Macworld Expo announcement.
The new iMac announced at Macworld 2002 was the “iLamp” — which is what people called it before Apple gave it the official name. Hemispherical white base. Articulated arm. 15-inch LCD floating at whatever angle you wanted.
I watched the announcement from my home office and wrote about it in my journal. The floating display was right. The arm was clever. The base contained everything — the computer, the power supply, the drive — in a half-sphere that sat on the desk and generated almost no footprint.
I’m an Apple person. I have been since the early 1980s. The 2002 iMac was the year Apple committed fully to the flat display — the CRT era was over — and the design language was unmistakable.
I didn’t buy that particular iMac. I was already juggling too many computers. But I watched the announcement carefully, as I watch all of them, and wrote down what it meant.
Predicting technology turns is something I’ve been trying to do since I was a teenager reading about the personal computer revolution from El Centro. Sometimes I’m right. I thought someone would bring back the International Scout twenty-five years before Scout Motors announced it. I also thought the Pinzgauer would get a mass-market reissue, and that hasn’t happened yet.