These days, in my spare time, I’ve been almost completely absorbed by the astonishingly positive experience I’m having with a first-generation iPad that’s been recently given to me. I’ve talked about it at length in my previous piece, and there will soon be a follow-up in case you were interested. And that’s why, until my RSS feeds were flooded with articles and mentions on the subject, I was nearly forgetting about the iMac’s twentieth anniversary. I really don’t have an organic article to talk about the iMac, so here are a few notes, in no particular order of importance.

Internet at home

That the Web was going to be a big deal, it was globally acknowledged pretty soon. But having Internet at home as a ‘normal’ thing took time, and some countries got there before others. In Italy, where I lived at the time, I remember using computers to access the Web to search information online around 1995 at the university, but it wasn’t until 1997–1998 that being able to just go online from home became a more common, widespread phenomenon. I’m talking about this from memory, so I don’t claim perfect accuracy on the matter, but I seem to recall that one of the major factors delaying the process was that telecom companies were slow to adapt to the trend, so there was a distinctive lack of affordable connection options. Connecting to the Internet via modem meant using the telephone landline to call a dedicated number, so that the call was billed as if it were a local call. Still, if you stayed connected for, say, three hours straight, even a local call would end up being rather expensive.

I like to believe that the introduction of the iMac helped to improve this situation — it was certainly much better when I finally could afford to purchase an iMac in late 1999. By that time, the iMac was already at its third round — the so-called ‘slot-loading’ model, an improvement over the previous five-colour offering, with a slot-loading optical drive, better processors, better graphics, more RAM. I got the entry-level 350 MHz blueberry model, which lasted until sometime in 2003. I had been using Macs for about ten years at the time, but that was the first Mac I actually purchased brand-new. All the Macs I had owned previously were second-hand purchases. It was also the first Mac with which I went online.

Headphone jack? We have plenty!

As far as I know, the iMac G3 is the Mac with the most headphone jacks ever offered. As you see in the picture (an excerpt from a 1998 brochure), the iMac G3 had two jacks on the front, but also a third one on the side. I remember using the side jack to connect a couple of external speakers, while having jacks on the front of the machine was useful when using headphones or earphones with particularly short cables.

The round mouse: a contrarian opinion

In A brief retrospective on failures (my, my, I wrote that more than 10 years ago!) I talked about the infamous round mouse that came with the iMac:

I don’t quite understand the general bashing — perhaps it’s nicknamed ‘hockey puck’ not for its shape, but after all the bashing. Perhaps it’s just me and my slim, long-fingered hands, but I’ve been using one for 9 years without a problem. It has to be handled slightly differently than a more elongated mouse (like the Apple Pro Optical Mouse or the Mighty Mouse, for example), and you can’t expect to be resting your hand on it. The way I hold it — putting my thumb and little finger at either side of it and using the forefinger and the middle finger to press the button — has made it the most comfortable mouse I’ve ever had, believe it or not. Before using that mouse I frequently ended my day with an aching wrist. That issue disappeared after using the rounded mouse.

The round mouse is probably the most hated Apple peripheral, and I know that a lot of people can’t stand its design; just like they can’t stand the design of the current Magic Mouse. I’ve used every mouse Apple has made since the first Mac, and while I find other designs undoubtedly comfortable (the Pro mouse, the Mighty Mouse), if today I don’t have the slightest symptom of RSI is thanks to the iMac’s round mouse and, later, to the Magic Mouse.

The mother of all bold moves

When it comes to demonstrating Apple’s boldness, the original iMac has become the tritest of examples. It’s been 20 years of “They point-blank dropped the floppy drive, along with other legacy connections, and introduced a new standard, USB”. And yes, it’s true, it was a bold move, it was a gamble. It could have backfired. Customers and third-party manufacturers could have resisted, kept on with their floppies, rejecting USB, and turning to other solutions. The iMac could have been a total flop. Turns out it wasn’t.

You see, I don’t really believe Apple ‘got lucky’ with the iMac and the accompanying technology and design decisions. The 1.44 MB floppy certainly had its usefulness. Sometimes today I talk with (younger) people about this, and for some it seems crazy that, at the time, many users held on to the floppy, given its small capacity. In 1997–1998, Macs were usually equipped with 1.2 up to 6 GB hard drives, for comparison, and there were already higher-capacity removable media around, such as Iomega’s Zip and Jaz drives, which used 100 MB disks and 1 GB cartridges, respectively; and of course magneto-optical disks — long-time pro Mac users will surely remember SyQuest’s 44, 88 and 200 MB cartridges, rather popular at the time. 

