July 17, 2002: Apple ships a brand new super-sized iMac G4 with a 17-inch widescreen LCD show that turns into the envy of most laptop customers on the time.
“One of the best client desktop simply obtained even higher,” says Apple CEO Steve Jobs of the corporate’s new all-in-one laptop in a press launch. “Having this beautiful 17-inch flat display screen floating in mid-air proper in entrance of you is solely breathtaking. There’s nothing prefer it within the PC world.”
He wasn’t flawed!
iMac G4 with 17-inch display screen: A pure development for Apple
The iMac G4, first launched with a 15-inch display screen on January 7, 2002, might be my favourite iMac in Apple historical past. As Jobs famous, it seemed completely not like each different laptop obtainable on the time. Nonetheless, whereas it was very a lot its personal factor, it linked many concepts revolving round Apple on the time.
For starters, it represented a midpoint between the eye-catching, cutesy design of the unique iMac and iBook, and the extra austere minimalism of Apple’s later units. It additionally echoed the Luxo lamp (Pixar’s mascot), whereas tying again to Apple’s nature-inspired hippie roots with a design primarily based on a sunflower.
Designing a pc impressed by a sunflower
In Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, he tells the story of Jobs and Apple design chief Jony Ive struggling to provide you with a brand new search for the next-gen iMac. The pair wound up in Jobs’ backyard, the place they got here up with the concept of a pc with a movable head that might be angled like a sunflower reaching for the solar.
They achieved this utilizing a cantilevered, absolutely posable metallic arm to assist the iMac G4 display screen. Opposite to fears on the time, they did it with out risking the entire thing falling over. A heavy, hemispheric base anchored the pc and contained its internals.
How highly effective was the iMac G4 17-inch?
So, what concerning the 17-inch iMac G4 specs? The pc got here with an 800 MHz PowerPC G4 processor, an Nvidia GeForce4 MX graphics card, an Apple SuperDrive for taking part in and burning CDs and DVDs, and an 80GB laborious drive. (Apple proudly boasted it may “maintain greater than six hours of video, 15,000 songs and 73,000 digital images.”)
The machine began at $1,999 (practically $3,600 in right now’s cash). Just a few years later, Apple upped the display screen dimension yet one more time by introducing a 20-inch iMac G4.
Did you ever get your arms on certainly one of these pivotal iMacs? Inform us what you considered the eye-catching new design within the feedback beneath.
