from 1998 to 2001, Apple will evolve its iMac by adding colors, other than the "Bondi blue", more powerful components over the revisions (Rev. C, Rev. D) and bets major updates.

The original CD player will also be replaced by a disk-eating model and the hard drive will grow to exceed the original 4GB. The good news is that the different iterations of the iMac "bubble" will see their price decrease gradually, with a few exceptions.

Finally, after a long fight, in January 2002, the cathode ray tube makes the weapons and is replaced by a LCD panel. Note however that the design of the original iMac will continue for some years, thanks to the four iterations of eMac, machines designed for the world of education.

Anyway, to celebrate this change, the teams of Jonathan Ive go to white, review the design and offer a flat screen of 15 inches carried by an articulated arm, connected to a hemispherical base. This is the famous sunflower model.

It embeds a Power PC G4 and continues to beef up its offer in network connectivity by offering a 56K modem, an Ethernet jack and an 802.11b Wi-Fi module, optional. It also introduces the Super Drive CD and DVD burner, which was a big selling point at a time when downloading an ISO image could still take several hours.

Sold from 1299 dollars, the iMac "sunflower" will live only two years. But before disappearing, he will know some updates, including offering larger screens of 17 and 20 inches.

The head squared

In August 2004, the iMac goes to the Power PC G5 processor and to accommodate this chip that needed air, Apple has redesigned the design of its all-in-one. White still dominates, but this time the case is parallelepipedic on an aluminum stand and is reminiscent of the Cinema Display range.

The beginnings of the current design, in a way. The LCD panel was available in two screen sizes, 17 and 20 inches. It will take until October 2005 to see the model arrive with an integrated iSight camera, the ancestor of FaceTime cameras.

Apple has other ambitions for this machine, he wants to make a kind of TV or at least a multimedia center. In October 2005, a new iMac is introduced and it comes with a small remote control minimalist and infrared that can be stored by magnetizing on the side of the device. On the interface side, Apple's developers have developed Front Row, which centralizes video content.

The screen of this iMac will grow to 20 and 24 inches and will also ship in its case the Intel processors from January 2006. Three iMac will be launched during that year.

Alu-cination

The rupture will occur in August 2007, with the arrival of the first iMac aluminum housing. Screen sizes remain unchanged at a maximum of 24 inches, but the screen begins to occupy more space in the front.

This design will undergo a significant evolution with a unibody design from October 2009. Finer, the iMac will also be larger and adopt the screen diagonals that we still meet today, namely 21.5 and 27 inches. It's with him that SSDs are also taking their first steps in Apple's all-in-one.

Three years later, in 2012, Tim Cook's teams will introduce the "slim" iMac, with a drop-shaped shape, reminiscent of the MacBook Air ... and which is still relevant today. The edges are very thin, then the back of the case widens to accommodate all components. In October 2014, the iMac is adorned with a Retina 5K slab.

The latest iMac revolution comes in 2017, with the announcement and then the commercialization of the iMac Pro. A machine with sidereal gray casing, whose configuration has nothing to envy to bulky professional workstations. It's a new beginning for everything in one, the validation of a design pushed to its limits and the first blatant distinction between pro and mainstream models.

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