iMac

The original iMac G3, unveiled in Bondi Blue in August 1998, is the machine that saved Apple. Steve Jobs had just returned to the company, and this translucent, egg-shaped all-in-one — with USB ports instead of legacy connectors, and eventually five different fruit colors — turned Apple from a company written off by the tech press into a design leader almost overnight.

Every iMac since has followed the same basic idea: put the whole computer behind the display and make the result something you'd actually want sitting on a desk. The G4's articulated 'lamp' arm, the G5's flat-panel silhouette, and the current Apple Silicon iMac's candy-colored aluminum are different answers to that same brief, two and a half decades apart.