The iMac is a range of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers designed and built by Apple Inc. It has been the primary part of Apple’s consumer desktop offerings since its introduction in 1998, and has evolved through four distinct forms. In its original form, the iMac G3, the iMac was gum drop- or egg-shaped with a CRT monitor, mainly enclosed by colored, translucent plastic. The second major revision, the iMac G4, moved to a design of a hemispherical base containing all the main components and an LCD monitor on a freely moving arm attached to the top of the base. The iMac G5 and the Intel iMac placed all the components immediately behind the display, creating a chunky unified design that tilts only up and down on a simple metal base. The current iMac shares the same form as the previous models, but is now thinner and uses anodized aluminum and black-bordered glass for its case.

History

The announcement of the iMac was a source of discussion and anticipation among commentators, Mac fans, and detractors. Opinions were divided over Apple’s drastic changes to the Macintosh hardware.^[1] At the time, Apple was trying to improve its retail strategy. Apple declared that “the back of our computer looks better than the front of anyone else’s”.^[2]

Apple declared the ‘i’ in iMac to stand for “Internet“; it also represented the product’s focus as a personal device (‘i’ for “individual”).^[3] Attention was given to the out-of-box experience: the user needed to go through only two steps to set up and connect to the Internet. “There’s no step 3!” was the catch-phrase in a popular iMac commercial narrated by actor Jeff Goldblum.^[4] Another commercial, dubbed ”Simplicity Shootout”, pitted seven-year-old Johann Thomas and his border collie Brodie, with an iMac, against Adam Taggart, a Stanford University MBA student, with an HP Pavilion 8250, in a race to set up their computers. Johann and Brodie finished in 8 minutes and 15 seconds,^[5] whereas Adam was still working on it by the end of the commercial. Apple later adopted the ‘i’ prefix across its consumer hardware and software lines, such as the iPod, iBook, iPhone, iPad and various pieces of software such as the iLife suite and iWork.

On March 3, 2009, Apple updated its offerings for the iMac, featuring new Nvidia chipsets, the new Mini-DisplayPort and a new standard keyboard featuring no numeric pad that has become standard in all new Apple computers.^[6]

On October 20, 2009, Apple updated the iMac, adding two new LED-backlit 16:9 widescreen screen sizes in 21.5″ and 27″ models, replacing the 20″ and 24″ 16:10 aspect ratio screens of the previous generation. In addition to memory and hard drive capacity increases, this release brought speed bumps to the Core 2 Duo technology and added Intel’s new Core i5 and Core i7 chips in the high end model, signifying the first quad-core iMac.

Design

Borrowing from the 1997 Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, the various LCD-based iMac designs continued the all-in-one concept first envisioned in Apple’s original Macintosh computer. The successful iMac allowed Apple to continue targeting the Power Macintosh line at the high-end of the market. This foreshadowed a similar strategy in the notebook market when the iBook was released in 1999. Since then, the company has continued this strategy of differentiating the consumer versus professional product lines. Apple’s focus on design has allowed each of its subsequent products to create a distinctive identity. Apple derided the beige colors then pervading the PC industry. The company would later drift from the multicolored designs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The later part of the first decade of the 21st century saw Apple using anodized aluminum and white, black, and clear polycarbonate plastics. Today many PCs are more design-conscious than before the iMac’s introduction, with multi-shaded design schemes being common, and some desktops and laptops available in colorful, decorative patterns.^[7]

Apple’s use of translucent candy-colored plastics inspired similar designs in other consumer devices. For example, grilling machines, portable electronics, pencil sharpeners, video game consoles and peripherals (including the Nintendo 64, which was released in special edition ‘Funtastic’ colors) featured the translucent plastic. Apple’s introduction of the iPod, iBook G3 (Dual USB), and iMac G4, all featuring snowy white plastic, inspired similar designs in consumer electronic products. The color rollout also featured two distinctive ads: one called ‘Life Savers’ featured the Rolling Stones song “She’s a Rainbow” and an advertisement for the white version had the introduction of Cream’s “White Room” as its backing track.

Thanks for kind reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac

It is not that he invents new technologies. He refines existing ones.

