In 1998, a year after Steve Jobs had returned to the company, Apple introduced an all-in-one Macintosh called the iMac. Its translucent plastic case, originally Bondi blue and later many other colors, is considered an industrial design hallmark of the late 1990s. The iMac did away with most of Apple's standard (and usually proprietary) connections, such as SCSI and ADB, in favor of two USB ports. It also had no internal floppy disk drive and instead included a CD-ROM drive for installing software, but incapable of writing to CDs or any other media without external third-party hardware. The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 139 days, making the company an annual profit of US$309 million—Apple's first profitable year since Michael Spindler took over as CEO in 1995. The "blue and white" aesthetic was applied to the Power Macintosh, and then to a new product: the iBook. Introduced in July 1999, the iBook was Apple's first consumer-level laptop computer, filling in the "missing square" of Apple's four-tiered consumer/professional laptop/desktop product strategy previously announced by Jobs. More than 140,000 pre-orders were placed before it started shipping in September, and by October it was as much a sales hit as the iMac.In early 2001, Apple began shipping computers with CDRW drives for the first time.
Apple continued to add new products to their lineup, such as the Power Mac G4 Cube, the eMac for the education market and PowerBook G4 laptop for professionals. The original iMac used a G3 processor, but the G4 and then G5 chips were accompanied by successive new designs, dropping the array of colors in favor of white plastic. Current iMacs use aluminum enclosures. On January 11, 2005, Apple announced the release of the Mac Mini priced at US$499, the least expensive Mac to date.
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