Introduced in the late summer of 1998, the original iMac
was an instant success, selling over 300,000 units in its
first few months of availability. Not only was it snatched
up by diehard Mac users, but Wintel converts and first time
computer users flocked in droves to to get their hands on
an iMac. The press, other than a few naysayers, fell all over
themselves in praise of this innovative product from Apple.
The computer was exceptionally easy to set up and connect
to the Internet. Reviewers praised both the design and low
cost of the machine calling the iMac a great value.
In large part it was the iMac that revived Apples fortunes,
from what had been a near death experience for the company.
The computer was completely aimed at the consumer and education
markets. It has no PCI expansion slots, no free drive bays
and limited graphics upgradability. There is also no SCSI
port or other high-speed transfer protocol. The machine uses
hot-swappable USB ports (of which there are two on the machine)
for connecting keyboard, mice or other external devices. This
use of USB was a first for a Mac and heralded an explosion
of USB capable devices.
The original iMac sports a G3/233 processor with 512K of
backside cache. It has 2MB of VRAM giving you thousands of
colors at 1,024 x 768 pixels. You can add an additional 4MB
allowing you to have millions of colors at the highest resolutions.
It is capable of 2D & 3D acceleration courtesy of a ATI
Rage IIc graphics chip.
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The machine came with an anemic 32MB of Ram installed, which
could be expanded to 128MB at the time of its release (see
"Facts At A Glance" notes). It has a fast 4GB hard
drive, but came without a floppy drive. The lack of a floppy
drive generated a lot of criticism but the market quickly
adjusted and provided other methods for getting data in and
out of the iMac. The CD-ROM drive is 24X and is rather noisy
in operation. It is the same CD drive found in the PowerBooks
of the time, and does not have a powered drawer. It seems
kind of fragile for school use.
Some complaints were raised by traditionalist about the compact
keyboard and the non-standard round mouse. However many new
users liked both.
On the front of the machine is a infrared port, from which
you can beam information to/from other infrared capable devices,
such as PowerBooks, digital cameras etc. The machine has a
built-in 56K modem and on-board 10/100 Base-T Ethernet.
In a few short months Apple came out with a revision "B"
of the iMac. Bowing to the complaints of gamers, this revision
had 6MB of VRAM and a better graphics accelerator - the ATI
Rage Pro Turbo - but otherwise remained unchanged.
Below you will find the MacBench 5.0 results for all of the
current processor upgrades available for this machine. The
bar graphs below express results as a percentage of improvement
over the base machine, which receives a score of 100%. Further
down the page you will find a table with the actual MacBench
score.
Scores marked in red were provided by the manufacturer and
scores marked in blue were independently verified by MacSpeedZone
Copyright 1996-2007 by Cider Press Publishing LLC all rights reserved.
MacSpeedZone is not authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple
Computer. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iPod, iBook, iMac, eMac, and
PowerBook are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Additional
company
and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby
acknowledged.
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