Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

~ the obit ~

the twentieth anniversary mac was not a computer i could have seen in ankara in '97. it was 7,499 dollars at launch and shipped through a concierge service in the us, with a person in a tie delivering it to your door and installing it. nothing about that pipeline reached turkey, and nothing about my house in '97 had any room for a mac in it either way.

i was 13 that year, on a pentium pc at home and not yet online. the apple world reached me later through ports of mac magazines that came into the hands of friends who cared about that stuff. the tam was the kind of object that would have been a poster image in those magazines, not a thing you ever expected to plug in.

the case itself was the point. apple shipped a slim vertical chassis with a 12.1 inch active-matrix lcd, in the year other macs still came in beige plastic boxes with crt monitors stuck on top. the keyboard had a leather palm rest and a detachable trackpad that lived above the function row. a separate base unit on the floor held the power supply and a bose subwoofer connected by an umbilical cable. the whole thing was meant to look like a piece of furniture rather than a computer.

the spec list was middling for the price. inside sat a powerpc 603ev clocked at 250 mhz, with 32 mb of ram on top of a 2 gb hard drive. the cd-rom slot was vertical and loaded sideways. an fm radio and a tv tuner came in the same module the performa line used at the time. you were paying for the case and the soundbar more than for the silicon.

the launch price was $7,499 with concierge delivery. the same machine landed at $3,500 by mid-run and at $1,995 in the firesale. customers who paid full price and complained got a free powerbook as compensation. apple discontinued the line on 14 march '98, eleven months and twenty-two days after retail launch. 11,601 of the 12,000 planned units had shipped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it tried to be ~

the tam was apple's 20th-birthday gift to itself, signed off when gil amelio was ceo and aimed at the executive market apple had never reliably served. the brief was a halo product (a high-margin showpiece that would prove apple still made desire-objects rather than commodity beige boxes). hartmut esslinger's frog design house had set the apple design direction in the '80s, jony ive was the in-house designer who actually drew the final case.

the concierge delivery was the part the press latched onto. for the launch price you got a real human in a black car who came to your home or office. that person assembled the machine and set up the internet connection, then handed you a phone number to call if anything went wrong. apple was trying to sell the experience of owning a tam, not just the hardware. very few people bought into that.

~ the price collapse ~

by mid '97 apple had already cut the price to roughly $3,500. that was the first sign the sticker had been a fiction. by the end of the same year the price was at $1,995 and apple was clearing out the production run rather than selling against demand. the customers who had paid $7,499 in march now had a furniture-grade flagship that any walk-in could buy for a quarter of what they had paid.

the powerbook compensation deal was apple's way of swallowing the complaint. the people who took the deal kept the tam and got a high-end laptop on top. apple did not publicly disclose how many of those swaps it honored. the tam buyers were a small enough group that the goodwill cost was manageable.

~ what got buried with it ~

steve jobs came back to apple in september '97 with a long list of products he wanted killed, the tam was already on borrowed time when he arrived. jobs reportedly disliked the design for being too ornamental and too disconnected from the rest of the line. the discontinuation in march '98 happened during the same housecleaning that ended the clone-mac program and a half-dozen performa skus.

the part of the tam that survived is the flat-panel all-in-one shape. the imac g4 in 2002 with its lcd on a swinging arm, then the imac g5 the year after with the computer behind the panel, ran in the lineage the tam had pointed at. the bose base unit did not survive. neither did the leather palm rest. the lcd-in-front-of-the-user idea is the thing apple still ships as the imac in 2026.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »