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New iMac Announced
Steve Jobs is terrific at just that, Creating Desire. This is no surprise to us, for sure, but nothing drives it home as much as sitting in the audience and watching him speak. I could tell you how wonderful an orator he is, and how groovy his products are, but I really want to hear what the Slashdot user communtiy has to say about that. I want to talk about what Apple is doing technically.
First: The new iMac is very attractive. It's cool, it's neat. It will be a very popular machine. It's got a good price/feature spectrum and it looks like a pretty decent machine for the consumer. It isn't, in the end, a machine for the linux die-hard, but that's okay. It's slick, it ships with a bunch of very decent apps to manage your digital media. I want one, it's a cool machine. I don't know what I'd do with it (which is the problem), but it's cool looking. It's not particularly a good deal, I mean, you can pick up 200$ 15" tft displays at Fry's and lets get real, the G4 (Excepting the velocity engine stuff) isn't that fast of a chip at any available speed compared to the x86 world. But boy, this is one slick machine. But we know that already from the previous story. I do worry about it overheating, as I did flash back to the cube's cracking problems a bit.
Second: Photoshop for OS X will be coming out "soon". That was the big news. They had a very impressive working demo, I hope to learn more tomorrow on the expo floor.
Third: iPhoto is a decent cataloging program, and one designed to be used easily and generate more revenue streams for apple in the form of booklets and print costs. But it looks very polished and useful.
Superdrive: You'll see the superdrive in the new imac finally, which is nice. Note that this is not the superdrive that everyone remembers from the 80s' :-)
That's about all. The keynote was terrific, but in the end, not so outstanding. I'll post pictures soon. I'm sure a lot of /. regulars will be doing the same. More Tomorrow!
What points would the programming inclined need for such a thing.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
It reminds me of obnoxious contemporary furniture, snotty yuppie housewares, tacky .COM boom era loft houses, and all those other things that symbolize snobby excess, and like many other Apple products, it's very 3 years ago.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Super-Mega-Fugly, my GOD it's FUCKING UGLY!
You know, if they were going to change the design that much, the least they could do is take some design cues from SGI or NeXT. Right now it looks like a bizarre roadsign with a tupperwear base.
Apple may have great hardware, but I can't figure out where they get their design cues. Well, besides the new iBook. Yum.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Darn.. I was hoping one of the big announcements was going to be MacOS X on the PC..
:)
But seeing as they cant even get it running quickly & reliably on their own hardware, asking them to port it over to the PC is a bit too much to ask
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
it wouldn't be news. The other 96% of the market has had these options for awhile now.
I don't understand Apple's trend of making low-end devices that look like makeup accessories. The first iBook (in orange and pink, I think) looked for all the world like a Barbie Makeup Case. Now they give us an iMac that is clearly modeled after a makeup mirror. What gives? Does Steve Jobs have an adolescent teenage daughter making design decisions or something?
Hmm Apple went public around what 1980? That's about 22 years or so and they were first formed in 1977? So I supposed they can last AT LEAST that long. And just to make you look extra retarded, Microsoft bought 150 million bucks worth of common stock which as you may or may not know has no voting power, 150 mil is pretty insignifigant for a company with an 8.2 billion dollar market cap in 2001. About a whole .01% of the cap or so. You, out of the gene pool!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It had a
13" 1280x1024 feed foward LCD display
700MHz G4
DDR Ram
Mobile Radeon
DVD
DVI connector
FireWire2
USB2
Gigabit Ethernet
Airport
Irda
Bluetooth
PCMCIA
and weighed 5lbs and cost $1800
Anything else is a lame waste of hype... Let's see people buy into this crap next time.
The reason why people like you can never appreciate the G4, or apple hardware, or pretty much anything apple ever does for that matter, is that you never actually use your computer to *do* much of anything. Quake? Please. Quit playing your little games and grow up. Photoshop is a real world application used by untold legions of graphics designers in professional situations. The software that is G4 optimized on the Mac platform is heaviliy optimized, and many are creative applications. So I think that the Photoshop benchmark is a fantastic one, because coming from the position of an artist:
I don't give a flying fuck how fast it compiles the linux kernel.
Conclusion? When I'm using a measly 667 MHZ G4 with my custom designed Audio DSP/Video processing patch in Max/MSP/Nato
I fly, I've got an assload of CPU power to spare, and you've just fragged your millionth bot. Good for you. Buy an Xbox, loser.
Boring people use boring computers.
...you can pick up 200$ 15" tft displays at Fry's and lets get real, the G4 (Excepting the velocity engine stuff) isn't that fast of a chip at any available speed compared to the x86 world.
Ugh. How many times do we have to see comments like this? There are hundreds of reasons why this machine can go toe to toe with a Pentium 4 at 1.5 Ghz or whatever. Most of them have nothing to do with the CLOCK SPEED of the Processor. The G4 runs circles around the P4, unless you're taking the lowest end G4 up against the highest P4. "This Velocity Engine stuff"... look, that's just a marketing term for a new version of the controller or something like that. All it means is that the G4 takes instructions in a little differently before it actually starts chugging away at them, and it improves efficiency by a little bit. Like I said before though, the TOTAL MACHINE SPEED is what matters, and Apple is really good at making fast machines. Of course, if you only use a Mac just to start it up and run a Windows emulator or something equally stupid, you won't see that speed advantage.
~ now you know
someone said they could get a $300 flat screen at compusa or somewhere.
LET ME TELL YOU THE DIFFERENCE.
fast-change pixels. without them, the screen is useless (like most cheap flats are) to play dvd's or quicktime movies without the 'GHOST' effect.
GO BUY YOUR CHEAP PIECE OF SHIITE. ***THEN*** you will find out the shortcomings, be $300 further from a real one, and stick your head in the sand yelling 'mine is just as good as a mac!!!!'
this refrain will sound familiar to anyone who has ever heard a peecee user debate a KNOWLEDGEABLE mac user.
the reason apple macs are a little more expensive is that you get a QUALITY product, engineered to work perfectly from the start as an integrated whole.
the only possible competitor in os wars, going forward, will be the new sony os, when it comes out. OS X is as far ahead of XP as mac gui was over DOS. (oh wait, i forgot the whole directory structure of XP was lifted right out of dos- but m$ SAYS there is no DOS underneath, and they WOULD NEVER LIE, WOULD THEY?)
Earth to Mac: you want to regain some of the lost marketshare? Stop creating products that belong in museums but have little inherent functionality. Build machines the people want: cheap internet terminals, inexpensive wireless networks for audio, true-to-TV video compression. You definitely have the budget. If half the money spent developing the new iMac over the last 2 years was spent on developing a low-cost internet appliance (say, around $300-500), Apple would be making a KILLING right now. Instead, I'm left with something that makes me glad I left the Apple world a long time ago.
Yeah ... and with the productivity that we expect from most Mac users, that'd probably be okay.