iMac G5

Apple put the entire computer behind the screen, and every iMac since has done the same. August 2004. Logic board, PowerPC 970FX, optical drive and everything supporting them sat in a white polycarbonate slab two inches thick on an aluminum foot, so from the front there was a display and nothing else. The processor was the same 64-bit chip as the Power Mac G5, running 1.6 to 2.1GHz. That put workstation-class silicon in a consumer all-in-one for the first time, against Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 desktops that still needed a tower and a separate monitor on the desk. Mac OS X 10.3.5 shipped on it, and iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie were reaching ordinary households at exactly that moment, which made this the obvious machine to recommend for photographs and home video. Fitting a 64-bit desktop chip into that depth without exotic cooling impressed reviewers. Some early units ran hot, and certain manufacturing batches had capacitor failures serious enough that Apple set up a repair program. It sold extremely well during the iPod years, when a lot of Windows users were looking at Macs for the first time. The lamp iMac is the one people remember. This is the one Apple is still building.