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Apple Releases New PowerBook and the eMac
Martin Kallisti writes "Apple has released new PowerBook models whose improvements include faster processors (up to 800MHz), better resolution, 1MB of L3 cache and 32MB of video memory. Also, a new computer looking much like the old iMacs, called the eMac, has seen the light of day. It's primarily targeted at the education market, and boasts a 700MHz G4 processor and a flat 17" monitor. " As Troc pointed out in another submission, the eMac will be available only to profs/teachers, students and higher education institutions.
I'm already tired of explaining to enquiring non-nerds that my nerd-friends are Emacs developers, not iMac's developers.
I guess the problem just got worse.
The point is that it's a machine designed specifically for education. It has some features and options that consumers don't really want.
One case in point is the CD-ROM only option. Schools like this for security reasons, but who wants to buy a CD-ROM only machine for personal use?
When he introduced the new iMac, Jobs said that they had listened to consumers top 3 requests - Flat Screen, G3 and Superdrive.
The thing about the flat screen is a bit of a killer in education for two reasons - primarly cost, and secondly durability. Schools want the G4 power, but not the extra hassle of the LCD iMac . I'm an admin for a school, and we're certainly leery of the potential for the arm getting busted.
I think the point of edu-only is to give schools what they want and need, without complicating the product line for the general public. I mean, how do explain the differences between the eMac and the basic iMac?
Well there are still plenty more letters left in the alphabet. Personally, I look forward to jMac, wMac, fMac, and 21 other fine computers.
Then, perhaps they will have to use characters from other alphabets. Wonder how you would pronounce ßMac? "Smack?"
-Evan
This may be blaringly obvious to everyone else, but this seems like a good solution to the problems apple has been having getting its hands on LCD parts.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
It seems like Apple not only came up with a new PowerBook, but they also came up with their own brand-spanking new PowerLanguage (tm). With words like:
..., mega-wide
screamingly fast
mind-boggling 60 Gb drive
a tremendous wallop
wicked-fast performance
stunning, dazzling, sleek, blows past
What audience are they targetting with language like that?
an iMac with a 17" screen...wasn't this the thing that people have been clamouring for, and rumours flying over ever since the original iMac was launched? this is what a hell of a lot of people have been waiting for, and apple decides to release it for the educational market only? i don't get it...it uses a CRT, so there should be a lot fewer problems with supply, and it has to be cheaper to produce than the new flat-panel iMac with moving parts, so you can flood the consumer market with it. steve moves in mysterious ways...
You see Apple has large Education Dept & university/tech/college contracts.
This is for them.
But once supplies get into gear, & the price for that spec starts to decrease, they'll open sales for them to the general public, you watch.
The way it will work is that large contracts with Education Dept & universities/techs/colleges will get 1st go.
Then Education staff will be able to by them from the collage Apple shop or through college book & supply shops.
Then it will be anyone with a student card buying from the collage Apple shop or through college book & supply shops.
Then they'l be sold in public stores but only to Education institions, education staff & people with student cards.
Finally when they have gone through all this routine over about 6 months & if supplies stock up a bit, then they'll be released for general sale.
That's the way its occured here where I am, in the past when Apple has released 'education only' products.
There's a feature that's been on almost every Mac, from low end to high end, since Steve Jobs decided to give the company's products their first image makeover. It's strangely absent from the eMac, and now I wonder why it lacks-- --the handles. Oh yeah, scoff if you must, but think about it -- nearly every non-laptop machine in Apple's post-beige era has had handles of some sort, either on the corners (blue G3 and G4 towers) or set in the top (iMacs from the get-go). Even the old iBooks had the plastic carrying handle. And if you think back, remember the very very original 128K Macintosh with the big square mouse? It had a handle too. SE/030? Handle. The eMac represents a departure from the standard design for a number of reasons as stated by other posters, and now there's this too. Yeah, I know, the handle isn't quite as nice as, say, the BSD-compatible core, but it's something I'd grown to rely on. I begin to wonder what's going through the designers' minds.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Actually (from the Apple website)...