But floppy diskettes retained a degree of inexpensiveness and practicality which, combined with their ubiquity, made them difficult to let go. They were often used for quick document exchanges in the same way today we may use an 8 or 16 GB USB thumb drive. At the time, basically every computer had a floppy drive. But Zip, Jaz, or other magneto-optical solutions? Not so much. It was more likely among Mac users, but if I had to deliver some files to a client, I was often asked to deliver them on floppies, even when recordable CDs were already getting traction.

And yet the lack of a floppy drive in the iMac was more of a problem on paper, or in the tech debates of the time. This ‘transition’ turned out to be smoother because — and I’m reading this from a 1998 issue of MacFormat magazine — companies like Imation and NewerTech had already announced external USB floppy drives. Imation’s SuperDrive, for example, could “read and write standard floppy disk formats as well as Imation’s own 120 MB format”. Iomega would “also be bringing its popular Zip drive to iMac” [with a USB connection].

In other words, if you decided to get an iMac in 1998, and you wanted to keep using floppies, the period of discomfort didn’t last very long. When I got my iMac one year later, the landscape had already changed so much that I didn’t even buy an external USB floppy drive. Whenever I needed to exchange stuff via floppy diskettes, I would resort to any of the older Macs I still had around, like the Classic or the PowerBook 150 or the Quadra 700. For the rest, it was email, or even recordable CDs. But if I absolutely had the need for a USB floppy drive for my iMac, by 1999 the options to choose from were plenty. 

Sure, not putting a floppy drive in the iMac had its risks, but the iMac was also a compelling computer with a very strong identity and purpose. Apple (Jobs) had a very clear idea of the iMac’s target audience, and that is reflected in the articles dedicated to the iMac in this October 1998 issue of MacFormat magazine I have in my hands. Lindsay Bruce writes: 

The home remains a place of critical importance to iMac’s success. As good as Apple’s Performas have been — especially the most recent Creative Studio minitower model — they have failed to appeal to a wider audience beyond the traditional Mac constituency: they’ve been too expensive, or too slow, or simply not accessible enough. 

iMac reverses these trends, and it does so spectacularly. […] Its speed is certainly impressive, running the legs off last year’s Performas, and in many ways it’s faster than any Pentium PC you can buy, for the home market or for business use. In short, iMac is the fastest sub-£1,000 computer currently available by miles.

And concludes:

Those who criticise iMac’s undoubted limitations compared with other Macs, such as the notable absence of a SCSI connection port or a floppy disk drive, miss its point: this is a Mac for people who need a computer just to do the simple things most of us do most of the time — word processing, playing games, learning to use or exploring the Internet and so on. But it does these tasks considerably better than anything else available at the price.

It’s all there: the genius in the iMac’s proposal was to provide a computer with a unique signature and personality which, combined with good (or good-enough) technical specifications, a very defined target audience, and an extremely competitive price, resulted in such an appealing package that regular people didn’t really mind certain limitations or omissions. Or at least they were willing to accept the tradeoff because what they got in return was a capable, fast, and — why not? — iconic machine. 

And third-party manufacturers agreed: there was both a rush to adopt the USB standard and offer products that could work with the iMac as soon as possible, and to fill the void left by the lack of a built-in floppy drive by making external USB drives. It’s easy to dismiss the colourful shape and the cartoonish, whimsical design of the iMac now that most computers have become æsthetically as boring as in the beige era (I hear you, Peter Cohen). But the iMac’s unique organic design and colour made such an impact that a lot of third-party USB peripherals produced for the iMac at the time were built with a similar choice of materials, colours and translucency. And soon after, copycats started to produce PCs with a sheath of coloured plastic thrown over decidedly ugly designs.

Getting a couple of things straight

I was a bit amused by Matt Birchler’s Living that #DongleLife all the Way Back in 1998 but I politely disagree on how he frames his comparison. He quotes a rather terrible review of the iMac by the New York Times. On the absence of a floppy drive and the introduction of USB replacing ADB, Serial, and SCSI ports, Matt quips:

Yup, even back in 1998, Apple was breaking hearts by removing ports “before their time.” And since I can already hear you countering “but it was different then, USB was clearly better and was the obvious replacement.”

and takes this excerpt from the New York Times article to finish his statement:

Others in the industry have doubts about the decision not to include a floppy drive. ”Those silly little floppy drives still perform a useful function…People still use floppy disks to move files around between home and office, between members of a work group and to make copies of documents and projects.”

Ray A. Meifert, director of the Superdisk…said his company sold between 600 million and 700 million 1.44-megabyte disks last year, out of a total worldwide production of more than 4 billion disks.

When Steve Jobs says the floppy is dead, I’d take that statement cautiously,” Mr. Meifert said.

I think that citing the opinion of a floppy disk seller on the future of the floppy disk is, well, awkward at best. We can hardly expect Mr. Meifert to reply, “Yeah, the floppy disk is history now. I advise you to stop buying floppies as soon as you can.” (This is a fault of the original author of the article, who evidently needed appropriate bits to fit his narrative). 

