Spartacus; or, Nothing New Under the Sun

In 1997, Apple released the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, codenamed: Spartacus. It retailed at $7,500, and shipped with a 250mhz processor, 32mb of RAM, a 2gb hard-drive, and a 4x CD-ROM. All this was reasonably high-spec at the time but the TAM's unique selling point was that it was an all-in-one desktop with a built-in LCD screen and thus looked very, very futuristic indeed. To make things even more futuristic, Apple took one of their laptop keyboards and turned it into a full-sized peripheral. Low-profile keys, you see, meant futuristic. Ooh...
(Photo: Wikipedia)

The low-profile keys are back, with the shiny new iMac:

Except this time you get a numeric keypad. Unless you go for the wireless keyboard option. In which case you don't. Because, you know, wireless is futuristic - and, as we saw in the TAM, the future doesn't do numeric data-entry. No, the paranoid android in the corner takes care of all the numbers :-)