More ways to shop Visit an Apple Store, call 1800MYAPPLE, or find a reseller. It was, nevertheless, criticized for abandoning then current technological standards like the floppy drive and the Apple Desktop Bus connector in favor of the emerging USB standard. HistoryeditSteve Jobs reduced the companys large product lines immediately upon becoming Apples interim CEO in 1. Toward the end of the year, Apple trimmed its line of desktop Macs down from ten distinct models to four models of the Power Macintosh G3, which included the i. Macs immediate predecessor, an educational market exclusive called the Power Macintosh G3 All In One. Install Windows 7 On Imac G4' title='Install Windows 7 On Imac G4' />Having discontinued the consumer targeted Performa series, Apple needed a replacement for the Performas price point. The company announced the i. Mac on May 6, 1. 99. Home of the CustoMac Buyers Guide, iBoot, MultiBeast, UniBeast, and the worlds most helpful hackintosh mac osx support community. Mac G3 on August 1. Internally, the i. Mac was a combination of the Mac. NC project and Common Hardware Reference Platform CHRP. Although the promise of CHRP has never been fully realized, the work that Apple had done on CHRP significantly helped in the designing of the i. Mac. The original i. Mac used a Power. PC G3 Power. PC 7. Apples high end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds. It sold for US1,2. Mac OS 8. 1, which was soon upgraded to Mac OS 8. The i. Mac was continually updated after its initial release. Aside from increasing specifications processor speed, video RAM and hard disk capacity, Apple replaced Bondi Blue with new colors. Throughout its lifespan, the i. Mac was released in a total of thirteen colors. A later hardware update created a sleeker design. This second generation i. Mac featured a slot loading optical drive, Fire. Wire, fanless operation through free convection cooling, a slightly updated shape, and the option of Air. Portwireless networking. Apple continued to sell this line of i. Macs until March 2. Mac OS 9 operating system. USB and Fire. Wire support, and support for dial up, Ethernet, and wireless networking via 8. Bluetooth soon became standard across Apples entire product line. The addition of high speed Fire. Wire corrected the deficiencies of the earlier i. Macs. The i. Mac CRT model, now targeted at the education market, was renamed the i. Mac G3, and kept in production alongside its i. Mac G4 successor until the e. Mac was released. As Apple continued to release new versions of its computers, the term i. Mac continued to be used to refer to machines in its consumer desktop line. The thirteen flavors of the i. Mac G3. The i. Mac was dramatically different from any previous mainstream computer. It was made of translucent Bondi Blue colored plastic, and was egg shaped around a 1. CRT display. The case included a handle, and the peripheral connectors were hidden behind a door on the right hand side of the machine. Dual headphone jacks in the front complemented the built in stereo speakers. Sir Jonathan Ive, currently Chief Design Officer at Apple, is credited with the industrial design. Its unique shape and color options helped ingrain itself into late 1. The i. Mac was the first computer to exclusively offer USB ports as standard,2 including as the connector for its new keyboard and mouse,3 thus abandoning previous Macintosh peripheral connections, such as the ADB, SCSI and Geo. Port serial ports. A further radical step was to abandon the 3 inch floppy disk drive which had been present in every Macintosh since the first in 1. Apple argued that recordable CDs, the Internet, and office networks were quickly making diskettes obsolete, however, Apples omission generated controversy. Black Screen Of Death Windows 8 Fix. At the time of i. Macs introduction, third party manufacturers offered external USB floppy disk drives, often in translucent plastic to match the i. Macs enclosure. Apple had initially announced the internal modem in the i. Mac would operate at only 3. Components such as the front mounted Ir. DA port and the tray loading CD ROM drive were borrowed from the Apple laptops. Although the i. Mac did not officially have an expansion slot, the first versions had a slot dubbed the mezzanine slot. It was only for internal use by Apple, although a few third party expansion cards were released for it, such as a Voodoo II video card upgrade from 3dfx and SCSISCSI TV tuner cards i. Pro. RAID and i. Pro. RAID TV from the German company Formac. The mezzanine slot was removed from later i. Macs, though according to an article in the German computer magazine ct, the socket can be retrofitted on revision C i. Macs. citation neededThe keyboard and mouse were redesigned for the i. Mac with translucent plastics and a Bondi Blue trim. The Apple USB Keyboard was smaller than Apples previous keyboards, with white characters on black keys, both features that attracted debate. The Apple USB Mouse was mechanical, of a round, hockey puck design which was derided as being unnecessarily difficult for users with larger hands. Apple continued shipping the round mouse, adding a divot to the button in later versions so that users could distinguish proper orientation by feel. Eventually, a new capsule shaped optical mouse, known as the Apple Mouse formerly Apple Pro Mouse, replaced the round mouse across all of Apples hardware offerings. Apple updated the i. Mac over time to feature different colors. January 1. 99. 9 saw the launch of Blueberry, Grape, Tangerine, Lime and Strawberry. Graphite was shortly thereafter made available as a Special Edition colour. The five fruit colours were later replaced with Ruby, Sage, Indigo and Snow. Ruby and Sage were later replaced by two limited edition designs, Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power patterns. The final lineup consisted uniquely of Indigo, Snow and Graphite, later limited to Snow only before being discontinued. A closer look at the i. Mac G3. Revision historyeditTray loading modeleditThe first iteration of the i. Mac G3 featured a 1. CRT display, 2. 33 MHz processor, ATI Rage IIc graphics, 4 GB hard drive, tray loading CD ROM drive, two USB ports, a 5. Modem, built in Ethernet, infrared port, built in stereo speakers, and two headphone ports. The CPU and memory were located on the same Daughter Card, which installed directly onto the motherboard. It came exclusively in a translucent Bondi Blue plastic, and was known as Revision A. On October 1. 7, the i. Mac was updated with ATI Rage Pro graphics. This updated Revision B model maintained its predecessors original price of 1. The i. Mac had its infrared and mezzanine features removed with the introduction of the Revision C model on January 5, 1. US1. 19. 9. Hard drive capacity increased and a faster processor was added. The Bondi Blue color was discontinued and replaced by five new colors Strawberry, Blueberry, Lime, Grape, and Tangerine. A final update, Revision D, was released on April 1. In some cases, it is possible to interchange parts between different revisions or install third party internal parts. For example, the i. Mac G3 in Bondi Blue shown below had its motherboard replaced with one from a 2. MHz Grape model, while the CD ROM drive was replaced with a Compact. Flashmemory card reader that is running Mac OS X Tiger. Modeli. Mac 1i. Mac Revision B 2i. Mac 2. 66 MHz3i. Mac 3. MHz4Picture. Release date. August 1. January 5, 1. April 1. 5, 1. 99. CodenameColumbus, Elroy, Tailgate, C1Life SaversModel identifieri. Mac,1. Colors Processor. MHz. 26. 6 MHz. 33.