Jobs himself acknowledged as much when asked during an interview whether he thought the iPhone represented a trend toward the convergence of computing and communications.

“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said Tuesday.

“I think of it as reinventing the phone.”

If the iPhone succeeds commercially, it will be new proof of Jobs’s power and his influence over the world’s consumer marketplace.

But while his design ideas have frequently been runaway successes, there have also been striking failures.

His Next computer, developed in the 1980s during his exile from Apple and originally intended for a college audience, was never able to break out of a small niche. In a similar fashion, the Macintosh G4 Cube, introduced in 2000, failed in the market despite being seen as an artistic breakthrough in computer industrial design.

When the Macintosh computer — also designed by a small group shrouded in secrecy — was introduced in January 1984, it was received with the same kind of hyperbole that greeted the iPhone this week. But a year later, the shortcomings of the first-generation Macintosh cost Jobs his position at the company he had founded with a high school friend, Stephen Wozniak, nine years earlier.

In light of the iPhone’s closed appliance-style design, it is worth recounting the Mac’s early history because of the potential parallel pitfalls that Jobs and his company may face.

Despite its high price of $2,495, the Macintosh initially sold briskly. But Jobs’s early predictions of huge sales failed to materialize.

The Mac’s stumble was in part because of pricing and in part because Jobs had intentionally restricted its expandability. Despite his assertion that a slow data connection would be sufficient, the gamble failed when Apple’s business stalled and Jobs was forced out of the company by the chief executive he had brought in, John Sculley.

In a similar fashion, Jobs is gambling that people will pay a premium ($499 or $599) for the iPhone and appears to have sought to limit its expandability.

The device is not currently compatible with the faster 3G wireless data networks that are driving cellular revenues to sharp gains in the United States (although several Apple insiders said the phone could be upgraded to 3G with software if Apple later decided to enable that feature).

Moreover, Jobs also appears to be restricting the potential for third- party software developers to write applications for the new handset, like ring tones and word processors.

To be sure, this strategy has not limited the success of the iPod, which has become the defining hand-held consumer appliance and fashion statement in the last half-decade. The world of digital cellular phones, however, is rapidly becoming a simple extension of the world of personal computing. The leading handset makers — Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Research In Motion, Samsung and Sony Ericsson — are all pushing in the direction of making their devices increasingly look like PCs you can put in your pocket.

Jobs is moving in that direction, too, but it appears that he wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors do.

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said.

“You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone model, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

There are still a number of intriguing questions about the design of the system, and analysts said the real design of the device would not be fully comprehended until the iPhone reached users’ hands in June.

Is it a phone, a PC or something entirely new? For instance, despite the phone’s having high-speed digital Wi- Fi capability built in, Jobs was coy about how that would be used.

Also, it is not clear how far Jobs will go in letting the device begin to replace the PC and Macintosh for users who have no need to sit in front of a desk or carry a portable computer.

It is possible that Jobs has found a way to step into the chasm between the two worlds and profitably fill it.

Thanks for kind reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/technology/12iht-apple.4182240.html

The iPhone is a line of Internet- and multimedia-enabled smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail), a portable media player (equivalent to a video iPod), and an Internet client (with e-mail, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity)—using the phone’s multi-touch screen to provide a virtual keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard.

The first-generation phone was quad-band GSM with EDGE; the second generation phone added UMTS with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA;^[16] the third generation adds support for 7.2 Mbps HSDPA downloading but remains limited to 384 Kbps uploading as Apple has not implemented the HSPA protocol.^[17]

Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,^[18] after months of rumors and speculation.^[19] The (retroactively labelled) original iPhone was introduced in the United States on June 29, 2007 before being marketed in Europe. Time magazine named it the Invention of the Year in 2007.^[20] Released July 11, 2008, the iPhone 3G supports faster 3G data speeds and assisted GPS.^[16] Apple released version 3.0 of the iPhone OS for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) on June 17, 2009.^[21] The iPhone 3GS has improved performance, a camera with higher resolution and video capability, and voice control.^[22] It was released in the U.S., Canada and six European countries on June 19, 2009,^[3] in Australia and Japan on June 26,^[23] and saw international release in July and August 2009.

