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.

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.

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: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 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: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.