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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!
I wonder if Apple will start selling wall mounting kits. Then you would take up zero desk space.
The comments about the lack change to the PowerMac desktop line are spot on...Apple has a real problem here.
The iMac now has a G4 at comparable speeds, a Superdrive, more expandable RAM capability, and OH YEAH it comes with a 15" LCD display. The PowerMac has the same thing, for $600 more, and without the display (so throw in another $500 if you want to be able to actually see the output of your computer). It is more than just disappointing...it is totally illogical.
I will grant that the PowerMac is more expandable in terms of PCI slots, but...I can no longer think of a single good reason anyone would want to buy a PowerMac, which means unless Apple updates them before the iMacs ship in January, their high-end desktop sales are pretty much going down the crapper.
sean
The only problems that I could see with a feature such as this is that you might be able to change the center of gravity of the machine enough to tip it over and it might be difficult to design a mechanism that would be both lightweight and durable.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Are they gonna update OSX so the display could be easily rotated 90 deg. for long web pages and the like? That'd be cool.
OK - I love the new iMac. It's great-looking, finally a G4 is included, the screen looks real nice, and the drive combinations are right on. This is probably the Mac that the Cube should have been. The price is about $100 higher than I'd like, but I expect to see the price points all adjusted once the new Pro machines _finally_ ship. Even though they still have old iMacs around for now, they need to get the new one to the sub $1000 point ASAP.
iPhoto is a compelling new application, and I'm going to download it and play with it tonight - it supports my Olympus 3000 so I'll try it directly instead of just using the reader like I normally do.
The new reconfiguration of the iBook line is nice, too - and the 14.1" screen on the high-end model will be a plus.
But - what about the Pro line? Apple's margins are fattest on the tower Macs, and they're not announcing anything today. Unless they do something soon, expect a bad quarter. I don't know about Motorola's yields, but Apple must be pretty pissed at them since they obviously can't get enough G5 (or fast G4 - whatever) processors to announce anything yet.
So, they'll sell a ton of iMacs, but I was hoping for a little more this time around.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Almost every Apple event gets mucho hype by the rumor community now. People speculate like mad, heck, I know 2 guys who actually made bets on what was going to be announced.
Then, after each show, a large number of people are disappointed and a few are wildly happy. A couple of in between the 2. But mostly people are just disappointed in Apple for not living up to their expectations! Granted, this time Apple _did_ beat their own drum way too loudly, but I can't think of any other computer hardware company that gets this kind of press, rumor mongering, and vast discussion after the event.
Just wondering if anyone has a good idea why Apple inspires all this? Is it Steve-o and his RDF? Because Apple is the underdog? Apple's penchant for always pushing the boundry on HW design (like, love, or hate it)? Personally I think it's because Apple keeps innovating, whether it's a success like the original iMac or a failure like the Cube, keeps people wondering "Just what the hell are they gonna pull next?!"
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Yeah, but what this misses is the whole Digital Hub philosophy. And no, that's not just the latest marketing catch-phrase. Apple seems to have remembered that the idea behind computers is to make all our lives easier and more enjoyable. They're trying to do it by streamlining things that we already do (or would like to do but didn't feel like dealing with the hastle). And I think they do a fantastic job of it with their Digital Hub software/hardware. I have an iPod and I think it's great. Jobs wasn't just blowing smoke when he quoted all the reviews saying it's the best digital music player ever. And the integration with iTunes is not a small part of that. iTunes is an extremely easy to use, yet flexible app. The integration with iPod is seamless. The iMovie tutorial I did was pretty cool, and I can't wait to play with it when I actually have some video I want to mess with. I haven't used iDVD yet (probably won't happen until I make my iMovies). I can't wait to use iPhoto. One of the reasons I don't use my digital camera much is that it's just so much of a hastle actually making anything of the images I take. Sure, I can drag and drop them onto my Wintel machine and then I can edit them with some other utility. But iPhoto appears to share one of the greatest features of iTunes...its library function. Sure, functionally it's not a whole lot different from what you can normally get from the filesystem. But it does add a LOT more convenience and accessibility.
Right now Apple's concentrating more on useability and convenience than sheer power. And at the moment, that's most of what I'm looking for. Yeah, I'll probably always keep a Wintel machine to play games on. But to an increasing degree, that's ALL i'm doing on Wintel. The user experience on the Macs is hard to leave behind. And that's really where Apple's adding the value. Not simply in the basic power of the hardware. Though the hardware isn't all that bad either (especially when "Velocity Engine" comes into play).
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
I forget how long it takes to decrypt a DVD
EfDTT by Charles Hannum, whose source code fits under half a kilobyte, can descramble CSS data in real-time using only 10% of a G4 Cube's CPU power. Think of what an implementation that uses more tables can do.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is a "rosette" pattern of perforations on the top of the base unit, and a ring of closely spaced slots around the base, under the bottom lip. A single fan draws air from the base trough the top of the unit cooling all internal components. The fan, according to the Apple website, runs at about the same db level as the hard-drive (~25db) so it should be very quiet.
I trust that this provides adequate cooling and depending on the environment the iMac is used in, won't get fouled by dust and crap, as packing all that kit into such a small package means the chances it will clog up over time are quite high. At least in my beige box there's room for that crap to accumulate without adverse effects to my components.
Bullfrog
Yes, for $1300 you can do that. However, people who would do that are not part of Apple's target market. People keep forgetting that Apple is a premium brand. They aren't competing with people who would order their own parts and build a box. With a $1300 entry price they aren't even competing with Compaq etc in the bargain market. Your same argument can be used to take a knock at Sony's PCs as well. Point is, for a premium brand like Apple, you pay a premium price.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
That is 100% it. Apple has realized, (and hopefully the consumers are realizing too) that a 2+ Ghz processor with a 60 Gig harddrive and whatever is of no use to the average person if the software running on it is too complex. Another 400 mhz of clock speed might enable the computer to encode mp3's twice as fast, but that advantage is wasted if crummy software requires me to spend twice as long organizing my songs and setting up the CD.
iMovie isn't full featured by any means, but it's incredibly easy to use. I can do things with iMovie on an ibook faster than can be done with something like premier on any type of hardware you care to throw at it. And hey, it's free as well. Hard to beat that.
The new iMac is about more than itself. It's more about creating a home for the software. It's about creating a new interaction between people and computers. This interaction won't mean that much to powerusers, at least not in the beginning, but that's why it's targeted at the everyday consumer. I think it's quite brilliant.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.