The top of the iMac had a thin vent that provided an escape route for rising hot air caused by the heat inside. Along the bottom of the iMac ran a grille (behind which Apple hid the speakers) that allowed cool air to be drawn in by the fans. The iMac was ingeniously designed for heat dissipation. The iMac G5 housed three fans in its thin frame.
These G5 processors ran hot, and I mean hot. Throw in the addition of Serial-ATA and the iMac was now a serious alternative for the PowerMac G5, at least for those who didn’t need PCI cards. The system bus speed increased accordingly, from a lowly 167 MHz to a much more sprightly 600 MHz. This meant that the iMac rocketed from a rather pedestrian 1.25 GHz G4 to a blisteringly hot 1.8 GHz G5 processor. The G5 had found a home in the PowerMac over a year ago but due to heat and cost constraints, the iMac had been trundling along with the G4 that had already been showing signs of age. The design was reminiscent of the iPod, and the fact was pushed by Apple in its advertising.Īside from the design change, the big news was that iMac was finally able to benefit from a G5 processor. It was the deliberate lack of any ostentatious characteristics in the iMac G5 that would pave the way for Apple’s minimalistic design choices over the next decade. The iMac G5 had finally grown up, moved out and got a job. Gone were the cutesy colors and childish nature of the infant iMac G3 as well as the nose and lip piercings of the teenage iMac G4 that made sure it stood out of a crowd. This machine was simply a neutral white rectangle, less than 2” thick, held aloft by a single piece of aluminum. The iMac G5 was far more mature in comparison to its predecessors. It was the day that Apple introduced the iMac G5.
On Augat the Apple Expo in Paris, Phil Schiller took to the stage to announce "one more thing” – a complete redesign of their flagship Mac. That form factor lasted just over two years. It was certainly unique and, love it or hate it, proved to be very popular. Although that limitation had gone, Apple still focused on the display and took a very original approach to mounting it on a swing arm. The iMac G3’s design had to focus around the sheer volume of a CRT. The iMac G4 (referred to by some as the iLamp) was the first major redesign of the iMac as Apple switched to LCD screens and was a radical departure to the original iMac’s design. The iMac G3 bowed out after three years before the next iteration arrived.
The original iMac, a CRT housed in a translucent case, saved Apple and cemented itself into popular culture that is, even today, still an iconic design. It’s a form factor that owes its beginnings to the iMac G5. Sure, it’s had a coat of paint, a change of clothes and it’s gotten bigger whilst losing weight, but the fundamental form factor of the iMac that we see today has been unchanged for almost ten years, a chinned display with (up until recently) a side-mounted optical drive. But that’s not the case and, in fact, since the introduction of the iMac in 1998 it has had only two major design changes. You’d think that if we looked over the lineage of the iMac, we’d see a number of major design changes as time went on. This year celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the iMac. This month’s post is by Jordan Merrick, a freelance writer and web designer who runs Sparsebundle, a UK-based blog about technology, Apple, web design, video games.
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