Five screen resolutions:
640 by 480 pixels at 138 Hz
800 by 600 pixels at 112 Hz
1024 by 768 pixels at 89 Hz
1152 by 864 pixels at 80 Hz
1280 by 960 pixels at 72 Hz
The eMac has a 17 inch display. Who the hell is going to run that thing at 1280x960!?! I'm sure your eyes would be just fine running at the recommended resolution of 1024x768 @89 Hz.
The actual range of the human eye for refresh rate is somewhere around 60-72 Hz anyway. So even if you do run at that way-too-big-for-this-screen resolution, you're still at the top of the spectrum.
Unless you're some sort of X-mutated cyclopse with a high-refresh eye, you'll be fine.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I'm not so sure that's a dumb idea right now. Apple is pimping the flat-screen iMac like mad to the "rest of us", so limiting the market of the new one is a potentially good way to keep demand high for the more expensive, "cooler" iMac while they still quietly sell the old iMac (remember, they kept a model hanging around at the low end) for a while. Also, since Apple almost always has supply constraints on new models for a while, the eMac can stick to it's intended channel for now.
Not coincidentally, it's the season where edu purchasing for the coming year starts to ramp up - so dedicating the supply to education for now is probably a Good Thing.
If I had to prognosticate further, I'd say to expect a flat-panel iMac speed bump around MWNY, followed by the quiet dropping of the old iMac and the eMac moving into general availability at the low end. Because in the longer run, streamlining their low-end models does make sense.
Oh - FYI, Macs are still only available from "authorized dealers", it's just that CompUSA and Apple themselves are on that list now, along with more mail-order folks than before. Don't be surprised if some eMacs leak into the channel early from some of them.
Anyone want to buy my TiBook 667?
(Actually, I still like it just fine - but boy, is that DVI out sweet!)
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Several anti-Apple cronies have voiced similar sentiments here. Do you guys really not get it? It's not hard. Jesus, Apple doesn't always get it right...not even close to "always"... but listening to some of you guys you'd think they were the worst managed company with the worst products in the entire history of commerce. Listen up guys - clue phone ringing for y'all:
Education institutions don't want flat panels in labs with 3rd graders. And they don't want CD-RW drives. And they're short on cash, too.
Everyday consumers, however, do want flat panel displays, do want CD-RW/DVD drives, and usually do have more money to invest than a grade school - after all they're only buying one machine, not thirty.
If you at all understand the above, then Apple's "new" product makes sense.
Plus, as someone pointed out earlier, this neatly takes some demand off of them for the flat panels. If some of the education market is ordering eMacs, then they won't have to come up with quite the number of flat panel displays that they might have had to.
As for the fool who was blathering on thusly..."oh great this will really prepare me for the real world - they're not even available in the real world..." PLEASE. You're kidding me, right? So if Dell decided to sell a particular configuration of a low end box specifically to the education market...a configuration that contained nothing new...you just hadn't ever gotten this particular CPU, monitor, optical drive config in one box before... that it would be a disaster because it's "not available in the real world?"
I think someone needs to cut the little pills in half tomorrow, mkay?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
In related news, Richard Stallman has insisted that Apple rename its OS X operating system to GNU/OS X. Stallman also called for Apple's renaming of its new eMac computers for education to GNU/eMacs, so as to distinguish it from clones such as X/eMacs.
My journal has hot
That's a very tough problem. I wonder what you can do about it?
One idea would be to use the included DVI->VGA adaptor.
Informative my fat white ass.
If you actually look at the pages, what is now the low end was the high end model before this announcement, and is now $500 cheaper. The old 550mhz G4 laptops are no longer available from the Apple Store anymore. The new options are more expensive than what used to be on there, but they're better. Materials didn't magically start costing less.
