What shape was Apple in when the iMac was designed?
Apple agreed to buy NeXT in December 1996 and closed the deal in February 1997, paying about $429 million for the operating system that became Mac OS X and, in practice, for Steve Jobs. Jobs came back as an advisor and by July 1997 was running the company as interim CEO.
What he found was a catalog nobody could navigate. Performas, Power Macintoshes and Quadras sat side by side in the same stores, many of them separated only by a configuration detail. Jobs cut the line down to a four box grid drawn on a whiteboard: consumer and professional across the top, desktop and portable down the side. The iMac was the consumer desktop box, and it had to sell to people who had never owned a computer.
The view from outside was blunt. Asked at the Gartner Symposium on October 6, 1997 what he would do if he ran Apple, Michael Dell said he would "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Apple had lost $1.045 billion in fiscal 1997 and had not posted a profitable year since 1995. Whether the company was ever really 90 days from bankruptcy in 1997 is still argued, but almost nobody expected a consumer desktop to fix it.
Why did Apple ship the iMac G3 with no floppy drive?
The iMac G3 was announced on May 6, 1998 and reached stores on August 15, 1998 at $1,299. It carried a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 15 inch CRT, a tray loading CD-ROM drive, a 56k modem, an Ethernet port, and no 3.5 inch floppy drive.
That last omission was the story for most of 1998. The floppy had been the way ordinary people moved a file from one machine to another since the mid 1980s, and Apple was cutting it from the one product aimed squarely at first time buyers. Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe wrote in 1998 that "The iMac is clean, elegant, floppy-free and doomed."
The counterargument from Jobs was capacity. A floppy held 1.44MB, which was already too small for the files people were making, and the modem and Ethernet port were meant to take over the job. He was early rather than wrong. Most American households in 1998 were on dial-up if they were online at all, and third party USB floppy drives sold as an iMac accessory for the next few years. The format itself outlived the argument, and floppy disks are still made in small numbers for industrial buyers.
How did the iMac push the whole industry onto USB?
The other deletion mattered more in the long run. The iMac shipped with two USB ports and nothing else for peripherals: no ADB, the Apple connector every Mac keyboard had used since 1986, no SCSI, no serial port, no parallel port.
USB had been published as an open standard in 1996 by a group that included Compaq, Intel, IBM, Microsoft and NEC. Two years later almost nobody was using it. PC makers fitted USB ports and kept every legacy port beside them, so a printer or scanner company had no reason to switch and buyers had no reason to demand it. The standard sat in a stalemate that the industry could not break on its own.
Apple broke it by removing the alternative. If you wanted to sell a keyboard, a mouse, a printer, a scanner or a drive to an iMac owner in 1999, it had to speak USB. Because USB belonged to a consortium rather than to Apple, those same devices worked on Windows machines as well, so the peripheral aisle converted for everyone at once. It is the clearest case in the era of one company forcing a standard that seven had failed to popularize.
How quickly did the iMac change Apple's balance sheet?
Fast. Apple shipped 278,000 iMacs in the first six weeks, a figure The Register reported in October 1998 as the strongest launch of any Mac to that point. The machine was among the best selling desktops in American retail that autumn, and a large share of the buyers were people who had never owned a computer or were leaving Windows.
The fiscal year carried the rest of the story. Apple earned $309 million in the twelve months to September 1998, its first profitable year since 1995, against a $1.045 billion loss the year before. CNN reported the result on October 14, 1998 and credited the iMac for it.
The iMac was not the only reason. Before a single unit shipped, Jobs had killed most of the product line, ended the Macintosh clone program, cut inventory hard and rebuilt distribution. What the iMac added was the part that restructuring cannot supply: a product people wanted, at a price they would pay, that made Apple worth arguing about again. Roughly six million iMac G3s sold before the line ended.
Is the iMac G3 still made in 2026?
No. Apple stopped selling the iMac G3 in March 2003, and by the end it stayed on the price list mainly for buyers who still needed Mac OS 9. The flat panel iMac G4 had already replaced it as the mainstream model in January 2002.
The name went nowhere. Apple still sells an iMac in 2026: a 24 inch all in one built around the M4 chip, which moved from $1,299 to $1,499 in the United States when Apple raised prices across the Mac and iPad lines in June 2026. Apple blamed a jump in memory and storage component costs.
The habits outlived the hardware. Dropping the floppy drive in 1998 was the first run of a pattern Apple repeated with the optical drive, the 30 pin dock connector and the headphone jack, and the same bet on how a product feels rather than what it lists on a spec sheet produced the iPod three years later. Translucent colored plastic escaped computing entirely for a while and turned up on grills, staplers and alarm clocks.
Where to find one today
The iMac G3 is one of the easier vintage machines to buy, because Apple sold millions of them and most owners kept them. Working units in the common colors generally list around $140 to $180 in 2026, with the Bondi Blue revision A machines and the 2001 Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian cases asking more. Shipping is the risk: it is a heavy CRT inside a plastic shell, and the carry handle on top tempts sellers to underpack it. Vintage sellers on Etsy are the practical route, and it is worth paying for a complete unit with the original keyboard and puck mouse.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the iMac really save Apple?
The iMac G3 was the central product in Apple's 1998 turnaround. Apple lost $1.045 billion in fiscal 1997 and earned $309 million in fiscal 1998, its first profitable year since 1995, with 278,000 iMacs shipped in the six weeks after the August 15, 1998 launch. The cuts Steve Jobs made to Apple's product line and distribution did the rest of the work.
How much did the iMac G3 cost in 1998?
The original Bondi Blue iMac G3 went on sale in the United States on August 15, 1998 at $1,299, with a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 15 inch CRT and no floppy drive. Apple sold roughly six million iMac G3s before ending the line in March 2003.
Who designed the iMac G3?
Jonathan Ive led the design of the iMac G3 as head of Apple's Industrial Design Group. Ive had worked at Apple since 1992 and took over the design group in 1996, but only gained direct authority over how Apple products looked after Steve Jobs returned in 1997. The translucent Bondi Blue case went on sale on August 15, 1998.