History and availability

Development of the iPhone began with Apple CEO Steve Jobs‘ direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens.^[24] Apple created the device during a secretive and unprecedented collaboration with AT&T Mobility—Cingular Wireless at the time—at an estimated development cost of US$150 million over thirty months. Apple rejected the “design by committee” approach that had yielded the Motorola ROKR E1, a largely unsuccessful collaboration with Motorola. Instead, Cingular gave Apple the liberty to develop the iPhone’s hardware and software in-house.^[25][26]

Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007 in a keynote address. Apple was required to file for operating permits with the FCC, but since such filings are made available to the public, the announcement came months before the iPhone had received approval. The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, at 6:00 pm local time, while hundreds of customers lined up outside the stores nationwide.^[1][27] The original iPhone was made available in the UK, France, and Germany in November 2007, and Ireland and Austria in the spring of 2008.

On July 11, 2008, Apple released the iPhone 3G in twenty-two countries, including the original six.^[28] Apple has since released the iPhone 3G in upwards of eighty countries and territories.^[29] Apple announced the iPhone 3GS on June 8, 2009, along with plans to release it later in June, July, and August, starting with the U.S., Canada and major European countries on June 19.^[3] Many would-be users have objected to the iPhone’s cost,^[30] and 40% of users have household incomes over 100,000 USD.^[31] In an attempt to gain a wider market, Apple has retained the 8 GB iPhone 3G at a lower price point. This is the latest of several price reductions since the iPhone’s release in 2007; it now sells for one-sixth of the price of the original 8 GB iPhone when it first became available. In the U.S., it now costs $99, down from $599, although it requires a two-year contract and a SIM lock.

Apple sold 6.1 million original iPhone units over five quarters.^[32] The company sold 3.8 million iPhone 3G units in the second quarter of fiscal 2009, ending March 2009, and 12.6 million 3G and 3GS combined, totaling 33.75 million iPhones sold to date (Q4 2009).^[33] Sales in Q4 2008 surpassed temporarily those of RIM‘s BlackBerry sales of 5.2 million units, which made Apple briefly the third largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue, after Nokia and Samsung.^[34] Approximately 6.4 million iPhones are active in the U.S. alone.^[31] While iPhone sales constitute a significant portion of Apple’s revenue, some of this income is deferred.^[33]

The iPhone has garnered positive reviews from critics like David Pogue^[35] and Walter Mossberg.^[36][37] The iPhone attracts users of all ages.^[31]

Thanks for kind reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

Interested Story: The man behind Apple’s new iPhone

Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer‘s reference platform based on two ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.^[3] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.^[3] As development progressed, Apple continued to refine the software’s look and feel. Starting with the iPod Mini, the Chicago font was replaced with Espy Sans. Later iPods switched fonts again to Podium Sans—a font similar to Apple’s corporate font, Myriad. iPods with color displays then adopted some Mac OS X themes like Aqua progress bars, and brushed metal meant to evoke a combination lock. In 2007, Apple modified the iPod interface again with the introduction of the sixth-generation iPod Classic and third-generation iPod Nano by changing the font to Helvetica and, in most cases, splitting the screen in half by displaying the menus on the left and album artwork, photos, or videos on the right (whichever was appropriate for the selected item).

In September 2007, during a lawsuit with patent holding company Burst.com, Apple drew attention to a patent for a similar device that was developed in 1979. Kane Kramer patented the idea of a “plastic music box” in 1979, which he called the IXI.^[6] He was unable to secure funding to renew the US$ 120,000 worldwide patent, so it lapsed and Kramer never profited from his idea.^[6]

Thanks for kind reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

The heroine from Apple’s 1984 ad, set in a dystopian future modeled after the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, set the tone for the introduction of the Macintosh.

Steve Jobs began working on the Apple Lisa in 1978 but in 1982 he was pushed from the Lisa team due to infighting, and took over Jef Raskin’s low-cost-computer project, the Macintosh. A turf war broke out between Lisa’s “corporate shirts” and Jobs’ “pirates” over which product would ship first and save Apple. Lisa won the race in 1983 and became the first personal computer sold to the public with a GUI, but was a commercial failure due to its high price tag and limited software titles.^[33]

The first Macintosh, also known as the Macintosh 128K.

In 1984, Apple next launched the Macintosh. Its debut was announced by the now famous $1.5 million television commercial ’1984′. It was directed by Ridley Scott, aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984,^[34] and is now considered a watershed event for Apple’s success^[35] and a “masterpiece”.^[36][37]

The Macintosh initially sold well, but follow-up sales were not strong.^[38] This was because of the again high price tag, as well as limited software titles. The machine’s fortunes changed with the introduction of the LaserWriter, the first PostScript laser printer to be offered at a reasonable price point, and PageMaker, an early desktop publishing package. The Mac was particularly powerful in this market due to its advanced graphics capabilities, which were already necessarily built-in to create the intuitive Macintosh GUI. It has been suggested that the combination of these three products was responsible for the creation of the desktop publishing market.^[39]

In 1985, a power struggle developed between Jobs and CEO John Sculley, who had been hired two years prior.^[40] Apple’s board of directors sided with Sculley and Jobs was removed from his managerial duties.^[38] Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc. the same year.^[41]

Apple’s sustained growth during the early 1980s was in great part due to its leadership in the education sector, attributed to an implementation of the LOGO Programming Language by Logo Computer Systems Inc., (LCSI), for the Apple II platform. The success of Apple and LOGO in the education environment provided Apple with a broad base of loyal users around the world. The drive into education was accentuated in California by a momentous agreement concluded between Steve Jobs and Jim Baroux of LCSI, agreeing with the donation of one Apple II and one Apple LOGO software package to each public school in the state. The arrangement, eventually replicated in Texas, established a strong and pervasive presence for Apple in all schools throughout California, that ignited the acquisition of Apple IIs in schools across the country. The conquest of education became critical to Apple’s acceptance in the home, as parents supported children’s continued learning experience after school.

Thanks for kind reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#cite_note-11

Established in Cupertino, California on April 1, 1976 and incorporated January 3, 1977,^[7] the company was called Apple Computer, Inc. for its first 30 years, but dropped the word “Computer” on January 9, 2007^[8] to reflect the company’s ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market in addition to its traditional focus on personal computers.^[9] Apple has about 35,000 employees worldwide^[5] and had worldwide annual sales of US$42.91 billion in its fiscal year ending September 26, 2009.^[3] For reasons as various as its philosophy of comprehensive aesthetic design to its distinctive advertising campaigns, Apple has established a unique reputation in the consumer electronics industry. This includes a customer base that is devoted to the company and its brand, particularly in the United States.^[10]
Fortune magazine named Apple the most admired company in the United States in 2008 and in the world in 2009.^[11][12]

1976–1980: The early years

The Apple I, Apple’s first product. Sold as an assembled circuit board, it lacked basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case. The owner of this unit added a keyboard and a wooden case.

Apple was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne,^[1] to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Wozniak^[13][14] and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.^[15] The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips)—less than what is today considered a complete personal computer.^[16] The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66 ($2.5 thousand in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation.)^{[17][18][19][20][21][22]}

Apple was incorporated January 3, 1977^[7] without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Multi-millionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple.^[23][24]

The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color graphics and an open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.^[25]

The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first “killer app” of the business world—the VisiCalc
spreadsheet program.^[26] VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II—compatibility with the office.^[26] According to Brian Bagnall, Apple exaggerated its sales figures and was a distant third place to Commodore and Tandy until VisiCalc came along.^[27][28]

By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The Apple II was succeeded by the Apple III in May 1980 as the company competed with IBM and Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market.^[29]

Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares of apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.^[30] Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface (GUI), and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa.^[31]

In December 1980, Apple launched the initial public offering of its stock to the investing public.^{[citation needed]} When Apple went public, it generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly created more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history. Several venture capitalists cashed out, reaping billions in long-term capital gains.^{[citation needed]}

Thanks for kind reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#cite_note-11