No One Expects The Apple iMac  Apple's media event on Tuesday
included many pieces of hardware, and with two whole new iPads
to talk about it could be mistaken for a tablet news day. But
among the releases, Apple showed its new iMac. It's easy to
overlook what this machine may mean.  Back in 1998 Apple debuted
the original iMac. It was bold, it was surprising, it was very
future-facing. Its colorful exterior and curved body was a huge
contrast to chunky beige-box desktop PCs. By suggesting it was
the first "legacy free" PC, because it ditched a 3.5-inch floppy
drive and older IO systems for a DVD drive (quickly updated to a
futuristic slot-loading version) and a USB connection, Apple
distanced it from nearly all its peers. The "i," later used and
abused for other Apple products, meant "Internet" and
"Individual" in an era when the Net was unknown to many, and PCs
were fiddly, tricky systems that on the whole couldn't rival the
iMac's out-of-the-box simplicity.  Over the next 13 years Apple
took that idea of s