New iMac Announced

MrGHemp writes "The new iMac with a flat panel has been offically announced, and can be seen on the Apple website. According to Steve Jobs the top 3 things we asked for were put into this new design. 1. Flat Panel screen 2. G4 processor 3. Superdrive (DVD burner on one of 3 models)... Apple also announced other new products like a 14' display on some iBooks, and iPhoto - the iTunes of digital photos." It's definitely unique looking ;) Update: Slashdot author ChrisD was there and has a report too. Linux and the Macintosh are very different things. I don't want to bore anyone with poor analogies, but when Macintosh has glitz, Linux has power. This isn't about Linux though, it just kept on striking me how much Linux lacks in the desire department.

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!

Comments

iMac availability

[pemerson]

Note that on apple's purchasing site (store.apple.com) the lower end new iMacs aren't available until March. The only one available in January is the top of the line $1800 one with the Superdrive (DVD writer & CD-RW). The other new item which I saw (didn't see the Keynote, so don't know how much attention was paid to it) is the 14.1" screen on the new top end iBook.

Re:Potential as a good home system

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

A 700 MHz G3 is okay.

Now a 700 MHz G4, now that's fast! (All of the new iMacs have G4 processors.)

Re:My thoughts on the whole thing

[sammy.lost-angel.com]

I agree with you. However, Macwork Tokyo is just 2 months away. They revised two of their lines of computers (with the iMac being a MAJOR revision). Introduced iPhoto, which is waaay cooler looking than i had imagined. If the updated their pro lines, what would be left for Tokyo?

It's possible that the G5 can be ready in time for Tokyo, in which case they don't want to take any attention away from the iMac if they don't have to by offering minor speed increases to their pro line.

Just my thoughts.

Another key feature: cost

[Masem]

CNN reported on the Time's flub with the pre-keynote news, but had additional analysis of the new iMac. Most importantly, besides Apple's attenuation with style, this iMac with DVD writer will be quite compariable in price to similar offerings from Dell or Compaq, $1800 vs $1600 respectively. If this was 3-4 years ago, I'd have expected similar machines from Apple and the PC clone makers to have a price difference of at least $500, but that appears to have evaporated; I'd suspect that the bulk of the cost of these units (Apple and PC) are in the flat-panel monitor, DVD-writer, and OS software; everything else is dirt cheap nowadays.

I don't ever expect an Apple and non-Apple machine to cost the same, but the more Apple can cut down that difference, the better off they are.

Re:Another key feature: cost

[Ryan Amos]

Apple is still selling the "old" iMac, at least for now. For $799, it's really not a bad deal. I suspect they'll sell the "old" iMac till they can drop prices on the new one to under $1000. This strikes me more as Apple's "mid-range" machine, which they never really have had. The computing industry as a whole is less and less about the hardware and more about the marketing and software. This is probably also why a lot of highly-skilled tech jobs are moving overseas and a lot of us geeks are between jobs.

Re:Another key feature: cost

[Graymalkin]

Like I said to the other dude, how much did the iMac cost originally when it first came out in 98? It wasn'y 799$ that's for damn sure. They also still sell the fucking CRT iMac if you are so inclined to save a couple bucks when buying a Mac. I think the point the guy was trying to make is that Macs aren't the price monsters that PC users generally assume they are. A 1800$ iMac has a Superdrive in it and a flat panel monitor. That's about what you'd pay for a BTO Compaq or Sony with a regular DVD-R in it (the Superdrive being arguably more useful since it can pretty much burn anything). The iMac is also designed to be an all in one package, the consumer asks "Hey can I take some movies I shot and edit them together into something people want to watch easily?" and they get pointed to an iMac. Of course you can get a Dell with a flat screen for a thousand bucks but what exactly are you getting? A 1GHz Celeron and a cheapo flat panel and some crap software Dell got a sweet OEM deal on. I'd put the 700MHz G4 up against a 1GHz Celeron and I'd definitely put Apple's iSoftware up against whatever Dell was packaging.

that's the crappy part

[xueexueg]

the 12" model is 1024x768. I bought the 12" because it crammed those pixels into a smaller area.

the 14" model is 1024x768. They seem to expect people to buy a computer just so it will take up more room in their briefcase/backback.

I was hoping the 14" would be at least 1280x1024 or something: it's really not out of the question.

Re:Cooling this thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The G-serice PowerPC chips dissapate much less heat than equiv-clocked chips from AMD&Intel (like less than half, probably under 25%), the GeForce i a MX (meaning mobility, which if Tom's Hardware and my memory of it are right, means they skimped some performance to save batter power---and thus less heat dissapated.

That leaves the power supply, which is only 130W according to the Apple tech specs, and the hard disk, of which there is only one and it's 7200rpm or less.

Given all that crap so close together won't help since there isn't a lot of air in smaller containers to cool with. They may use the metal inside the case to help dissapate the heat via direct contact with heatsinks... like a Dell laptop does.

