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Flat-panel iMacs in Apple's Future?
WinkyN writes: "A story on Yahoo! is claiming Apple might release a flat-panel iMac for release in early 2002. Analysts for Morgan Stanley who cover Apple say the computer manufacturer has placed orders for component parts to build such a machine (in fact, build about 100,000 of them a month). Perhaps Steve Jobs will announce this at Macworld Expo in January?"
http://www.acorncreative.tv/imac2.html
I'll take any of them.
While the reported component order gives the rumor slightly stronger legs, don't forget that Apple already buys lots of 15" LCDs for their 15" Studio Display. It would be very interesting to know how many of these monitors Apple currently sells per month. Perhaps the additional 100kmonitors/month is simply forecasting additional demand?
Yet, since I saw a G3 in action two years ago at my uncle's place (he is an artist), I got interested.
Now, my old laptop (P120/32MegRAM, running Linux) is getting really old. How long will it live? 6 months perhaps, but replacement is probably due next year? I didn't make up my mind yet, but an iBook is now definately an option! I want to try OS X, Yellow Dog Linux, perhaps even NetBSD. Plus they look good!
If they can get *me* interested in their hardware, they must be on for a comeback: two years ago, I would have laughed a Mac user in the face...Now I say: cool show me how it works.
When the iMac was unveiled it was considered by many to be nearly revolutionary. Whether you agree with this sentiment or not is another issue. However that was (I believe) in 1998, and it's nearly 2002 and the iMac of today is visually almost identical to the 1998 firstborn Bondi Blue iMac. Yeah, there have been color changes, hard drive upgrades, speed bumps, memory increases, and now even a slot-loading cd/dvd/whatever drive, but the external appearance is pretty much unchanged. Normally this wouldn't matter for a computer, but the iMac was a hit because of its style.
So it's time for something "revolutionary" again. I've heard rumors of the flat panel iMac from lame sites like Mac OS Rumors since at least the end of 1998. Actually this particular rumor (and its failure to materialize) was one reason I stopped reading MOSR and its ilk and realized what garbage they were.
So if Steve Jobs unveils a flat panel iMac, it won't be a big surprise. The difference now will be if he doesn't, analysts will be disappointed and Apple's stock price will probably take a minor hit.
rooooar
Shipping even more flat screens has definitly interesting side effects. This means that Apple wants to lower the prize (for themselves) and it means all flat screens will be cheaper, and I am hoping it will be cheaper faster. This implies that I could, the next time I want a new computer, two at least 19", LCDs together with my brand new nVidia GF++.
So, everybody who doesn't care, or are mac maniacs, go buy one of these;)
That's exactly what I thought until I stopped and really took another look. While the iBook includes much of what a flat screen iMac would have, its form factor makes a big difference in how it is used and built. As pointed out, a flat screen iMac is likely to have a larger screen, but not only that, because it is designed for the desk they can use cheaper componenents, such as a larger HD, full-size DIMMs and a faster processor (it wouldn't have the same heat dispation issues). The iMac would also have a separate keyboard and mouse. All this goes to make for a different design and a lower cost. One thing they could do with adding is a TV tuner, as this would certainly help students who are suffering from too little space in their dorm rooms for both TV and computer.
Since this will be a new generation of iMac, Apple may be looking for something else in terms of design for looks of the case. What exactly that will be is hard to tell. The current portable products use the metalic look, while the desktop range use a coloured plastic look, even of the plastic is not completley transparent.
Flat screens have come down in price a fair bit. I can buy an average quality 15" flat screen here in Canada for around $500. Given that Apple partly owns a flat-screen manufacturer in Asia, it means that they have the ability to get hold screens more cheapley than othe companies.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Why does Apple's iMac computer warrent special mention?
I can (sort of) understand some of your objections to Microsoft, but why are PC manufacturers, who provide a range of machines that can run a variety of operating systems, treated lousy, but Macintosh is treated specially?
Apple, with its desire to control the hardware *and* the software, is much more "monopolistic" than Microsoft ever was. It's just that Steve Jobs made an inferior product, and the market made its choice.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. P4's and G4's both have lots of optimizations that allow them to detect low-level parallelism and thus execute instructions in parallel. The G4 is arguably a bit better at this, in part because it has a RISC instruction set and thus has more flexibility in the ordering of instructions, compared with the Godawful x86 instruction set which often takes several cycles to execute.
The other major advantage that a G4 has is altivec, but I would argue that this isn't as great an advantage as Apple claims. True, it's cleaner and faster than MMX or KNI in the Intel line, but the difference isn't *that* great, and more to the point many developers aren't taking advantage of it. So while you can get a 6x speed boost on seti@home or photoshop, it's not going to do much for your run-of-the-mill applcation.
Finally, in terms of overall speed, I think it's ludicrous to claim that Macs are 2-3 times faster at the same clock rate. True, it's somewhat faster at the same clock rate due to a simpler instruction set, shallower pipeline, and other reasons, but I simply don't buy a 3-fold performance advantage. On average, a 866 G4 is probably equivalent to a 1 GHz or maybe 1.2 GHz P4. That's still substantially slower than Intel's top-of-the-line 2 Ghz P4's.
Apple has been very successful at selling the idea of a "megahertz myth," and to a certain extent they may be right. But honestly, better architectures can only push you so far. If the chip is doing fewer cycles per second, that *has* to be a handicap.
So I would say Macs at the moment are slower than their PC counterparts. They also happen to be less power-hungry, have better industrial design, run a better OS, be easier to use, etc. That's why I bought one. But I don't think we should be doing Apple's PR job for them. The G4 is a fast chip, but it's not *that* fast.
So true. I'm in the same boat (life-long PC user).
