Yesterday was a significant day for Apple fans in India. It has been confirmed that the iPhone is now being Officially Launched in India. Apart from that, exactly 10 years ago, Steve Jobs went on stage at the Flint Center auditorium near Apple’s campus and revealed the product that would save Apple – the iMac (affectionately called Bondi Blue).
When I think of the iMac I only think about playing the ‘Prince of Persia’ – that’s all I did with the first one I encountered (I was too dumb to do anything else). At that time the beautiful white machine seemed queer to me. I always kept searching for the CPU and wondered why the CD – Rom Drive was embedded in the screen.
The original iMac came stocked with a 233MHz G3, 32MB of SDRAM (though you could bump it up to a whopping 128MB), a 4 gig harddrive, 2 USB ports, a CD-ROM drive (not a CD burner, Apple was late to that party), and an IrDA port.
The original iMac started out what seems to have become a habit for Apple now. It did not include a Floppy Drive. This helped create a market for USB based products and peripherals. Cut to today – Apple has launched the MacBook Air without a CD – Rom Drive. This is consumer led because people don’t use CD’s and DVD’s anymore (or not in large volumes). People in the US use their VPN’s and NAS’ to transfer and transport data. So changing consumer needs and habits have synergized with design. Not all companies do this too well. This will probably drive the market for Software Downloads and save packing and transportation and other distribution related costs.
After my tryst with the Bondi Blue I must confess that I almost never used a Mac again till more recently (Windows 98, and then XP seemed like very stable Systems).
The new iMac that I recently tested was extremely beautiful. I settled for the MacBook instead opting for portability over (slightly better) power.
I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy however I do think that there are a couple of features on the Mac OS which make life really really easy. My top pick would be ‘Spotlight’ – the real time thorough scan search tool that sorts what im searching for pretty accurately (special thanks to the screen capture tool because of which I don’t need to edit my screenshots!).
Exposé is a close second.
I’d love to know some of your experiences with the iMac or Mac in general. Which is your favourite Mac Tool? Why do you love Mac Product?
There are so many cool things about the Mac to love, its hard to choose one that I like the best.
The ability to have it read your Safari pages is cool; the ability to blow up, or enlarge anything on the screen is fantastic – I use that a lot; the lack of virius’s is a given, but most of all, I think I just love that fact that it just works – OS X doesn’t bog you down or get in your way.
the apple computer is not the best selling computer of all time…the best selling computer is the commodore 64