R.I.P. Original iMac: 1998-2003 443
Joey Patterson writes "CNET News.com reports that, after five years, Apple has stopped selling the gumdrop-shaped iMac to the general public."
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.
It will be missed by few, loved by many (Score:4, Insightful)
I especially liked the manuals... the shortest manuals ever, something like 20 words right? But anyways, I've gotta hand it to Apple for those things lasting as long as they did, and bringing a new style and appeal to the computer market. Live long and prosper iMac..
No biggie (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, it will be hard to make a fishtank out of the flat-panel iMACs...
5 year lifespan for hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No biggie (Score:3, Insightful)
Think antfarms!
Re:Mom likes em (Score:5, Insightful)
On a more serious note, Apple got lots of praise and lots of flak for producing a translucent computer. They knew it was "trendy" and they knew when to move on. Now everyone making a translucent device that wasn't designed to be translucent should move on, too.
There are all the usual jokes about the vacuum cleaners and the iLamp, but have you heard anyone say, "While the user interface is straightforward and the availability of the BSD architecture is a great plus, I'd never buy one because I think it looks like a lamp." - No. They don't know anything about them, but their friends said Macs suck 15 years ago, so they fall back on the only insults they know.
Sorry for the rant.
Re:education takes a backseat as usual (Score:3, Insightful)
scripsit inputsprocket:
Maybe an institution would have an interest in a standard platform? If I've already got (say) forty-five eMacs and I get the funds to add five more to my lab, is it inconceivable that I'd want to get five more like the ones I have, so I don't need to support an additional hardware configuration?
Not everything's a conspiracy...
Re:Mom likes em (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The computer that put Apple back on the charts (Score:2, Insightful)
"There is nothing that hasn't been thought of. The trick is to think of it again." - Goethe
KFG
Re:*sniff* (a eulogy) (Score:1, Insightful)
What a bunch of bullshit!
Please, show me (Score:3, Insightful)
A Brave Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
I had one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs. While other people were praising its beauty, I thought it was kinda ugly. As a fashion statement, the blue translucent plastic seemed somehow akin to bell-bottom trousers and leisure suits. The periodic release of new machines with different color schemes seemed to support that view.
But it was a fine computer. The original iMac was a brave departure from the beige boxes we'd all become so accustomed to. The compact all-in-one design simplified things for people who don't want to invest a lot of time in figuring out how everything goes together. (You or I may feel unfulfilled with any computer we haven't built with our bare hands from raw sand, but there are plenty of folks who just want to use the thing.)
The iMac moved things forward in part by turning its back on a lot of legacy stuff. The iMac upset a lot of long-time Mac fanatics who were upset that they couldn't plug their old ADB and serial peripherals into the USB ports. Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives, I guess the iMac's work here is done.
Snif... Drat... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
Re:I'll bet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:RIP iMac (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like I want my car to have some pizazz. My garage door opener? Pizazz is probably just going make it work poorly.
Apple didn't care if YOU hated them! (Score:5, Insightful)
The iMac was designed to be used by grandmas and the like, to send e-mail and browse the web. People like grandma don't need expansion or upgrade capability. Grandma won't be swapping out her video card and processor over the weekend to squeeze a few more FPS out of Quake III. As long as the machine starts up and runs when she wants to use it, it will always be plenty fast for grandma.
Don't call them cheap crap just because they didn't meet your needs. They were very good machines, they did just what they were designed to do, and for whom they were designed to do it, period. If they didn't, the model wouldn't have survived on the price list for almost five years, so show some freakin' respect-- if not for the iMac, there might not have BEEN those Power Macs you like so much.
~Philly
Re:It will be missed by few, loved by many (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an orange book, that folds out, with 5 pictures, each representing the the plugging in of a different cable. There are no words whatsoever.
Re:*sniff* (a eulogy) (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see what I have now. USB mouse, keyboard, zip drive, floppy drive, scanner, Palm Pilot cradle, SD/MMC card reader, laser printer, ink-jet printer, web-cam, and link to my digital camera. All hot swappable, all plug and play, and no rebooting.
What is kind of weird is that I can remember when
Still expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
my iMacs (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs' Mac gave us windows, icons, mice, and pointers. His NeXT computer gave us the WWW, his iMac gave us a network appliance, and his OS X gave us Unix for teenagers. Quite a set of lifetime achievements...
Re:correct me if i am wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
Cheap crap != conformity? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with the original poster... the sooner that fad dies, the better. There's more to stylish design than translucent plastic, and blindly applying an idea to everything you can get your hands on because someone else did it successfully is just another form of conformity
Re:Cheap crap != conformity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that I dont think it looks absolutely horrific, but for the record I've found most of that translucent plastic they use on everythign from iMacs to whatever the hell else they wanna make "cool" to be very durable.
Once in high school, an iMac fell off a desk in the lab and bounced off the floor. Crashed the dsik real good, but the rest of the machne was unharmed. *shrug*
Re:Cheap crap != conformity? (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, even when it's not cheap plastic it's usually horribly ugly. The early USB ZIP drive that's the same old design but in translucent blue is a perfect example.
Re:Please, show me (Score:3, Insightful)
Here
http://www.xicomputer.com/
These guys make some of the best x86 CAD systems around. The the machine I got the above quote for is a dual Xeon 2.0, half a gig of RAM, SCSI Raid 5 (40Gb), & 1Ghz ethernet.
Jaysyn
Re:difference bewtween a mac and pc (Score:2, Insightful)
I predict its end of life as a gaming machine in about 2 years, as the motherboard does not have an AGP slot, the PCI 3dfx card is not supported anymore and all new Gfx cards require AGP.
Of course, it was the most powerful configuration that could be bought then, but it shows that quality made PC can last as long as Macs.
Krouic
Re:Mom likes em (Score:2, Insightful)
So while the PC-world was still struggling with DOS and pre-3.11 Windows, we Mac-people could enjoy Unix, vivid colors, multiple monitors, and of course the pleasant experience of using the Macintosh interface.
Now tell me which computer type *really* sucked in 1988?
-Lasse