Slashdot Mirror
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?"
After all, they *DID* stop selling any monitors but flat screens...
And hell, they can make them smaller, and in new shapes, they could do a lot of things with the shape, since they aren't limited by the size of the CRT and the heat problems inherent with monitors in close proximity with other computer pieces...
Besides, If the release another "flower power" imac, and you were stuck using it, wouldn't *YOU* want it smaller/easier to hide?
Ex
..it's called an iBook.
But seriously, why would Apple sell such a thing? It would have to be comparable in cost to an iBook, the LCD being the most expensive part.
It would probably be a snazzy box, but would the price be right for a low-end machine?
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
This has got to be the most common Apple rumor in recent years. The flat-panel iMac is always predicted at every major MacWorld Expo, and so far it hasn't materialized. Maybe it will this time, but Mac rumors have been so far off in the past that a lot of people don't pay attention to them anymore.
Think about what they've done in the past couple years:
Nice hardware, growing in leaps and bounds as the market for those things matures (pc133, yes it was late, and yes, it's slower than DDR, but hey, better than pc100), nice processors, removing all relic hardware as necessary (USB instead of ADB, etc). Apple has always done this. Making the powerbook g4 was the next step, making a laptop just slightly less powerful than a desktop, *AND* has a battery life to speak of.
Nice software: OS X. BSD core. No need for them to figure out how to reinvent the wheel with their crappy old OS's--Simply change a few widgets, and call it Darwin, then add a GUI, and Voila! instant OS. With a *LOT* of software available, not to mention the 20 billion BSD hackers, the people that'll keep the Darwin OS up to snuff.
Totally reengineered interface--Finally a command line that doesn't suck! And for that matter, a GUI that doesn't suck! And multitasking! And all sorts of neat widgets that make techies and non-techies alike scream out "I WANT ONE!"
Giving computers to schools, making great leaps in hardware, standardizing their video system. I see this as a incredibly brilliant move for Jobs.
All in all, more power to them... They may live, they may struggle, or they may die. They are pushing the user's into a whole new realm; DVD-R's in affordable systems, laptops that don't suck, and keeping up with technology a lot better than they used to.
Ex.
Right. They'll announce it between the new Apple PDA and the Disney buyout.
And then Hitler will build a snowman.
--saint
Granted, Gateway, HP, etc have come out with flat panel consumer PCs, so the fact that Apple can stir up a bunch of rumor news with a flat panel product may leave some scratching their heads wondering what the big hoopla is. Think about the iPod. Yeah, there are plenty of mp3 players out there, but it took the design team at Apple to create the best one. Apple took their time, and GOT IT RIGHT. The same can be said for the next iMac. It may have the same specs as some other machines out there now, but it'll make everything else look like junk when it comes out. Obviously I haven't seen it, but knowing Apple's track record I'm sure it'll be amazing.
The trouble with LCD iMacs is the education market. Schools don't buy iMacs just because they are cheaper than iBooks, they buy them because they are more durable.
The abuse that a computer takes in a school setting is enough to make me cringe.
Still, I like the idea of having a LCD iMac. It would be cool for me, I'm just not sure that it will work in the education market. (Yeah, I know. Maine just bought 38,600 iBooks. Still, most schools buy iMacs.)
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Why does the Slashdot community automatically tear apart everything Apple does? Would it be so hard to admit that they got it right with Firewire, got it right by popularizing USB, got it right by deleting the useless floppy drive, got it right with Quicktime, got it right with the (new) iBook and Powerbook g4, and got it DAMN right with OS X? Seriously folks, look back at all your knee-jerk reactionary posts over everything Apple and do some thinking. Point me to major innovations that have not been driven by Apple and then try using a new Mac. Have you ever USED OS X on a new Titanium? Have you ever tried to copy even 64MB over USB to a Rio, and then copied 2 GB to a firewire drive in the same time? Try using Final Cut Pro, iMovie, DVD Studio Pro... This site has become a bunch of first-post, bash-everything, small-minded jerkoffs.
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.
There are big wins in switching when you make the whole machine. The box size goes down. Shipping cost goes down. Shelf space at retail goes down. Power supply size goes down. It's a bigger win for Apple than for the Wintel crowd.
I'm just surprised that Apple didn't do this before the holiday shopping season.
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
Apple's failure was not allowing clones of its hardware
:)
I can't think of a worse time in the platform or company's history than during the point that clones were available. It was an absolute mess. Part of the problem was that none of the manufacturers had any interest in actually expanding the market. They just took Apple's best customers while Apple was left to foot the bill for platform development. Clones elminated a lot of the core value of the Mac.
Cloning was in direct conflict with the Mac experience, philosophy and culture. It may have seemed like a good idea on paper (largely people assumed if it worked for x86, it would work for the Mac), but in practice, it just didn't flow right. The platform is undoubtably in a more stable position today.
and they had a fully operational 486 booting Mac OS, complete with desktop and even Quicktime movies with sound
Welcome Mac users, to the wonderful work of IRQ conflicts and COM2.
Controlling hardward and software helps integrate, but not innovate
Actually, just the opposite. Things like iDVD, iMovie and AirPort worked immediately upon introduction (and therefore added value) due specifically to the fact that Apple controlled both the hardware and software.
The fact that Apple owns and maintains its own platform is at the core of its value proposition and ability to differentiate from other manufacturers. It provides choice in the industry.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
> 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.
I think people also buy iMacs for their expandability, but what they appreciate about the expandability is that it already has great "add-on" software and hardware in it from the start, and adding more software and hardware is easy (drag-and-drop software installs, plug-and-play hardware installs, easy-access expansion doors in the cases). I mean, all of the ports are right there on the side, attractively presented to the user. People who never looked at the back of their PC are looking at the FireWire port on their Mac and going "that's where you plug-in a camcorder or hard drive" because when they do that, it just works. It's already been set up for that before they get the machine.
For example, a non-technical friend of mine gave up trying to add software and hardware to his PC because he didn't enjoy all the work involved, and he was generally always suffering from one problem or another with Windows, anyway, and "didn't want to make it worse". He got an iMac and added a printer and scanner himself, no problem. He adds software all the time. So he actually told me that the iMac's "great expandability" was one of the things he liked about it over the PC, second only to the fact that it crashed less than his PC. Also, I got one "help desk" call from him in the past two years with his iMac, versus one a week when he had his PC.
So to say an iMac is "not expandable" is really looking at it from a PCI board / geek hacker perspective. For many people, it's the most expandable system they've ever used. That's part of why they're still selling more than a million iMacs a year, even in this economy, even with CRT displays in them, even with all the empty MHz you get on the PC side. It really serves the needs of the users who buy them.