iMac G3 (Slot-Loading)

Apple redesigned the iMac's insides in October 1999 and left the idea alone. The visible change was the optical drive. A slot replaced the tray, which tidied the front of the machine and felt better to use, and that is roughly the level of ambition here. Underneath, more had moved. G3 clocks eventually ran from 350 all the way to 700MHz across an unusually long production life, graphics improved, and RAM and storage ceilings rose enough to keep the design current into the Mac OS X years. The colors kept coming. Graphite, further fruit variations, then Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power, which are the two everyone remembers and the two nobody bought. New World ROM meant these ran Mac OS X natively, so slot-loading iMacs stayed in schools and homes for years after faster G4 machines had arrived, and a great many people met Apple's modern operating system on one. By this point nobody was asking whether the iMac worked. The question had become how long Apple could keep iterating on it, and the answer turned out to be most of a decade.