The arrival of the iMac in 1998 signaled more than a renaissance for Apple; it sparked a widespread industrial design revolution. Apple’s teardrop-shaped machine gained a large part of its appeal from its translucent Bondi blue plastic housing, which dramatically set the iMac apart from a sea of beige-boxed PCs.
Not long after the iMac’s launch, the rest of the world hitched a ride on Apple’s design coattails. A horde of translucent multicolored plastic goods flooded nearly every consumer market to the extent that, not just computers, but staplers, paper towel dispensers, and kitchen appliances assumed the mantle of transparency for the sake of coolness.
What few realize about the birth of Apple’s translucent industrial design is that it didn’t start with the iMac. At least five Apple products prior to the iMac incorporated translucent plastics. In fact, the trend originated within Apple some two years before the launch of the iMac and almost a year before Steve Jobs returned to the company.
Considering the seismic impact of the iMac on the rest of the industrial design world, it’s worth investigating the origins of this distinctive design feature within Apple itself. There’s no better way to do that than by examining the first Apple products to incorporate translucent design elements.
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