March 20, 1997: Anniversary Mac Introduced
The traditional gift for a twentieth anniversary is china. There were no plates, cups or saucers when the Mac turned twenty. Instead, Apple treated Mac fans to the wildly expensive Mac 20th Anniversary Edition.
The special Mac (only 12,000 were made) featured a lot of firsts for Apple. It was the first desktop with a flat screen, the first desktop power PC departure from the beige box paradigm, first vertical CD drive, and the only desktop Mac to feature an integrated track pad.
Since only 12,000 of the machines were made and since they cost a whopping $7,499, most folks never saw one in person. Fortunately, a great many people got an eyeball full of the Anniversary Mac when they watched the hit series Seinfeld. Break out the champagne because the Twentieth Anniversary Mac was introduced March 20, in 1997.
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The computer was also featured as Alfred’s personal computer in the absolutely atrocious Batman and Robin.
Hey Mort, who used one in Seinfeld? Was it a single ep?
I bought a 20th Anniversary Mac for $1999 in 1998, when Apple cleared out its remaining stock (they didn’t sell well for $7500, or even for the initial reduced price of $4000, but when the price dropped to $2000 they were gone within days). I used it as my principal word processing machine for the next four years. It was a stunningly beautiful design, and with a 400 MHz G3 processor upgrade it ran at a reasonable speed. Ultimately, the fact that the meager video card couldn’t be upgraded, the fact that the 800x600 screen was small and began to lose its brightness, and the fact that it couldn’t run OS X led me to give up the TAM in 2003. But I never regretted owning it, and I still miss it sometimes.