The fact is that the floppy drive was dead in Steve Jobs’s mind because he thought about what came next, not about the status quo. Of course there were still hundreds of thousands of floppies around — every other computer that was not the iMac had a floppy drive, including all other Macs. But documents and projects were already getting bigger, and I remember (again, to please a client who didn’t have a Zip drive and whose email provider didn’t allow big attachments) having to compress a project into a StuffIt archive, then split the archive in four parts and use four floppies to deliver it to the client. Floppy disks were getting progressively annoying to use, exactly because their capacity was obsolete for the time.

USB was indeed superior than the connection technologies it replaced. From MacFormat again:

USB has three central advantages over its predecessors, though. The first is simply that it’s much faster than either ADB or Serial. […] The second advantage is that USB is ‘hot-pluggable’ — you can unplug one device and plug in another without switching iMac off. […] USB is an invention of Intel, the firm behind most of the processors used in PCs. Some may view Apple’s adoption of USB as siding with the enemy, but prosperity in the computer industry is based upon exploiting good technology standards. USB works well and is set to become a standard on PC as well as iMac (USB software is a core part of the new OS upgrade Windows 98). So its third advantage is that you can expect far more USB devices for iMac than you could choose from for other Macs.

Back to Matt Birchler:

Yes, even 20 years ago we were living that #donglelife.

Now I’m not saying what Apple was doing in 1998 with ports is exactly the same as what they are doing today, but those paragraphs feel like they could be pasted into a review of the current MacBook line and all you’d have to do is swap out the nouns.

Dongles and adapters aren’t a recent invention (and annoyance). I remember using them ever since I started working with Macs and PCs in the late 1980s. There were network adapters, ADB dongles, SCSI terminators, SCSI adapters (when you needed to hook up an external peripheral using DB-25 SCSI connectors to a Mac laptop using the smaller, square HDI-30 SCSI port), and so on and so forth. But the so-called ‘dongle life’ wasn’t really a problem when you were on a desktop workstation that had several peripherals permanently connected via different adapters. All connections were cabled anyway, so whether it was direct or through an adapter, nobody cared. You looked for the right adapter, you installed it, then it was there. It worked. 

But today’s ‘dongle life’ with MacBooks and MacBook Pros is another thing altogether. In 1998 with the iMac, Apple was able to get away with those drastic changes because the company managed to attract such attention to a perfectly marketed and inherently interesting machine that of course third-party manufacturers wanted to jump aboard. USB was an emerging standard with obvious technical advantages. Connecting peripherals could become and would become a simple affair (bye bye, SCSI terminators, SCSI chain configurations, or having to connect things before turning them on for fear of breaking something). And third parties could provide the iMac with everything it lacked, making money in the process.

Today’s USB‑C has certain advantages over the connections it wants to replace, and the ability to provide different types of data and power over the same physical connection is indeed noteworthy; but aping the same boldness of 1998 in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook, and in 2016 with the MacBook Pro line, hasn’t produced the same results. Why? I can’t say exactly. In my opinion, while going USB in 1998 was part of a plan focussed on the possibilities that the new standard could bring to the table (faster, simpler connections, and more Mac/PC interoperability), going USB‑C — and USB‑C only — in 2015–2016 was more a decision dictated by design constraints than anything else. A decision that, paradoxically, has turned the MacBooks into systems that are more ‘closed’ than the iMac was in 1998. 

As I said above — again, going from memory here — the ‘period of discomfort’ for owners of a new iMac in 1998 was relatively short. If you look at the table in the previous section, you can see that third-party USB offerings were already a fair amount less than two months after the iMac’s availability. And the situation got better quickly. I don’t have similarly hard data at hand, but after the MacBook and MacBook Pro introduction I don’t recall the ready availability of, say, a USB‑C scanner or printer. Or even a USB‑C keyboard or mouse or drawing tablet, if you’ll forgive a bit of hyperbole^[1]. Nothing but dongles. Even to connect other Apple products like an iPhone. A year after the iMac’s introduction the choice of USB peripherals was staggering compared with today, three years after the introduction of the 12-inch MacBook, and two years after the introduction of the latest MacBook Pro design. The ‘period of discomfort’ for many MacBook Pro owners seems to be longer in comparison. Check this post on Michael Tsai’s blog and the many links it contains to have an idea of the debate surrounding USB‑C.

Today we’re still stuck with having to get a dongle for connecting a regular USB thumb drive or an SD card reader, or an external display, or… many other devices, really. And that’s what’s ridiculous about today’s ‘dongle life’: featherweight, ultra-thin portables that quickly become cumbersome because you have to bring a bunch of adapters with you in case you have to work off-site and you may want to interface your sleek machine with the rest of the world.

 

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