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Apple Dropping CRTs for LCDs
Roberto Brega writes: "Steve Jobs, key-note-ing the World-Wide Apple Developer Conference (WWDC), announced that Apple is going to drop CRT monitors alltogether, in favour of all-digital TFT displays in 15-inches, 17-inches (new) and 22-inches (cinema) configurations." And with that 22" costing $2500, you can just imagine how many people will buy their monitors elsewhere. Perhaps that's the whole idea -- maybe Apple wasn't able to turn a profit on CRTs. The real downside to all of this is games. Ever try playing a 640x480 game on a 1024x768 laptop LCD? Yucko. Also, apparently OS X is default for all new Macs.
LCDs are still a specialized device for specialized needs.
Also, as others have pointed out, the adjustments on today's lcd monitors for off-prime sizes are much better than they used to be. For that matter, look at the mask on a color crt--you have those little triangles of phosphor elements in R, G, and B, which function awefully close to pixels--there's less than 1/3 of any given scan line that can take a given primary color, and there's a similar vertical problem as well.
I have yet to notice any artifacts running this screen at sub-prime sizes--but I don't use windows much at all (only for old kids' games), and X will only handle 1600x1200 . . .
hawk
Looks like Steve is continuing a tradition that he started way back in 1978. By making state-of-the-art hardware standard on computers, he's creating economies of scale for the hardware, and thus driving down prices. Here's a few for you:
1978: color graphics computers - Apple ][
1979: 5 1/4" floppy drive - Apple ][
1984: 3 1/2" floppy - Macintosh
1985: laser printer - LaserWriter
1986: SCSI - Macintosh Plus
1988: optical hard drive - NeXT Cube
1998: USB - iMac
2000: Gigabit Ethernet - PowerMac G4
2000: Wireless Ethernet - AirPort
2001: LCD monitors
Now, before you get your knickers in a bunch, realize that I am not suggesting that Jobs and company invented these things (except for the tech behind the 5 1/4" floppy--Wozniak is a genious). I'm merely suggesting that by placing these items in mainstream computers (OK, NeXT was never mainstream, but Steve sure thought he could make it so), Steve helped drive down the unit costs of these items until they were common place in computing (he failed with the optical disk). Or, alternatively, Steve had the forsight to buy in to these technologies at a point in the price curve about 1 year (or more) ahead of the competition.
As for LCDs costing too much? Just watch--LCD panels will be cheaper than CRTs in 5 years.
--Be human.
Most graphics professionals I know will not go to LCD. I noticed their reason after trying to work with Photoshop and Animation Master on a good LCD. There is no comparisson in the contrast levels of a good CRT. You cannot tell the difference between white and light grey or other simillar colors and shades with an LCD, unless you tilt the screen the right way, throw the salt over your shoulder and knock on wood.
However, I predominantly write code and find 12 hours with an LCD MUCH EASIER on my eyes than even 8 hours with a good CRT. The LCD panel gives a better focus plane for the eyes than a CRT.
Here. I guess Jobs was just trying to mislead us earlier.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
And with that 22" costing $2500, you can just imagine how many people will buy their monitors elsewhere.
1998: And with USB devices costing 3x as much as their serial counterparts, you can imagine how many people will buy their monitors elsewhere.
1998: And with floppies being the most popular sneakernet standard, you can imagine how many people will have to buy $100 floppy drives for their iMac.
2000: And with Firewire being an unused standard, you can imagine how many people will pay $300 for a Firewire->SCSI adaptor.
This is Apple's schtick. They take a costly and cool technology and produce it in such incredible quantity that it becomes affordable. Flat screens are expensive now because they're not being produced in enough quantity. (In part.) Once Apple ups the demand by 10x monthly, I'm guessing prices will drop in a huge way.
Waldo
I spent two grand on an Apple. What did I get? Two 450MHz G4 CPUs w/1MB L2 cache, 256 MB RAM (half of it was thrown in for free by Outpost), 30 GB ATA hard disk, gigabit ether, 56K modem, case, power supply, keyboard, mouse.
I could probably have gotten a faster PC for that price, but still, that's not shabby. Certainly no other non-PC vendor would have given me that much machine for my money.
(BTW, I did not buy an Apple monitor, I thought they were overpriced.)
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
First and foremost Apple is a hardware company, they have to sell their hardware at slightly higher prices then Dell and Gateway because they need to make more money off each one since they know they're going to sell a lower volume. Next to that their hardware is a bit more expensive. Motorola sticks a high price tag on their chips because they sell them only to Apple and only make a small number of them (compared to someone like Intel or AMD) which soohts their price way the fuck up. If they dropped their "beggars act" and dropped the prices on their hardware they'd end up fucked in the ass because they wouldn't make nearly enough money to keep their investors happy or pay their bills. On the matter of their cheapest boxes being twice the price of cheaper PC systems, take a look at what they're offering before you knock them. Cheap PC systems offer 32 fucking megs of RAM and come with an OS which is shitty at best. Low end PCs have shit sound and graphics (often times their graphics cards suck up system memory) and a software modem. If you wat a decent PC you're still going to fork over 7-800$. Which is about the price of the cheapest iMac. I think Windows/PC centric people often regard Apple as some minor player in the corporate business world but take a look at a MacMall catalogue or something one of these days. They are jampacked with all the things a business customer needs, besides that Office 2k1 for Mac is really sweet. SO to make a long story short, Macs are nice for business shit because they network easily and readily with a non-routeable protocol (if you look too long into AppleTalk, AppleTalk begins to look back into you).
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If apple reworked their iMac to use an LCD it would be absolutely amazing-- they could take their desk footprint down to a fraction of what it is now-- this would be problematic considering the iMac is a low-end machine, and LCDs are expensive.
What i think would be cool is if apple made an imac with a cinema-proportioned widescreen, then included an HDTV tuner. That way they could justify the higher price. :)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
That said, I find the idea of Apple forcing everyone to use LCDs somewhat obnoxious - and it sure isn't going to make Macs any cheaper... every mac still has a VGA port. their CRTs were too expensive and weren't turning enough of a profit. so now people can either spring for an apple LCD, or go buy a CRT from another vendor. nobody's being forced to do anything.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I am continually amazed at the degree of ignorance and FUD that gets posted here about Apple. Apple is not perfect by any means (their legal team should be fired), but they have made a lot of progress in the past few years and come out with some really interesting stuff. When other companies do that sort of stuff, everyone cheers. When Apple does it, it's nothing but bitching and moaning. Why?
Well, because Tacoboy and his minions hate anything that is not Linux, GNU or the GPL. IBM is okay because they use Linux. HP is okay because they use Linux. SGI is okay because they use Linux.
So what does Apple do? It bases its new OS on FreeBSD instead of LinuxOS, and uses the APSL instead of the GPL. To the kill-it-if-it-ain't-linux crowd, this was a mortal insult that can never be forgiven.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
A quick romp across the net for similarly configured and priced machines yields the following results:
1024x768 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ehternet
RGB-video out
firewire
1400x1050 LCD
64 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ethernet
IEEE 1394
800x600 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
ethernet (optional PC-card)
TV-out
no fireware/IEEE 1394
1024x768
64 MB RAM
15 GB HD
CD-ROM
built-in ethernet
unspecified external display port
no firewire/IEEE 1394
800x600 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ethernet
TV-out
no firewire/IEEE 1394
(I have omitted some features either becuase we all know how the contents turns out -- i.e. the CPU on the iBook is much slower than the competition -- or becuase the specs were substantially the same -- everyone has USB ports and modems, so why mention it?)
The Apple offering seems to stand up to the competition pretty well, with the notable exception being the DELL Inspiron 8000 which just kicks butt up and down (1400x1050 LCD! profanity, blasphemy, and disrespect! that is some nice hardware! I wonder how well it does with Linux). Most of the stuff I saw that was significantly cheaper than the Apple system didn't come with built-in ethernet and had only SVGA resolution on the LCD, which are two features near and dear to me.
While you can't get a new Apple laptop for the $900 that some models from some manufacturers are going for at the moment, you are certainly not getting ripped off. I'd say that the old saw about overpriced-underpowered Apple hardware is clearly more myth than reality.
Disclaimer: I'm an old Apple hand (my first real computer -- the kind that didn't store its data on cassette tapes -- was a Lisa 2 running MacWorks back in 1984) who has drifted far into the Linux camp of late (though I do own some Apple stock). I went into this comparisson intending to show that Apple was a clearly better value for the price than PC laptops with similar features, but the truth has bested me.
P.S. what I wouldn't give to have support for the TABLE tag on Slashdot.
This is just a question. But i thought apple users beeing the l33t computer graphics people that they are would require a monitor that can show 32bit color?
24-bit color is visually identical to 32-bit color; the extra byte is simply to speed up accesses by aligning pixels on 32-bit boundaries.
And monitors always display 24-bit color (at least monitors made in the last decade). The video card may store its pixel data in 8-bit or 16-bit format, but it sends full RGB data to the monitor.
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The Apple LCDs have always been noted for scaling well. The old analog ones have convolution filters and do no display chunkiness lower resolutions. I have played hundreds of hours of TeamFortress on an original Apple LCD. (It is also gorgeous when displaying NTSC video.) I prefer to use my original iBook at 640x480 for games that have smallish displays (like Snood).
The new digital interfaces use filtering in the video card, I'm told it is good.
One of those little features that a company can build in when they have a few extra dollars built in to the margins.
(As long as I'm countering CmdrTaco's unfounded steering statements... I fail to see how the price of the very high end display is going to turn off the price concious buyer. The price concious buyer is getting an iMac for $899 and not spending anything on a montior. 22" LCD@$2500 is a damn good buy (if you need it). Nec 20" is $3500, I'd quote other prices, but I can't find anything else of 18" at uvision.com)
I noticed that there is still a sentence of the original article that hasn't been refuted...
Apple will continue to sell CRT monitors. They will not have little Apple logos stuck on them and they won't have custom plastics, but the AppleStore will have monitors from an as yet un-named monitor manufacturer as an option on purchases. Just like they sell things like external disks, tape drives, mp3 players, hubs, UPSs, and such.
Right. This Mac OS X box, which lets me run Photoshop, Illustrator, BBEdit and Dreamweaver alongside Apache, Perl and MySQL is just a totally useless status symbol. Certainly not useful for web development, or anything.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
I swear, he must've read perhaps eight words of the article when he wrote that it's the "default" OS. More than once it's made perfectly clear that OS 9 remains the default setting.
/.'s proofreaders must not get paid very well... (When I left work two days ago for lunch, I overheard a conversation in the hallway; one guy was finishing up relating a technical piece of news which was clearly ridiculously bogus, and the other co-worker said, "So, you read that on /. right?" and both guys laughed when the first one answered, "yeah, and the Weekly World News." I would've laughed if I hadn't been drinking soda pop.)
It's pretty lame when your name becomes synonymous with "lack of journalistic standards." Kindof expected for infotainment magazines like WWN, but this is supposed to be a legit site...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
So does this mean the I-Mac will now be flat :)
And given that this market has long been a mac stronghold, I really, seriously, honestly can't imagine what they're thinking.
they're thinking that real professionals can get a pro-level monitor elsewhere for cheaper perhaps? besides, i've never seen a true graphic designer that had a monitor under 21" and Apple hasn't made a 21" monitor in years (they only just now dropped their only CRT, the 17"). professional designers have always bought 3rd party monitors. nothing has changed here.
- j
well i think what it comes down to (as was alluded in the story) is that Apple didn't really make much money selling CRTs. it's a commodity market with not much room for margins and they decided that CRT vendors could make CRTs better and cheaper than Apple can.
i completely agree with this. if you want a good CRT, go buy a Sony, a LaCie or something similar (incidentally while you can get a 19" for $200, they're really shitty monitors). if you want a great LCD (and the Apple LCDs are great) then buy from Apple. but really, your computer vendor doesn't need to be your CRT vendor.
this "LCD-only" story is being blown way out of proportion on all the news sites. Macs still come with a VGA adapter and you can buy any monitor you want. it's not like Apple is forcing LCDs down your throat. the only down side is that your 3rd party monitor doesn't match your pretty cube. boo hoo.
also as others have noted the slashdot write up is incorrect: MacOS 9 is still the default, but MacOS X is now available too.
- j
With that $100 M investment they made, they shouldn't have the same supply/quality problems other companies have been having... Smart move, Apple. Once again, they lead the industry into Bold New Worlds... 4 years from now LCD screens will be pretty much standard =)
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"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
Oh, c'mon. As if anyone on Slashdot actually reads the stories... :)
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I'd mod this as a troll if I had the points. Either that or you haven't used a Mac since at least 1995. But I will clarify anyway, because I can afford the karma hit.
/. you'd prefer to be a build-your-own kinda bridgedweller, but of course not everyone can.) And in any case it's starting to become the case overall; I blame Intel for patenting Slot 1, and then we have Slot A, and FC-PGA, and Socket A, and DDR SDRAM... (Brian fades off into a long babbling list of hardware-level features that change so quickly that motherboard swaps are inevitable when making major upgrades)
-The current crop of G4s are five-slot systems. It'd be nice to have six or seven, true, but given that you've already got Ethernet, USB, FireWire, and sound on the motherboard you have all those yummy extra slots for things like a GeForce 3 card and other fun stuff.
-Western Digital 20 gig (Ultra ATA/66, though I don't think it takes full advantage) in my 6500. Aftermarket. No problems whatsoever.
-RS-422 serial ports disappeared with the B&W G3s. But you know that as well as I do. Go back under your bridge.
-Mobo swaps? Try box replacement. I grant you it's ugly, but it's the same for Compaq, HP, and a number of other PC makers. (Obviously if you're on
You've *got* to be a troll. Nobody, and I mean, nobody, who posts here can act this clueless and actually mean it. I admit that it is kind of tough to find ethernet for an SE, but... aw, fsck it. I shoulda flamed you instead.
/Brian
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
"And with that 22" costing $2500, you can just imagine how many people will buy their monitors elsewhere."
