GoKawiil“I’m pleased to report to you that Apple’s back on track.” It was May of 1998, and Steve Jobs was about 10 months into his second stint leading the company he’d cofounded more than two decades earlier. (It was also a bit more than a decade after that company forced him out.) Jobs took the stage at the annual Macworld conference in a white shirt and dark jacket, and told the audience the Apple team had been working harder than ever to finish up a new computer, one designed with the internet in mind. It was called iMac. “We think iMac’s going to be a really big deal,” he told the audience. He was right.
Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs introduces the five new colors of the i-mac computer Tuesday at MacWorld in San Francisco January 05, 1998 Photo by John Green/Media News Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images
When Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he had taken on a company in a sort of product disarray. Apple was making a lot of Macs, with no obvious rhyme or reason to the lineup; it was making, and not really selling, printers; it was trying to sell servers to businesses; it was building the Newton, a handheld device with a stylus and some big ideas about handwriting recognition. Apple made products called Quadra and StyleWriter and AudioVision and Workgroup Server and Pippin. It had certainly made a lot of very good computers, and with the PowerBook in particular, even some very innovative ones. But the company was struggling, and it was flailing.
Jobs had not been shy about this fact. “The products suck!” he’d said not long after retaking an active role in the company, according to a 2006 Businessweek story. “There’s no sex in them anymore!” Even while he wasn’t working at the company, when he was theoretically busy with Pixar and NeXT, he had spent years giving interviews about how Apple needed more innovation, about how he’d do things differently. “I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple,” he told Fortune in 1995. “I can’t say any more than that it’s the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.”
MA - JULY 30: A billboard for the Apple Newton July 30, 1993. Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Fifth grade students at Mantua Elementary in Fairfax,Va. are using Apple e-mate laptops for most of their school work. The computers are small and nearly indestructable. March21st, 1998. Photo by Susan Biddle/The The Washington Post via Getty Images
Whether that ’95 plan is what Jobs went on to execute, we’ll never know. But Jobs began rescuing Apple almost immediately, rehabbing the company’s culture and kicking off a decade of almost nonstop product wins that eventually led to maybe the most lucrative and influential gadget of all time. Early on, Jobs drew up the now-famous four-quadrant grid, saying all Apple needed was a portable and a desktop product for consumers and for pros. He remade Apple’s corporate structure and gave the design team an unprecedented amount of control over how devices would look and work. (Much of it with the help of a design executive named Jony Ive.) The new Apple decided to take a new look at what computers might be, starting with a device that was colorful, shapely, translucent, and unrecognizable next to the beige boxes of parts on shelves everywhere.
Apple sold 800,000 iMacs in the five months after it hit stores in August of 1998, making it the best-selling computer in the United States at the time. That was all despite — or maybe because of — the fact that it was nothing like the other PCs of the era. It was an all-in-one device in a market filled with modular, upgradeable machines. It even ditched all the ports people actually used in favor of a newish standard called USB. Eschewing expansion had been a problem for the original Macintosh, but the iMac found a buying public desperate for a computer that didn’t take an advanced degree to figure out.
Jonathan Ive, left, Apple Computer’s vice president of design, and Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s senior vice president of engineering, posing behind five iMac personal computers at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California March 19, 1999. Photo by AP Photo/Susan Ragan An inflatable rendition of an iMac, Apple Computer’s new low-priced home computer, stands on Prague’s fashionable Wenceslas Square to announce the arrival of the iMac in the Czech Republic, where it sells for kc49,000 (US$1,630) October 16, 1998. Apple’s recently-released third-quarter earnings outdid analysts” predictions and sent the company’s stock price up. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Jobs would later say the company had been 90 days from insolvency when he took it over, but its fortune appeared to turn around almost as soon as the iMac launched. And that was just the beginning. Starting with the iMac, Jobs and Apple went on one of the all-time hot streaks in business history, churning out hit products, cultural revolutions, and game-changing new ideas about the future. From that May day in 1998 to the January Macworld in 2007 when Jobs revealed the iPhone — a time you might call the iDecade — Apple was on a product tear the likes of which we’ve never seen before or since.
The summer after the iMac announcement, in 1999, Jobs debuted another remarkable new computer: the iBook. It borrowed much of the colorful iMac design, only in a rounded clamshell case that promised more portability than any other laptop ever. It shipped with built-in wireless networking, which was so unbelievable at the time that Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, sent a file from his iBook to another computer while literally leaping off an elevated stage. Jobs also swiped a hula hoop over the iBook, lest anyone think there was just a really long wire somewhere. The bit worked, and the iBook also became one of the best-selling computers in its class.
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