Congrats to the iMac on its 10th Anniversary

August 15 is the 10th anniversary of when the Apple iMac first shipped, and our cohorts at Macworld have a nice story up called "Eight Ways the iMac Changed Computing."

This prompted us here at PC World to look over our iMac coverage over the past decade.

First, we have our review of the original iMac in 1998. We delegated five pages to the little PC but grumpily headlined it: "iMac vs. Pentium: No Points for Good Looks."

Since this was still back in the days when PC users hadn't yet capitulated to the concept that Steve Jobs was a god, we picked the iMac apart.

The review harrumphed: "To see whether Apple would make believers out of us, we pitted the iMac against two Intel-based PCs: a pricier Pentium II-400 system and a Celeron-based machine that costs about $300 less than the iMac. The results: In its base $1299 configuration, the iMac finished last in each of our application tests. The system was nearly as easy to use as the company claims, but its poor performance means Apple failed in its core mission."

Take that, Apple!

Don't miss the System Comparison Chart at the end of the review, which shows the battle between the iMac's 32 MB of RAM against the mighty Packard Bell Multimedia 945's 64 MB of RAM (Packard Bell???).

Interview with the iMac's Designer

Also in 1998, our compatriots at IDG News Service scored an interview with Jonathan Ive, the principal designer of the iMac as well as the iPod and iPhone.

In it, Ive called the iMac the most important design achievement in his life so far and disclosed that earlier in his career, he had designed sinks and toilets.

Best quote from the story? Ive saying: "We could make a computer look like a grapefruit." I'd feel a little bit better about this interview, though, if it hadn't misspelled Ive's name all the way through as Ives.

Newer iMac Reviews

As the years went by, PC World got a little more friendly in its iMac reviews. In 2002, we called this version of the iMac "eye-catching" and a powerful home PC at a reasonable price ($1799). The headline on this review was: "iMac's Monitor Bends to User's Will."

And by 2004, the Apple style thing was growing on us. The iMac G5 impressed us as "another high-style revamp from Apple" but we were slightly dubious about the inability to adjust the monitor.

In the 21st century, PC World jumped firmly on the Apple train, in least in terms of reviewing products. (In the late 1990s and early years of this century, we would get complaints from our readers if we featured an Apple product in the magazine.)

But since 2006, we've had more fun with Macs in general as we can now put the Windows OS on them. And we knew things were changing when our former editor-in-chief, Harry McCracken, bought a MacBook laptop as his personal PC.

In 2006, we liked the 20-inch iMac G5, saying "This beautiful 20-inch wide-screen all-in-one combines entertaining multimedia features and a good price." It also bundled an iPod Shuffle-size remote control for the entertainment software.

And in one of our latest iMac reviews, that of the 24-inch version, we praised it as a striking system that will surely make you look twice.

Happy Anniversary, iMacs!