;)
;)
It costs about $500 more than a comparably-sized CRT from Sony (remember, unlike CRT's, advertised size=viewable size (roughly) with these displays). Jobs also promised to continue cutting prices, though of course it isn't hard to predict that flat-panel tech will get cheaper.
Oh, and there are two other, much cheaper displays available which Taco somehow forgot to mention.
"The real downside to all of this is games. Ever try playing a 640x480 game on a 1024x768 laptop LCD? Yucko."
Games on these displays are gorgeous.
"Also, apparently OSX is default for all new Macs. "
No, OS X is installed on all Macs sold today and beyond, and boxed with all the Macs currently in the channel. But OS 9.1 is still the default when you switch on these new machines.
Funny how someone always has to do this...
Lots of monitors where I work, and luckily I am surrounded by Apple displays.
These LCDs are absolutely gorgeous. Not only their design, but the display itself. It is so sharp, so bright, and has such a wide viewing angle, that when I return to other monitors, they're a complete blur.
I cannot explain well enough how great Apple displays are. And games on them are BEAUTIFUL.
I pay $499 for 17" monitors. I'm HAPPY to spend $599 instead. It's very, very worth it.
Yes, Apple is pushing consumers a little by only offering LCD. But think about the other end of that.. It will, in the long run, push LCD prices down, and LCDs will more quickly become the norm.
I'm just a believer in pushing markets. Sorta like not including a floppy drive in the original iMac -- and I haven't missed floppies in YEARS. I never even think about them. And if I have to transfer a file, or need a backup, I just use a Zip disk or my free iDisk.
I think it's all really great.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
If you want an inexpensive Linux CLI portable, the Toshiba is quite spiffy... but not comparable.
The iBook is a subnotebook with the feature set of a full notebook. Turn a sheet of notebook paper sideways on your desk: that is the total footprint of the iBook. (Set the same sheet of paper on the keyboard of your Toshiba, and you will see that it is much smaller.)
It weights 4.9 pounds (counting the battery and the drive).
It has a battery which, in real-world use, runs about 5 hours between charges when using OS 9. (Running OS X costs you about an hour of that time, because of the less efficient power management, but that still blows the doors off my HP Pavilion, which is lucky to get past 65 minutes.)
No laptop which matches it's features and weight can be found for under $2k. Nice try, though.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
But the press release is here: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/may/21display .html
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I don't buy this. I regularily play games such as Diablo II on my laptop. However, the laptop in question (IBM X20) uses ATI's Rage Mobility M chipset, which does hardware upsampling to 1024x768, so 640x480 appears as a quite smooth image. (800x600 doesn't fare so well, but it's still quite decent.)
Even without that, you have the ability to simply use a 640x480 chunk of the middle of your screen, or specify a constant multiplier; hopefully the video cards apple uses to drive these LCDs -- currently ATI Radeons, I believe -- will allow you to say "I want to view 640x480 pixel-doubled on my 1280x1024 LCD" or similar.
The big problem with LCDs and games is if the pixel speed on the display is too low, thus not allowing the LCD to keep up with the frames that the game is displaying because it can't change pixel colors fast enough. I doubt any of Apple's displays would suffer from this problem, since they are intended to be used for things like video editing.
I keep seeing posts claiming that new Macs cost $5000+ and that Apple hardware isn't compatible with anything, etc, etc. I don't know where this is coming from, given that most of Apple's hardware costs well under $2000. (You can get a damn nice laptop for $1300). And I challenge you to find me a high-quality 22" wide-screen LCD for less than $2500. I also find it interesting that Apple dropped its price on the 15" screen to $599, but that shows up nowhere in the article. $599 is hardly a bad price for an LCD display.
If this were coming from SGI, the article would have originated from the "drooling-on-my-keyboard department," but instead we get the "you-gotta-be-kidding department." Very cute, guys. Mod me down as flamebait, but the knee-jerk reactions against everything Apple get a little irritating after a while.
This story reminds me of this article on Segfault, entitled Steve Jobs Now Officially "On Crack". Now, while I love the results of Steve's NeXT venture, I haven't been able to take the man seriously for over half a decade.
This is not a Fugazi
All that regardless, I still feel this is a bad move for Apple. Think for a minute on what has long been a mainstay for Macs: prepress. Well walk into any prepress shop and look at what they use. All CRTs. Currently LCDs just have too many problems when you're dealing with matching colours to print. Well, it seems kind of silly to me to cut out tubes from your lineup when you are pitching to a market so tube dominated. Perhaps this will indeed work out to the better for them, but this seems to be a bad move to me.
Here is a link.
Just read this on yahoo. Mac OS 9 is the default but OS X is loaded also.
I suppose for the time being, the iMac wil still come with a CRT? That may be good enough for their low-end offerings. An iMac with a low-cost LCD would be kind of nice, though.