What Happened to the iMac G3? Why the iMac G3 Disappeared

iMac G3 sales were already falling in 2000, more than a year before Apple showed the flat-screen model that replaced it. A prettier computer is not what made Apple's translucent machine disappear. Unveiled in May 1998 at $1,299, the Bondi Blue iMac shipped 278,000 units in its first six weeks, and nearly three in ten early buyers had never owned a computer. Apple sold it as the easiest way onto the internet. By December 2000, dealers held about eleven weeks of unsold Macs, Apple had been slow to add a CD burner, and iMac shipments fell 45% in fiscal 2001. Inside this video: • Why did Steve Jobs overrule his engineers on the design? • What did Apple's own survey say buyers really wanted? • How did a missing CD burner hurt Apple's best-selling computer? • Why did Apple launch a new tube computer, the eMac, 112 days after calling the tube finished? If the iMac was the first computer in your house, you remember lifting it out of the box by the handle on top. Tell us which color you chose. It proves a rule: a computer sold for one job needs new buyers for that job every year. Subscribe for careful histories of the machines families carried home, and of the companies that made them.