A few weeks ago, Christophe and I ran into a cheap, used iMac DV in Paris so we decided to tear down our first big Thing. Here’s a stop motion video of this session 🛠

Let’s go back in time and analyse Ruby 🛑 in more details.

A little bit of history

The line of iMac was started in 1998 right after Steve Jobs came back to sit on his throne at Apple as interim CEO. The Ruby version was released one year after the original Bondi Blue, in 1999.

This first product under the new reign of Steve Jobs was responsible for the amazing turnaround at Apple. From an almost bankrupt company to what the corporation used to be: a design-oriented company with easy-to-use computers. After more than 4 years of commercialization, the G3 left the stage and the G4 took its place in 2002.

Just like the recent scandal of the iPhone losing its audio jack connection, the iMac G3 was one of the first computer to abandon the then-current standards like the floppy disk 💾 and the Apple Desktop bus in favor of what is now a standard: the USB port (but for how long 🤔).

Did you know that the first iMacs were the combination of two devices that were developed in Cupertino: the MacNC project (a device mainly relying on a network promoted by Oracle) and the Common Hardware Reference Project (a standard system architecture capable of running different OS on PowerPC based computers). Steve Jobs cut the development of these two projects to focus on the core values of Apple but used what was already developed to build the iMac as we know it.

Its basic retail price tag was US$1,299, whereas the DV we tore down was the first iMac to break the below-$1000 barrier at $999

Let’s get technical

This iMac used a 13.8-inch viewable CRT display, an ATI Rage IIc graphics card, a 4GB hard drive (enough for 1 blu-ray movie!), 32MB of memory (PC100 SDRAM), slot-sloading CD-ROM drive, two USB ports, a 56 kbit/s Modem, built-in Ethernet, an infrared port, built-in stereo speakers, and two headphone ports. The CPU and memory were both located on a daughter card which was installed directly on the motherboard.

The original iMac ran on a 233Mhz processor while the Ruby iMac we tore down used a 400Mhz processor and 64mb of memory. The initial release ran on Mac OS 8.1 and the maximum operating system that can be used on this model is Mac OS X 10.3.9 “Panther” and Mac OS 9.2.2.

This beautiful baby weighted more than 17kg or more than 37 pounds! As a comparison, the current 27inch iMac weigh just below 22 pounds! What a diet!

Designed by Apple in California

The design of this iMac was groundbreaking! No computer ever harboured such colorful palettes and a translucent body letting the user see the guts of the device. Jony Ive is credited to be the father of this amazing design and led him to become Chief Design Officer at Apple and one of the most renowned designer in the world.

Some radical steps taken by Apple included the use of only USB ports, no floppy disk drive, which, you can imagine, created a lot of controversy. By doing this, Apple took a bet and believed that Recordable CDs and the internet made diskettes obsolete. Right now, we can say that this was a wise decision. Will it be the same for the Jack port on the iPhone? Wait and see.

By being detailed-oriented after the return of Steve Jobs, Apple decided to build specific translucent mouses and keyboards for their new line of iMacs:

Because Apple loves to frustrate its customers, the keyboard was smaller than its predecessors with white characters on black keys. The Apple USB Mouse was mechanical, of a round, “hockey puck” design which was derided as being unnecessarily difficult for users with larger hands. (source wikipedia).

The marketing time machine

Let’s take a look at some of the marketing campaigns used to make the iMac G3 one of the pop icon of the late 90s. Here’s a magazine ad displaying all the colors available.