This is the best summary I could come up with:

In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to an Apple that was at death’s door, and in true Princess Bride style, he rapidly ran down a list of the company’s assets and liabilities.

With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan.

Though LCD screens certainly existed outside of a laptop in 1998 — Apple shipped the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh the previous year — they were considered too small and expensive to be used in a desktop context.

Ive’s design embraced the big, bulbous shape of the electron gun housing that tapered out behind the display and covered it all in a two-tone aqua and white plastic shell.

It wasn’t just computer accessories — just about any consumer product that had a plastic piece that could easily be swapped out was rereleased in a colorful iMac-inspired version.

Apple’s first consumer-focused laptop, the iBook, was a bulbous and brightly colored cousin to the iMac, but after a few years, it was redesigned to be a white plastic rectangle instead.

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