replacement by so-called “network appliances”, stripped-down terminals that would get all their content from the Internet. Steve kept the project internally but made it evolve into a new consumer desktop computer, the iMac (the i stood for Internet). For the looks of the box, he turned to one of Apple’s in-house designer, a soft- spoken Englishman named Jonathan Ive. Ive had joined the company before Steve came back, but it was the interim CEO who made him head of the industrial design team.

But Apple’s biggest hit was yet to come. When Steve came back at Apple, a team was working on a so-called NC machine, for “network computer.” It was commonly thought at the time that personal computers were living their last days before their complete

Steve unveiled the iMac on May 6 1998, at the Flint Center auditorium in Cupertino, in the same room where he had unveiled Macintosh some fourteen years