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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.
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.
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 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 :)
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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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!
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.
Just read this on yahoo. Mac OS 9 is the default but OS X is loaded also.