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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!
http://sakots.pekori.jp/imgboard/imgs/img200201071 62803.jpg
I wonder if Apple will start selling wall mounting kits. Then you would take up zero desk space.
I keep expecting it to start hopping around like the Pixer desk lamp! ;)
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.
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
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Until Apple makes a 1.5Ghz G5, they won't get me as part of thier market share.
You're going to be waiting a while, since Apple doesn't make CPUs of any speed -- that's Motorola and IBM's job.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
the answer should be obvious:
iCe.
Thank you, be sure and tip your waitress.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Hmmm, that would explain that quote from Steve Jobs about wanting to reach out an touch it.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
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.
Is it just me...?
(1) these things won't stack very well on the "bring out yer dead" carts wheeled about during downsizing...
(2) I afraid of the ($0.32 cost) $199.95 monitor arm after a few months and it gets a *little* loose, and *slowly* drifts down...slowly...like a glacier...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
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.
Breakfast served all day!
The iMac isn't for people that care about fsb.
The iMac is for the consumer, it's been 3 and a half years but alot of Slashdotters don't understand this.
The iMac is for people that want a computer they doesn't take knowledge of computers to use.
College kids that arn't in CS, Grandmas, Mothers, cousins, aunts. The Art kids or the math kids at my work, they don't give a shit about a front-side bus speed or a clock multiple. It's an iMac. It can connect to your digital camera without drivers or installing anything and it works. It'll burn CDs and DVDs too if you want it.
It's an iMac, it just works. That's why it's got a 100 MHz fbs. Because it's market doesn't care about 100 vs. 133 fbs or what kind of RAM is in it.
Can video be sent wirelessly?
Just imagine if this were possible! We could just put the screens in our living rooms, and people could broadcast all kinds of entertainment to us! It would be a sort of Radio but with moving pictures!
Ah, we can but dream of a time when such marvels might be possible!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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 = =.
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.
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
Which is why the iMac line is the consumer one (doi!)
Apple has 4 main lines:
- 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.
- Tower models - really the professional desktop line which does cross over into home users with specific needs. Opens easy, slots for cards, customizable.
- iBook - Laptops for the masses at a great price/product point. Lotsa built-in goodies in a durable case with long batter life.
- 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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
is that it doesn't look like a computer. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Apple is the one computer company that is doing anything original with case design and form factor. Sony has the most stylish x86 boxes out there, but they still look like... boxes. We've hit the point where we don't HAVE to build computers that look like bricks, but you wouldn't know it by looking at PCs these days.
Kudos to Apple for daring to do something a little different, even if it does make us think of a desk lamp. ;)
This
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
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.