A boy, his dog and a candy-coloured iMac helped pull Apple back from the brink
In one early iMac advert, a seven-year-old named Johann and his border collie Brodie raced a Stanford business student to set up a computer. The boy and dog got their iMac running in 8 minutes and 15 seconds. The student, with an HP Pavilion, was still at it when the commercial ended.
Apple badly needed that message. In the mid-1990s it was near bankruptcy, squeezed by Windows PCs and Mac clones and unable to finish a modern operating system. Buying NeXT in 1996 brought back Steve Jobs, who became interim chief executive in 1997 and cut a confusing product range to four machines: a laptop and a desktop each for consumers and professionals. The consumer desktop slot became the iMac.
Jony Ive's team designed an all-in-one machine around a curved CRT screen, wrapped in translucent coloured plastic and aimed squarely at getting ordinary people online. The advertising man Ken Segall proposed the name: short, containing Mac, with an i hinting at the internet. Jobs hated it at first, yet the prefix went on to label a whole family of Apple products. The iMac was also bold about what it left out. It was the first Mac with a USB port and no floppy drive, which meant Mac owners could at last buy the same keyboards, mice and printers as PC users instead of hunting for pricey Mac-only parts.
Reviews were mixed, sales were not. The original sold more than six million units in 13 colours and patterns, and its see-through, sweet-coloured plastic was copied across consumer electronics. Examples now sit in the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Later versions changed shape repeatedly: a white dome with the screen on a steel arm inspired by a sunflower, then slim designs with everything tucked behind the display. It moved to Intel chips in 2006 and to Apple's own processors in 2021, when it returned to a palette of seven colours in a nod to the first model.
Source: IMac