Next year I'll be replacing my desktop with a laptop, because I absolutely need a laptop now. If I were to buy now, I would buy the Titanium. It's an incredible little machine, and not overly pricey given its abilities.
As an engineer (-to-be) I think the Titanium is technically amazing. It's got a great-looking screen, a fast hard drive (for a laptop), REALLY good battery life (5 hours *average*? I've never seen a similarly equipped Wintel laptop last anywhere near that long) etc. It's also pretty light (5.5lbs). I'm just blown away by the thing.
I'm hoping, though, that Dell comes out with a Wintel laptop that can compare. I don't know if it's feasible, though, because of the fundamental difference in hardware architectures. The thing is, I need some school-related software that exists under Windows only. Oddly enough, if Dell doesn't make a laptop like the Titianium, I'll forgo my needs.
That certainly used to be the case. Interestingly, however, Apple has gone out of their way to make the iMac and the iBook almost completely trivial to upgrade, at least if you're doing the most common upgrades (RAM and an Airport card). In other words, now that hard drives are getting to the point of being "big enough" (many fewer people are getting to the point of being squeezed for hard disk space even in the age of mp3s) and video cards are "fast enough", if you build everything else in, you really can make all reasonable upgrades possible for a person armed only with simple instructions and a US quarter.
In essence, people are empowered but not hassled, which could basically be Apple's new slogan.
Babar
The problem with USING all that cool Mac stuff is that it costs MONEY. Sure you could grab the software somewhere, but the hardware is so overpriced compared to PC hardware.
Apple has a different business model than somebody like Dell. Apple has an entire platform to develop. They provide free, ad-free internet services to their customers. They provide quite a bit of free software. They host open source projects. These things cost money to create and maintain. This money comes from the margins. Basically, you pay more so Apple can develop a better experience.
A company like Dell, however, is primarily an assembly service. They don't have product development in the same sense that Apple does. Dell's products are defined largely by Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM and component manufacturers. The actual machines and experience end up being very similar to that of other manufacturers, so Dell effectively competes on the sale rather than the product. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with this -- it's just a different business model.
The fact that Apple and Dell have different approaches to selling computers is good. It means we have choice.
Apple is profitable and has well over $4 billion in cash, but if you look at their actual profit on per-quarter basis, they aren't raping customers and just watching the money pour in. They're doing constructive things with it.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Given the additional cost of an LCD screen, a flat-panel iMac would cost about the same as an iBook. And performance-wise they're almost the same. I don't see much of a market for a flat-panel iMac as long as it doesn't provide better performance than the iBook.
--Bud
OK, let me stir the rumour pot a bit.
;-)
Obviously if Apple comes out with an LCD flat-panel iMac, it is going to have to be a lot cooler/more revolutionary that just an all-in-one Mac with a flat screen. They always seem to go that little bit further than other companies.
We've also heard all sorts of rumours about some new Apple product based on their Newton tech. Hmmmm. And we know that Apple loves their AirPort product. Hmmmmmm.
So here is the new product: it's a powerful desktop iMac with a 15" LCD screen, but the screen pops out of it's case/dock and is a portable web pad/writing tablet. Connected to the main machine via AirPort, of course. You can tote this baby all over the place, take notes with its hand-writing recognition, surf the web wirelessly. Then just drop it back in the dock/stand/cradle, and it's now the display for you much more powerful desktop machine, with it's hard drive, DVD+RW drive, etc.
You heard it here first
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Except that it wasn't remotely this easy, or this simple. They actually updated the display language from display postscript to display pdf, which I know is a minor change since one is much like the other, but then they reimplemented all widgets under the new system. They also developed an Old-MacOS-API-in-a-box for NeXTStep on Mac, and the resulting bundle of everything is called MacOSX.
You know, I hate to have to be the one to point this out, but Luna doesn't suck either. Oh, sure, it looks like someone in fisher-price's art department developed a theme for windows, but you can change themes all day, even to some fairly convincing aqua themes. With GlassXP and a geforce or radeon card, you can have arbitrarily hardware-alpha'd windows (though some things don't work like you might like, like transparent video windows or transparent windows OVER video windows) and you can, quite frankly, make windows look like anything you want in much the same fashion as using windowmaker or some other highly-configurable window manager, using StyleBuilder and StyleXP. My windows Theme is a work in progress that's looking better and better all the time. Heck, you can even use PNG images with the alpha channel utilized in your themes.
Let's not forget the feature set of windows' GUI, either, besides silly alpha features (which I am nonetheless quite fond of) - It's based on motif, more or less, (note the popdown menu on the left, which in Win 3/NT 3 even looked like Motif) so it provides an interface familiar to windows users and CDE users alike. It supports all the usual operations for windows, the taskbar has grown up quite a bit and now supports grouping, there's a virtual desktop manager included with Power Tools for XP, and so on.
That's true, but their price point still seems a bit high to me in most cases. Comparing the iMac to a PC doesn't seem to do the PC justice just because of the PC's basic modular, expandable nature, which you are paying for; If the PC were as unexpandable as the iMac, it would be cheaper. However, it's built to be expanded (at least slightly) and it's made with off the shelf parts which means that, unlike most mac hardware which has "graced" our desktops over the years, the hardware is all pretty much the same these days, which is also a nice feature.
With all this said, I do think that the current Mac hardware is fairly sexy. I do however think I'll stick with PCs. You can build a dual athlon XP pretty cheaply now...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Want a real revolution?
Stop producing desktop machines cause the laptops are just as good, ramp up production to drop costs.
Make a range of 'digital hub' servers for home and small office - file-sharing, internet gateway type things. Or maybe multi-user servers and ibook-like thin clients that connect to them. Schools would love that and so would families with 2+ kids.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'