How is the iMac any different than a G3 All in one without the floppy and zip drives?
Technically, the main differences are that it's got a new firmware that allows network booting and also the USB connections.
In stock configuration, the G3 All-In-One, which was only offered into education markets, not to consumers/professionals, did not have a modem, although it was possible to add one, I don't know if Apple bothered letting schools buy them that way.
The idea really was that the G3 AIO was going to go into environments that had a lot more legacy equipment that would need to be used, thus an AIO with Zip and Floppy. The fact that it shared PCI expansion and the ability to add the Wings a/v card was a bonus, and by the time it was available, I don't know how many schools used it.
It's also worth noting that the G3 AIO predates the iMac by up to a year. the Beige G3 family was introduced in around August 1997, whereas the iMac G3 was introduced in August 1998.
Are you telling me that Putting the same computer more or less, in a colorful plastic case instead of white, and REMOVING floppy and zip (which in my opinion was a bad move) SAVED an entire company?
What I'm actually telling you is that flattening the product line from around 25 unique models in early 1997, to five in late 1997, while at the same time lowering the price on almost every single shipping Mac by a thousand dollars, created enough movement to save Apple.
The piece the iMac did was create an experience consumers were interested. Buying a Mac for your home before 1998 was a painful and tiresome process, and regularly huge comparison lists were published to save people at home the trouble of having to build their own.
Have you ever looked at what Apple was selling in 1996? There were 21 different Mac models, not counting sub-types and clones available during 1996. Plus, the issue with product stuck in the channel meant a fair number of models introduced or discontinued in 1994 and 1995 were still available.
Consumers didn't want another 4000/5000/6000 or have to deal with thinking about whether the 7000 series is worth it, or a clone and build your own bundle. They wanted to buy something from a short menu of choices, take it home, and send an email.
The iMac enabled that.
The iMac also isn't a bad office computer, and I know lots of schools purchased them in spades. In a lot of ways, the iMac was actually a much better machine for the education environment. Sometimes, it doesn't come down to specs, but even if it did: the iMac G3@233 had identical performance in nearly all tests to the Power Macintosh G3@233. It came with faster networking, it was small and stylish but generally didn't skimp on function, and within a few months of launch there was an extremely healthy ecosystem of peripherals.
The
other thing that helped save Apple was cutting unnecessary expenditures. Things like QuickTakes, LaserWriters, StyleWryters, OneScanners, and the Newton never really made money for Apple. They did all that because they had pretty extreme Not Invented Here syndrome. Hilariously, most of those products (save the Newton
specifically) were OEMed versions of products other companies made. Canon and HP were the true builders of most LaserWriter and StyleWriter printers, for example. QuickTake circuitry was shared with at least Kodak, and I don't know who built the hardware in the OneScanner, but my first guess is either HP or Epson. By 1997, the point had come to either accept that the Mac was going to survive and peripheral makers were going to support it (or the Mac had to adapt to support peripherals on its own) or it wasn't and it wasn't worth keeping that stuff on the books.
But, I guess it often gets simplified into a story of Jobs dreaming and building the iMac and the iMac on its own saving the company. That version ignores a lot of real troubles Apple had up through 1997, some of which persisted through early 1998.
a fairly high end VidCard at that point
I haven't had an opportunity to test it to 1600x1200, I should bring it into my office and do so, but with the 6-meg option, the GPU in the Beige G3 can do 1280x1024@24bit. I bet it could also do 1600x1200@24. The iMac has a very close chip and can also take the upgrade to 6MB.
Of course, an iMac's internal display can't operate at 1600x1200, but it's of note that the iMac's GPU could do it.
Idly, I hadn't been aware Radius also made PCI video cards. It would be neat to see someone stuff one into a 7000/8000/9000 and use it instead of a Rage128 or Radeon.
That is
very in the eye of the beholder, but sort of true. Two things happened:
Clones based on the pro Mac architectures were cheaper. Even systems that were
literally a Power Macintosh 9500 board but in another vendor's case (PowerTower Pro is pretty close to this description - they dressed it up in an EATX format, but it was a near entirely unmodified 9500 architecture) cost a little less than what Apple was charging.
The UMAX
S900 in particular offered some neat features above what Apple was doing, such as UltraSCSI and 10/100 Ethernet on the "E100" card, along with a 50MHz bus, up from 40MHz on every other 7500-9600 derived platform and on most of the other clones.
The entire clone program was basically intended for cloners to build something like the
UMAX C-series, which Apple thought was needed for the platform, but didn't really want to build themselves. The idea was that they'd design the 4400, and then the cloners would copy it and sell it inexpensively in bulk to people who would grow the overall Mac market, without touching Apple's part of it. Instead, Apple opened all of their platforms up for cloning and the clone makers ate Apple's lunch at the high end -- the systems Apple probably most needed to move to make anything they were doing at the time make sense.
Thinking about it, a 4400 or C500 might have been a pretty ideal system for you, both had two PCI slots and at least one on the C500 could hold long cards. I believe all three cards in the C600 could be long. There was even a C600 configuration that came with a 2M accelerator, although I'm not sure if that card could have done 1600x1200@24, however you could add your own still.
I don't know if there's a lot of proof that low end of midrange clones ever did what Apple wanted in terms of growing the Mac market below what a retail Performa would have cost at the time, making the whole thing that much more of a failure.
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