Apple sent me a review copy. My first impression? At almost 12 pounds, Designed by Apple in California is Apple’s heaviest product this side of a 27-inch iMac. Seriously, there are weaponized toilet tank lids that weigh less than this thing.

But I also thought where the book started was interesting: 1998’s candy-colored iMac G3, the first Mac released after Steve Jobs came to Apple. This is an important computer, true. But it’s not the first computer Jony Ive designed for Apple. Nor is it his most forward-looking.

That honor would go to the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, sometimes shortened as the TAM, first released in 1997 at the eye-watering price of $7,499, or about double what a Mac Pro will cost you today. Only 12,000 were ever made, making it a collector’s item to this day.

What’s amazing about the TAM is that it foreshadows a lot of the work Ive would do on the Mac line over the next two decades. Like the current iMac, it’s a slim, flat-screen all-in-one, released during an era when computers were distinctly cube-shaped. Everything’s integrated: the screen, the speakers, the disc drive, and so on. It had an LCD screen, five years before they came to the rest of the Mac line, and weighed half as much as the iMac G3, released the following year.

If Apple under Ive has been defined by its obsessive pursuit of ever thinner, lighter devices, then the TAM was ahead of its time. But it’s interesting to see other future Apple innovations the TAM took a stab at. Consider, for example, the fact that the TAM shipped with a removable trackpad that could be used alongside the keyboard, 13 years before Apple unveiled the Magic Trackpad.

It’s true, the TAM doesn’t share the same material sensibility as later Ive designs. It’s mostly plastic, but that was typical of the era: Apple wouldn’t really switch over to aluminum and glass as its primary materials for another decade. Yet, in this promotional video, a young, skinny, and curiously unshaven Ive delivers a very familiar sounding ode to the care his team put into the TAM’s material process: The die-cast metal foot, for example, or the addition of metallic flaking to the plastic lacquer used in the case, all to give the TAM a premium feel and luster.