I also though I saw some small slits in a circular patttern at the top to let heat out, but it may just be me...

Drivers

[SimJockey]

Drivers may not be that necessary. I borrowed a digital camera from my folks a couple of weeks ago, a Panasonic PDR M5 or something. Thought, just for the heck of it, I'd plug it into the USB port on my iMac DV without installing any drivers. Up pops the OS X Image Capture utility asking me what I want to do with these pictures from the camera. So cool.

Re:same DVD-General drive?

[PCM2]

I'm not sure what this post was supposed to mean. The Apple DVD-R drive does everything a CD-R burner can. In fact, it is a CD-R burner, with the additional ability of being able to write to DVD-R media.

The "SuperDrive" is not an Authoring burner, no. Those still cost, last I checked, at least $1,000 more than a General class drive, and probably wouldn't be appropriate for a consumer machine anyway. Their primary market is the professional video production industry.

As far as I can tell, the only thing you're really criticizing the DVD-R drive for is that it doesn't let you use CSS encryption on your own discs. If you're against industry copy protection to begin with, then why on earth do you see that as a problem?

And BTW, yes -- if you use DeCSS-derived software on a Mac, you can make copies of commercial DVDs. The only constraint is that the data contained on the original disc must fit within the capacity of DVD-R media, which is not yet as sophisticated as pressed DVDs. Both Authoring and General DVD-R media can only hold 4.7GB of data, which is half the size of a mass-produced, double-layer DVD disc -- the format that most commercial DVDs seem to be shipping on these days.

G4 or G5? Good question

[Infonaut]

Yeah, it's not exactly clear. Whether they call it the SuperG4 or the G4+ or the G5, the next chip we see in Macs should be substantially faster (let's hope so, after all this waiting!).

Architosh has some interesting info about the PowerPC roadmap.

G4 vs. Wintel Processor Speeds

[rob.eberhardt]

I always hear people on /. complaining that the G4's are slow compared to the latest Intel/AMD chips, but I wonder how many of you have actually used both systems in production.

For the past 6 mos. I've been using a 733Mhz G4 (OS9.x) and a dual-1Ghz Dell Dimension (Win2KPro) for AfterEffects work, and during renders the single-chip G4 beats the pants off the Dell. Almost twice as fast. So, like Steve is always trying to remind us, all Mhz are clearly not created = =.

Re:it's like the lottery!

[rgmoore]

I think that it's the Monte Hall paradox.

For those who don't know, Monte Hall was the host of a gameshow in which the prize was hidden behind one of three doors. They picked one door, another was opened to reveal nothing, and then they were given the option of staying with their pick or switching to the remaining unopened door. It turns out that in a fair contest you should choose to switch; the chance of the first chosen door being right is 1/3 and the remaining door is 2/3 (hence the paradox).

Re:Mount on wall

[westfirst]

During the keynote, Jobs mentioned that the optical drives run slower if they're vertical. So he wants to keep them flat. Thus the blob on the desk.

Re:Biggest reason desktops will still: the display

[maggard]

The iMac looks nice, but a 15" 1024x768 screen won't cut it. Home users are okay at that, but professional mac users aren't going to work at that sort of extremely limited screen resolution.

Which is why the iMac line is the consumer one (doi!)

Apple has 4 main lines:

1. iMac - Intro/consumer line. All-in-one design with quality components & limited expandability ('cause most home folks never change anything and lots was built in anyway) at a low price.
2. Tower models - really the professional desktop line which does cross over into home users with specific needs. Opens easy, slots for cards, customizable.
3. iBook - Laptops for the masses at a great price/product point. Lotsa built-in goodies in a durable case with long batter life.
4. PowerBook - Take-no-prisoners complete desktop replacement offering performance and features at a high but competitive price.

As for Mac's vs x86 boxes - the prices aren't all that far off. Yes one can throw together a Frankenstein PC at lower cost but for a warranteed product from a major manufacturer with quality components (and Apple does use quality displays & such) with the OS included they're generally a good deal, certainly when one considers the integration.

No, they're not to everyone's taste but MacOS X is a great unix and coupled with this hardware it's damn enticing. Besides - it's getting more unix out to more folks then anyone else ever has.

Let's look at that clunky 800-MHz G4

[Weasel Boy]

From http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/

PowerPC G4 @ 800 MHz: 8.2 million RC5 keys/sec
AMD Athlon @ 1600 MHz: 5.7 million RC5 keys/sec
Intel Pentim 4 @ 2000 MHz: 2.9 million RC5 keys/sec

Now let's talk again about how clunky the G4 is.

Re:Some specs

[anti-drew]

And just to be anal, SuperDrive physically has DVD-RW capability, but Apple won't release -W support until the fight between DVD-RW and DVD+RW gets sorted out. Dumb reason, I know.

Actually, it does have -W support, it's just not advertised. If you're lucky enough to have a SuperDrive and some DVD-RW media, try it ... it works! Burns and erases just fine.