“Many Apple fans love Apple history, and most Apple fans love Jonathan Ive,” OS X Daily reports.
“This amusing video from 1997 combines both, features Jony Ive being Jony Ive as he waxes poetic about the 20th Anniversary Mac, product, design, and experience,” OS X Daily reports. “Despite being 15 years ago, you could replace ’20th Anniversary Mac’ with ‘iMac’ or ‘iPad’ and it would be right at home in a modern Apple video (minus the random cheesy flame video clips).”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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Amazing how Apple was putting more thought into their products 15 years ago than many companies are doing today. Even though it looks a bit dated, it’s still a pretty ingenious design, and well ahead of its time.
Jony Ive with hair…!
It was a very cool design. But the design was ahead of its time for technology used. Color LCDs were still fairly new back then, and that screen was only 800×600, when the minimal “standard” for desktop CRT displays was at least 1024×768, even for cheap ones. The processor was a PPC 603e, the slower power-efficient version used in PowerBooks of that time, not the 604. The max RAM was 128mb, fine for System 7.6, but barely adequate for Mac OS 9. And the $8500 retail price tag… what were they thinking?
And shaved!
He was hot!!!
iMac, anyone? Damn that looks like a precursor to it…..
Not of the original iMac, or the second one, or the third one. But starting with the iMac G5, Jony Ive did come back around to “reincarnate” the TAM.
Correct; original and lamp-styled iMacs’ main designer was Steven Jobs himself, not Ive, which was main designer of the current style iMac (patent filings are very accurate about that; though Ive certainly played major role in earlier iMacs, as well as Jobs in later ones.)
Keep pushing Apple!
Dang, Sir J. Ive broadcasts a bigger RDF then Jobs ever did. After watching the vid, I want one. Even though my iPhone is more powerful. 🙂
Great to see Jony Ive, and to feel how dedicated he is to the best. Great to be reminded of this legacy during a time that Apple is just getting dumped on from every angle. It will endure.
I enjoyed mine quite a bit. It had a radio tuner, a TV tuner built-in, the Bose speakers, cool, front mounted CD player. It was an awesome machine for its time! I logged in with my voice! Ha! Mine is now in a computer museum in the Eastern U.S.
The vid explains why M$ is failing today. Apple has ALWAYS considered form and function as a unified whole, whereas M$ have concentrated on software alone and left the hardware side to OEMS to go wherever they wanted to go.
By giving free reign to the innards of Windows the world ended up with software that was freely allowed to overwrite neighbouring app’s memory, corrupt registry settings and leave the system vulnerable to viruses and malware. This in turn resulted in an entire industry devoted to protecting the Windows machine from those naughty hackers and gave the poor old microprocessor so much background work to do that although clock speeds began to rise over the years there was little noticeable improvement in interface speed on a Windows platform.
The results speak for themselves – the Mac experience today is a unified quality experience with a pleasing OS and hardware that is a real pleasure to use – while M$ is having to throw all of its toys out of the pram in an effort to catch up, having realised that Apple’s approach was right all along.
Windows fans have always decried the Mac’s closed off approach whilst extolling the openness of Windows but the result for Windows was a mess of patches and hacks and spaghetti code resulting in huge memory footprints with instability rife throughout. Win7 did improve on that but it was always the case with M$ that it took every other iteration of the OS to swing from utter balls-up to improvement and back again, and Win8 is a continuation of that muddled trend. M$ always seemed to learn something and then immediately forget it all next time out.
Win8 looks to me like a hastily conceived muddle of conflicting ideas in an effort to be all things to all people but Apple has always realised that this approach was doomed and would always result in compromise. M$ and some of its die-hard fans really believe they are on to a winner with Win8 and the Surface when you read certain blogs but the compromises will eventually take their toll and reveal shortcomings – I simply cannot ever see that the “Modern UI” (AKA Metro) can ever be a good thing on a desktop / laptop because it is so completely rooted in the tablet approach and the two worlds are just simply incompatible with each other.
Only the other day at work I had to install a new WiFi router. The manual that came with it was about 1/4″ thick and all of the content was devoted to Windows users (there was a DVD included as well). Reading through this manual was a real eye opener to see all the options for different Windows versions – it was truly mind boggling to understand what the typical Windows user has to endure in order to connect to the internet.
Luckily we are on Macs at work and it took all of 5 minutes to get set up. No DVD to load up, no download to “update my driver”, it all just sort of worked the way that Macs do.
I wish I’d had a £1 for every time I have contacted a supplier at work to be told that the “server is down, can you call back tomorrow?” – these are all Windows machines in the main (or certainly non-Apple machines) and it must have cost the world an absolute fortune over the years in wasted revenue when you think of all the updates that have had to be downloaded, all of the IT guys needed to keep the darn things running and the lost productivity where people have seen all their work trashed as a result of yet another crash.
Had the world been using Macs all this time we would all have been much more productive by now I am certain – if for no other reason than people would have all been able to just get things DONE.
Looking forward to Mr Ive’s continuing innovations, I bet he has some amazing designs up his sleeve, long may he continue!
Amen to all that, brother!
‘The world using Macs’ was never going to be an option though. Apple doesn’t compete at the low end of the market, and a multi-national buying 30,000 iMacs over $200 dumb PCs is an impossible dream.
Jony Ive is the face of Apple, not Tim Cook. He should be doing the keynotes.
Here, here!
With the recent internal leadership changes, I think he will become a prominent part of Apple’s “keynote” presentations going forward. Tim Cook will do the “overview” portion, and introduce Jony Ive (and probably Phil because he’s funny and does a great job with software demos) to do the rest.
And Jony said:
Behold the future!
And it was good
That’s one serious-minded object designer, out there, peerless, in a league of his own. Long may he prosper! (If only Stevo were still around to inspire the troops and the punters..)
I have this is new mint condition stored away. All the accessories too. I loves this machine and used it to its fullest.
Oh boy, that was truly a terrible machine. The design was ahead of its time, but the screen resolution was way behind. The retail price was ridiculous, the speed was a nightmare. The 20th Anniversary Mac was a huge disappointment, and so it failed. So glad we have different Macs now.
I’ll take your word for it. But somehow it still looks futuristic. Guess that is because in those days everything Apple did wasn’t instantly copied by Samsung et al.
You can certainly hear even then the desire to use the best materials technology to drive simplicity and beauty in what was at the time otherwise a beige box containing a few boards, a PSU and a chunky 20 MB HD.
So… Where’s the 21ST CENTURY Mac Jony?
Maybe an all new MacPro21C?
I had one. Bought it from apple as a refurbished item educational special for 2K. I guess the Bose sound system was the best part of it. It had issues with a recall on the sound system. TAMM was alot of fun to show people. I kept all the original items and packaging and sold it at a good price on ebay. After watching the demo makes me want it back. It was interesting that they showed that the item was portable. I think not. The subwolfer was attached to the CPU. I think the TAMM made a cameo on Seinfeld. I never understood the wacky price.