iMac G4

By 2001 the CRT was dying and the original iMac's gumdrop shape was inseparable from the tube inside it. Apple's answer to the flat-panel era took two years of design work: rather than gluing components behind the screen (Jobs rejected early flat designs as inelegant — 'let each element be true to itself'), the computer sank into a hemisphere on the desk and the display floated free on a counterbalanced stainless arm.

The engineering of that neck is the exhibit here. It holds the screen weightlessly at any angle — tilt, swivel, raise — moving with a fingertip and staying exactly where you leave it, no knobs, no levers. Apple patented the mechanism; nobody has shipped anything quite like it since. The industrial design world compared it to an Anglepoise lamp, and to Pixar's Luxo Jr., and Time put it on a cover the week it launched.

Launched at Macworld in January 2002 as 'the new iMac', it anchored Apple's digital-hub strategy — the machine at the center of your cameras, music, and home movies, running the young Mac OS X. It sold well through three screen sizes, though flat-panel prices made it costlier than the gumdrop it replaced.

In 2004 the iMac G5 flattened everything behind the display, the arm disappeared, and Apple's desktops have been rectangles on stands ever since. The G4 remains the road not taken — and the one people pet in museums.

The iMac G4 is the consensus pick for the most charismatic desktop Apple ever built, and it proved that the company's post-1998 design language could evolve past translucent plastic into something warmer and stranger. It was the face of Mac OS X's make-or-break early years and the digital-hub era that set up iLife, the iPod halo, and the switch campaign.

Its afterlife is affectionate in a way few computers earn: it's 'the iLamp', the sunflower, the Luxo Mac — a machine remembered with the vocabulary usually reserved for pets.

You will touch the screen arm within the first minute; everyone does. The adjustment really is as good as the legend — one finger, any angle, zero drift — and it changes how you sit with the machine, pulling the display toward you for reading and pushing it away to spread out. No monitor since has moved this well.

As a computer, it's early OS X in its Aqua-glory years: Jaguar and Panther look spectacular on the bright LCD, iTunes and iPhoto feel native to the machine's whole concept, and the matching clear Apple Pro Speakers chime like little ornaments. The dome stays quiet on the desk. It is impossible to use one and stay in a bad mood.