The announcement and eventual success of the fruity-colored all-in-one desktops not only marked a return to the sheer simplicity of the original Mac, but marked Jobs's "second coming." (And, notably, his dismissal of the beige-box computer form factor that he had helped create 15 years earlier.)
"That was a huge hit for him, a massive design win," says Leander Kahney, author of the blog, Cult of Mac. "Until then, Apple had a product lineup with all these boring and bland beige plastic computers." With the iMac, Jobs threw all the rules of conventional computer design out the window.
