Enthralled, enraptured.
[note sarcasm]
Title here please?
Thanks!
Marketing gimmicks? Apple, can you innovate any more? But ten units looks like they are intended to be awards/memorabilia for someone.
faux vents
For three thousand bucks I would expect properly textured vents, at least.
That actually looks surprisingly good. Late Stage Hipsterism, tho…
If it’s an all-over reskinning, for $3k I’d expect that soft pebbly texture of a beige Apple //e case as well. Or at least the look of it rather than just flat beige.
Hm. Am I wrong in thinking that cosmetic differences were being promoted in part to cover up the lack of ability to use different software under the hood?
Vinyl overlay does not even approach the right look. Nor does the multi-colored apple.
However i do like the colr used.
The price is too steep for what is essentially a vinyl job with a new apple.
There were a bunch of motivations for the design, though I think Jobs was excited to make a Dieter Rams inspired design in a realm of dull design, akin to what he’d done at NeXT with their cube/slab, and also make his mark as the new CEO bringing changes. Making it visually clear that the box wasn’t a Windows based PC on a visual front helped in differentiation, but there was more to it. They had big changes under the hood with the new G3 233 CPU that was a huge leap in (integer/cache) performance compared to previous Apple consumer desktops (that had been built on the relatively underperforming 603e), had moved to USB, a new logic board design (based on the G3 portable), but differentiating on hardware bumps alone hadn’t worked well for Apple. This was also when they were getting rid of having a ridiculous number of hardware versions of desktop Macs on the market at one time (Performa/non-Performa, 5300, 5360, 6300, 6340, 7500, 7600, 8100, 9500, et al) down to a simple line, so having something visually striking to show the change in direction helped there too. Of course it was also a Hail Mary pass with the company fending off financial ruin, so they needed something attention catching, compelling, and desirable to pull in new customers, and the simplicity of hardware design helped play into the marketing of the ease of use of and design of the OS.
That’s a pretty damn expensive vinyl wrap.
But still closed source OS that the end user had no choice about using?
Basically true, though at the time in '98 that was generally taken for granted by consumers, the landscape for consumers was the binary realm of Macs and WinTel boxes. You could get Linux on the thing since it was Open Firmware based (I ran MkLinux on a Rev. B iMac and dual-booted), and YellowDog and other distros showed up not long after. Linux in '98 was still a very non-user friendly thing and was mostly for hobbyists and servers. As I recall, the movement to popularize Open Source software to the public only really started to pick up steam after “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” was published in '99 (with other OSS evangelism picking up steam as well).
I think you could run BeOS on the iMacs too, if you wanted less software and a different closed platform that was amazingly fast, and the BSDs were booting on it in '99 if you wanted a non-Linux open OS. But that was all very niche, if you bought an iMac it was likely because you wanted the newer, faster, cooler looking Mac.
Fair enough…
