iMac G3

In May 1998, Steve Jobs unveiled a computer that didn't look like any machine before it. Newly returned to Apple, Jobs had cost-cut the company back to profitability and slashed its confusing lineup down to a simple four-product grid — but Apple still needed something compelling to sell. Jony Ive's design team delivered it: a teardrop-shaped all-in-one wrapped in translucent "Bondi Blue" plastic, a flat rejection of the beige-box era. It dumped the floppy drive for CD-ROM and USB — faster and cheaper than Apple's old proprietary connectors, and controversial precisely because it was ahead of everyone. It went on sale August 15, 1998, looking like it had arrived from tomorrow.

In January 1999 the line burst into five candy colors — blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape, and lime — and that October the iMac DV arrived for the emerging digital-video wave, bundled with iMovie. This is the iMac a generation actually remembers: rows of colorful gumdrops in the school computer lab, the machine you typed your first reports into, friendly in a way computers had simply never been.

Apple discontinued the G3 in March 2003, but its fingerprints were everywhere by then — translucent colored plastic had become the de facto design language of the era's gadgets. More than any spec, that was its legacy: it proved a computer could be playful and personal and still get the job done.