iMac G4 (Lamp)

A hemispherical dome with a flat LCD panel mounted on a chrome arm, shown in January 2002 and resembling nothing else anybody sold. Everyone called it the lamp, or the sunflower, and the Luxo Jr. comparison was obvious enough that Apple never had to make it. Jony Ive's team designed it after the Cube failed, which gives you some idea of the confidence in the building at the time. The arm was not decoration. It tilted, swiveled and pivoted well enough that you could set screen height and angle properly, which no other flat panel of the period allowed, and Apple's advertising leaned on it heavily. Inside was a G4 from 700MHz at launch to 1.25GHz later. Pentium 4 desktops posted bigger clock numbers and came in beige boxes with a separate monitor and a tangle of cables. Mac OS X 10.1.2 shipped on it, at exactly the moment Apple needed people to leave Mac OS 9 behind, and a friendly machine made an unfamiliar operating system easier to accept. Nothing has used the dome and arm since. The idea underneath, that a computer can be a sculpture you keep on a desk, went into the iMac G5 and everything after it.