The iMac difference

Since its introduction a year ago this week, the iMac has smashed sales records, turned up on the desks of sitcom stars everywhere and unleashed a new wave of third-party peripherals wrought in translucent, polychromatic plastics.

It's also attracted a lot of heat from critics who maintain that its innovations are mostly a matter of appearance and its success is thanks more to visual appeal than top-of-the-line hardware.

My response can be boiled down to three words: Sure. So what? I've got two confessions to make. Confession No. 1: I got a look at the iMac precisely one day before the rest of the computing world saw Apple iCEO Steve Jobs unveil the top-secret consumer desktop system on May 6, 1998.

Confession No. 2: I was underwhelmed. As a matter of fact, I thought it looked more like a Fisher-Price bath toy than a PC.

Nor was I blown away by the specs: a 233MHz G3, 15-inch screen, no expansion slots, a maximum 128 Mbytes of RAM -- oh, yeah, and no floppy drive.

In other words, I was skunked by my own inability to see the difference between a consumer product and the old-school professional systems I'd grown accustomed to.

My conversion really occured on the day I brought my five-year-old to work with me and set her up in front of the pre-release iMac Apple had lent to MacWEEK. My kid has been using a Mac since she was about two. (Despite our reluctance to raise a little mouse potato, her fascination with her mom's Photoshop work convinced us to let her try her hand at it.) However, trying to keep her occupied with games on an old office Power Mac had always been a touch-and-go proposition; after about 20 minutes, she'd generally get more interested in raiding the vending machine or ogling the strange characters I work with here.

She stayed in front of the iMac for three hours that morning; even then, I had a hard time dragging her away.

We bought an iMac, of course; I figure giving our daughter and her younger sister something else to wrestle over will build muscle tone and keep them off the streets.

Score another one for Apple's approach: putting solid hardware into a striking package that -- like it or loathe it -- has redefined the visual language of consumer computing.

It's also introduced new subjects into the discourse, creating a market where design and fashion cues play as significant a role as pure horsepower.

That's not to say that the iMac is an insignificant piece of hardware: Its PowerPC G3 speeds have risen to 333MHz and counting; its use of Universal Serial Bus has blazed a trail for the rest of the Mac line and led many of Apple's Windows competitors; and rumors of an impending upgrade that adds FireWire and DVD support should boost the system's sexiness for consumers with a yen for multimedia.

Nevertheless, the iMac's primary charms lie in its ability to lead the long-awaited expansion of the PC from a technology tool for hardware tinkerers to an Internet-driven home appliance. Many iMac users don't know or care what goes inside the package; they're satisfied knowing that they can pick a model that matches their decor while swapping e-mail and surfing the Net.

Is that a problem? I sure don't see one.

That's why I have little patience for PC users who don't see where Apple gets off taking legal steps to defend the iMac look from knock-off competitors such as Future Power and eMachines. Arguing that brightly colored chassis were an inevitable consumer experiment is one thing; after all, a slew of candy-color consumer electronics have come (and mostly gone) since the iMac's introduction.

However, to maintain that a translucent blue-and-white all-in-one system with an upright design, minimal ports and lots of curves is as inevitable as putting four wheels on an automobile is putting some effort into missing the point.

With the iMac (and now the iBook), Apple is making a play for a whole different type of market -- one where a compelling industrial design counts for at least as much as what's going on under the hood.

That way of thinking might offend some PC purists raised to think in terms of raw performance and expandability. That's fine; those aren't the people Apple is trying to sell these systems to, anyway.

When it comes down to it, the main expansion option the iMac has offered is the most important one of all -- expanding basic computing functions and Internet connectivity to a population that's resisted the beige stylings and hardware arcana of earlier PC generations.

Matthew Rothenberg is director of online content for Mac Publishing LLC, which publishes MacWEEK, MacCentral, Macworld and MacBuy.