Pretty cool, the 17" CRT eMac is the same depth as the 15" CRT iMac (17.1 inches), and only .8 inches taller and wider. That's pretty impressive.
http://www.apple.com/education/emac/specs.html
http://www.apple.com/imac/g3/specs.html
(For some reason in the marketing description they say it's 8mm shorter, not sure why.)
One of the cool thinks about the iMac is that it had no fan, so it was very quiet. I assume this one does, because it doesn't say one way or the other.
I wish Apple, ATI, and the rest of the industry would get together and work up a standard for video cards in laptops. I'd like to see the video cards be removable and not part of the mobo. As long as you had the support of the video card manufacturers like ATI and the GeForce folks, you could allow your laptops video setup to be upgraded when needed. Let's say that ATI comes out with the 8500 with 64MB in the mobility configuration. I do a little surgery on my laptop and *boom* I have a better video card that extends the useful life of the expensive laptop. I think Apple would be an ideal candidate to do this. They make a lot of inovative moves that are initially seen as risky. Many of the become "the thing" and everyone eventually does the same. Apple would be a good place to start this idea. Please Apple, do this!
The PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine is so fearsomely fast that its performance is measured in gigaflops
My wang is so big it's measured in kilometers: 0.00001564km!
- Apple just introduced their new iMac a few months ago. It's gotten great reviews everywhere from the New York Times to BusinessWeek to most every major local daily and geek publication.
- Apple isn't going to confuse the market with an iMac that hearkens back to the older design iMac (which they still sell BTW!)
- However the Education market is a big one for Apple and one they've recently been taking a beating in (in spite of a few big wins.) The last education-specific-product they had was the ill-starred eMate (Netwon-based indestructo-laptop) that burnt their customers when it was suddenly dropped.
- Folks have been whining at Apple for a 17" iMac for forever. However Apple made it clear they couldn't do it in the iMac formfactor. Well, this is pretty close but yeah, not the same.
- So here they've solved two problems with one stone, er, Mac. They've satisfied the Edu market with a cheapie low-maint iMac that has scaled up to the 17" world. They've also managed to satisfy that market without detracting from their can't-ship-them-fast-enough new iMac design.
- Will this eMac move into the Consumer market? Probably not as such. Right now the service, support, marketing etc. for this model is nicely contained in the Edu division of Apple and likely to stay there for a while.
- On the other hand businesses have really taken a shine to a iMac line. This is a bit of a quandary for Apple as they'd far prefer their G-series of Macs be the corporate model.
- The eMac might lead the way to a compromise: Here's a cheapie iMac-alike that could be a great client packaged with a MacOS X Server. This could get Apple into the 1,000-cheap-standardized-ruggedized-identical-bui
l t-to-be-centrally-managed desktop model that they've been completely absent from.
- However this would somewhat expand Apple's product line which is something they're leery of after the excesses of the late 80's-90's.
- Right now Apple's product line-up is Consumer with iMac & iBook, Professional with G4 & PowerBook. The Cube was an odd duck to this - a cross between the iMac & G4. However this is almost exactly what the eMac is just cheaper and in a different formfactor.
- So eMac = Cube v.2?
- This is my guess. Not only did Apple listen to what Edus wanted from an iMac but they also learned what didn't work with the Cube. Now they've merged them and I wouldn't be surprised in a rev or two to see Apple start a big public push back onto corporate desktops.
- Just as NT was perceived as a better OS as it came in desktop & server versions (gotta have the same across the enterprise!), it was "friendlier" then Netware and the other competition (can't get nicer then Apple!) and "industrial strength" (MacOS X runs BSD for goodness sakes!) I bet Apple is getting ready for the same assault back.
- A range of hardware, expanding marketshare, an OS that runs the same stuff as "the big boys", easy to develop custom apps for, ease of use, runs MS Office; Apple could regain some serious ground.
All IMHO of course.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.