Designer Jonathan Ive and Apple boss Steve Jobs unleashed the iMac - a brightly coloured, translucent desktop computer like nothing the IT industry had seen before. Despite the stunned mutterings and
Designer Jonathan Ive and Apple boss Steve Jobs unleashed the iMac - a brightly coloured, translucent desktop computer like nothing the IT industry had seen before. Despite the stunned mutterings and derision from the ultra conservative PC fraternity, the general public - particularly first time buyers - loved it, and even the diminishing family of hardcore Mac owners embraced it as their saviour.
And saviour it was. Apple was rapidly sinking in a sea of debt and crashing sales. The Doomsayers were counting down the days to the funeral, when, suddenly Apple rose overnight like a rainbow in the aftermath of a storm - and at the end of the rainbow there was enough gold to put the company back in the black and restore it to its old glory days.
Jobs, who founded Apple in the 1970s and was ousted by the board of directors in the mid 80s, had been brought back in a last ditch attempt to save the company, which was in such serious trouble it was not going to see out the 1990s. He did it with an ad campaign called Think Different, and the iMac, and later the iBook, was at the centre of it.
Ive had moved to San Francisco from London in 1992 to work in-house for Apple. In London he had been a partner in a small design firm called Tangerine, which had experience designing TV sets, VCRs, microwave ovens and other high-demand consumer items, but never computers. Ive had been designing washbasins before his move but that didn't stop him from leading the design team that came up with the iMac concept.
In an interview published on the Apple Web site a year after the iMac launch, Ive said he saw design as playing an important role in forging a connection between Apple's spectacular technology and the individual. 'Very often design is the most immediate, the most explicit way of defining what these products become in people's minds. What is it? What does it do? How am I going to use it? Where am I going to use it? How much is it going to cost? The intellectual challenge of addressing these questions through design is totally seductive.'
He was critical of the industry's adherence to its generic 'beige box' design, saying it was driven by an industry that had defined its agenda and what it believed the purchasing criteria should be. 'That, therefore, defines the priorities for the designer. It is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective. It is an industry where there is an obsession about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is the hard drive? How fast is the CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six.
'But it's also very inhuman and very cold. Because of the industry's obsession with absolutes, there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive, less tangible product attributes,' Ive said.
American author John Naisbitt agrees. At a recent media forum in Berlin he said technology had for many years been clearly separable from people. But that was changing and there was now an inter-relationship between the two that he called 'high tech, high touch'. People wanted to be able to connect with their machines. For decades phones and cars came only in black, but people wanted something more that they could relate to, and today they come in all colours.
He said the iMac was a classic example of a high tech machine that had a high touch factor, and it was a trend that was bound to happen throughout the computer industry.
The transition from beige box to fashion trend was completed late last year when one of the world's leading fashion magazines, Elle, dedicated a page of its September 1999 issue to the iMac and repeated the exercise this September with a full page on the iBook.
Elle's IT Editor Gilles Klein said it was the first time the magazine had featured a computer and when he repeated the exercise this year he did it under the heading 'It is a must'.
'People who are working with iBooks want to have them everywhere and if they have them everywhere they do not want them to be ugly. To have an iMac or an iBook is stylish,' he said.