Issue 1194 69
Craig Grannellis
a writer, designer,
occasional musician
and permanent
loudmouth. He’s
owned Macs since
1996, when Apple was
facingcertain doom,
and is therefore
pleasantly surprised
by its current success.
FindCraigon Twitter
at@craiggrannellMac
A Bit Of A
Character
I
was recently tasked with
writing a feature fora
magazine thatrealised Apple
was about to hit 40. The idea
was to trawl through the
company’s history and talk about
the best bits. Naturally, I spenta
chunk of time onWikipedia,
exploring a timeline of hardware,
from the original Apple I, right
through to the mostrecent
versions of the Mac, iPhone and
Apple TV.
As often happens when I look
through pictures of old Apple
hardware, it was the iMac G4
that really stood out. Iremember
that machine when it was first
released and how it made
everything Apple had previously
created look stuffy and boring by
comparison – including the
original iMac. Dispensing with the
older iMac’s fishbowl stylings
(which were a limitation
somewhat enforced by a CRT
display), therevamped iMac had
more in common with Luxo Jr.,
the excitable bouncing lamp in
Pixar’s classic animation.
Whereas the original iMac had
been a mainstream home
computer with at least some
style, here was one with
personality. The screen was akin
to a face, attached to a metal
neck that could be moved in any
direction. The unit was light,
smart and fun, although the
design was not best suited to
the 20" version, which looked
top-heavy.
It’s probably that final
incarnation of the iMac G4 that
explains why the design went no
further. Desktop all-in-ones
continued to rampage onwards–bigger was better as far as the
display went, and everything else
had to be hidden from view.
Accordingly, the model’s
successor – the imaginatively
titled iMac G5 – becamea
flatscreen with a chin, supported
by a sleek L-shaped aluminium
stand. It could tilt a bit, but short
of nailing the thing to a sliding
wall mount, the iMac’s ‘face’ had
lost its freedom.
Moreover, the iMac had also
lost its personality and would
never get it back. Every new
release in the line has merely
bowed to Apple’s ongoing
infatuation with minimalism and
thinness.You get the feeling the
company won’t be entirely
satisfied until it’sreleased an
iMac you can’t see side-on, and
which gives you a nasty paper
cut whenever you try to move
the screen.
Of course, personality isn’t at
the top of my list when it comes
to home computing. I’m perfectly
happy with my nice-but-dull
iMac, which has to date been
quitereliable, quiet and
unassuming, sitting on a desk like
a sterile lump of metal and glass.
But every now and again, I do
get the temptation to bung ‘iMacG4’ into an eBay search to see
what’s out there. I did for a while
think an old iMac G4 could
somehow be a useful addition to
the office. Myreasoning was that
it could perhaps be a telly ora
jukebox. Then I came to my
senses andrealised that with the
ancient version of OS X it would
be saddled with, this quirky iMac
would just be another piece of
dead kit, barely used and taking
up space.
So my officeremainsresigned
to boring Apple kit, with every
new piece of hardware offering
more capabilities but less
character than its predecessor.
The logical conclusion is that
computers will essentially be
invisible within a few generations,
anything imaginative going on
inside the display rather than with
the hardware’s design. This isa
crying shame and the price of
progress, but it does raise one
question: how bored will Apple's
chief design officer, Jony Ive, be
in a few years if his job mostly
entails drawingrectangles rather
than truly thinking different?jMacs used to have a sense of fun,
before they became sterile rectangles
of glass and metalOnce, Macs had personality, but Craig Grannell reckons
that’s been stripped away in favour of minimalismIssue14 04 69