The iMac was the first complete machine that was the result
of the "2nd Coming of Jobs" era. Its unique all-in-one futuristic
design, speedy processor, low price and excellent marketing
propelled it to become one of the best selling computers of
its time. The revision C version of the iMac was released
at the January 1999 Macworld in San Francisco, a short 6 months
after the initial release of the original iMac. As of the
release of version C, Apple had sold over 800,000 units of
previous iMac versions. According to Apple 40% of purchasers
were first time computer purchasers and Wintel converts.
The revision C iMac has a few modest technological improvements
over the previous revision. There is a small processor performance
boost (from 233Mhz to 266Mhz), a larger hard drive (6GB instead
of 4) and the machine came with OS 8.5.1 installed which fixed
some bugs in the original release of 8.5. The biggest change
with revision C was in its looks. The iMac came in 5 Lifesaver
colors; strawberry, lime, tangerine, grape and blueberry.
In addition Apple dropped the price on the revision C iMacs
8% from the price for the previous version.
Apple showed, with the iMac, that it had really got on the
ball again in marketing and generating interest in its products.
The changes to the C version are really rather modest in terms
of technology, but when combined with the cosmetic changes,
the C versions made quite a big splash. Apple's efforts showed
just the type of care and nurturing of its product line that
had been woefully missing in previous years.
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The machine sports a G3/266 processor with 512K of backside
cache running at 133MHZ. It came with an anemic 32MB of Ram
installed, which could be expanded to 128MB at the time of
its release (see "Facts At A Glance"). The CD-ROM
drive is 24X and is rather noisy in operation. It is the same
CD drive found in the PowerBooks of the time, and does not
have a powered drawer. It is kind of fragile for school use.
As with previous iMacs there is no floppy drive or high-speed
SCSI port for connecting external drives. Instead the iMac
has two 12Mbps hot-pluggable USB ports and built in high speed
10/100BASE-T Ethernet. Also included, was an internal 56Kbps
modem.
Other changes that occurred with this revision of the iMac,
was the removal of the proprietary mezzanine slot and, alas,
the infrared port.
Geared for the consumer , school and business market the
machine is capable of very little upgradability and is more
appropriate for general computer use. The machine came with
a substantial software bundle.
Some complaints were raised by traditionalist about the compact
keyboard and the non-standard round mouse. However many new
users liked both.
Below you will find the MacBench 5.0 results for all of the
current processor upgrades available for this machine. The
bar graphs below express results as a percentage of improvement
over the base machine, which receives a score of 100%. Further
down the page you will find a table with the actual MacBench
score.
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