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Apple Delays New iMac
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is running a story that Apple has delayed the release of the new iMac until September and has stopped taking orders for the current models."
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This may have more to do with clearing old inventory in retail channels ahead of the traditional educational back to school computer bonanza.
A well timed announcement of a really sexy new iMac in August will get everyone excited, without cannibalising sales of the present generation of stock.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Its amazing to see Apple actually pre-announce a product! This is virtually unheard of, espessially for something as important as the next gen iMac. It looks to me like this pre-announcement is the result of some terrible mistake in predicting when all parts (PowerPC 970FX maybe?) would be available.
I had one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs. While other people were praising its beauty, I thought it was kinda ugly. As a fashion statement, the blue translucent plastic seemed somehow akin to bell-bottom trousers and leisure suits. The periodic release of new machines with different color schemes seemed to support that view.
But it was a fine computer. The original iMac was a brave departure from the beige boxes we'd all become so accustomed to. The compact all-in-one design simplified things for people who don't want to invest a lot of time in figuring out how everything goes together. (You or I may feel unfulfilled with any computer we haven't built with our bare hands from raw sand, but there are plenty of folks who just want to use the thing.)
The iMac moved things forward in part by turning its back on a lot of legacy stuff. The iMac upset a lot of long-time Mac fanatics who were upset that they couldn't plug their old ADB and serial peripherals into the USB ports. Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives, I guess the iMac's work here is done.
Snif... Drat... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
Thank you for your support.
I'm not sure how valid this thought is but it would seem that using Apple products in a school (talked about in the article) setting would pidgeon hole students into a very limited sector of the market.
That is moronic, and yet oddly it is used by school districts all the time to put a Windows monoculture in place. Think about it: what system could possibly be used that isn't totally outdated by the time kids graduate in 5 years? Even if you gave them expert-level training on Windows XP, Microsoft's defacto standard that enjoys a monopoly position, that "education" is down the drain when Longhorn ships. The same is true of any non-monopoly system, too. The pigeon hole playing field is pretty level.
I would have loved being able to choose to work on a platform of my choosing instead of being forced into one thing.
Kids don't know shit. Platforms of their "own choosing" are video game consoles. Teachers aren't there to follow the students' instruction; it's the other way around. What school administration needs to go with is a computer that will build a technology base for the students without causing the teachers a lot of headaches. That neither describes Windows nor Linux.
Yeah, yeah, someone says it every time. But seriously, if a company like MS did this, the same people who I see here calling this a 'legitimate business tactic' and 'good marketing' would be calling it a shallow, greedy attempt to abuse market power.
No, I'm fairly sure a lot of slashdotters would rejoice if Microsoft were to delay a product until it's truly ready. Throw in the discontinuation of the current product as well and you've got the ingredients for the declaration of a bonafide Open Source holiday.
On a serious note, I think you've fallen into the trap of thinking the specific action is what people object to. Nobody really cares about integrating a browser into the OS (although the way MS did it, technologically, was a big screw-up--but that confuses the issue, there are many instances (WebKit on OS X, Konqeror on KDE) where it's been done right). It's not the action, it's the ultimate effect the action has on the user that people really are fed up with.
Which brings us back to the topic at hand. What is the effect of Apple's announcement? Media buzz? Big deal, who cares. It doesn't quash Dell or IBM by locking them out of a market, it doesn't pull the rug out from under the consumer. In fact, it's the result of a screw up at Apple, and they're afraid of an already slow and, to some, stale product continuing to get ever more slow and stale. They've fessed up, and humbled themselves before the consumer. What they've done is take a bad situation and do the right thing about it.
This is a good thing, and if MS did it, I, for one, would find it refreshing. Sadly, MS rarely does the right thing, so I have to look to Apple (and, for other but somewhat similar reasons, IBM) for a company that I can feel good about dealing with--that the persuit of money doesn't corrupt everything it touches, as it so often seems to do (such as you see with the RIAA, MS, and Sony's ATRAC players).
Well, if Apple's flat out of iMacs for at least two full months, my guess is whatever little inventory is out there on the market shouldn't have that much difficulty finding happy new owners who don't want to wait 'till September.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
As a CS student, I often wonder why are labs are all WIndows. Its a horrible OS to write software in, IMHO.
It's especially a horrible OS to run a lab on. Ditto for Macs.
I don't see for the life of me how a university with a comprehensive identity-management system (they all have one, if they have email) gets by having desktop settings and file access tied to the machine and not the user. 'Specially given that college kids are not exactly sedentary.
When I was in school, we still used telnet and pine on AIX to check email. That at least gave you a small, portable console environment that was your own. Now that schools are moving to web-based email, things are even worse.
Three words, unis: Sun m.f.-ing Rays. The kids get their own desktop preferences, browser settings, bookmarks and files wherever they go; everyone's happy.
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I think Apple was trying to stress the internet as a medium for transfering data rather than floppies when they released the iMac. They probably thought emailing attachments would work better than carrying floppies. I'm just assuming that's what the "i" stood for.
And they probably were trying to let market forces allow a larger capacity disc become a standard as well, like Zip discs or memory card readers, because 3.5" discs just didn't have enough capacity for a lot of things people needed. Without an established new standard, leaving USB ports available so users can add their choice of drive would seem the logical thing to do.
Really, this is good for a lot of people. Sure, they can't get an iMac right now, BUT, this will also save them the agony of "I bought an iMac 2 months ago, and now it's a discontinued piece of obsolescense! Thanks a lot, Steve!" syndrome.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I know all of one person who is not a CSE who has opened their computer to upgrade it. I know one more who has paid the cost of a new computer to upgrade theirs (when it made no sense).
No one else's has ever been opened unless I was visiting and wanted a peek inside.
And remember; you can't upgrade PCI or video in an imac. Aside from that, they're about as expandable as one of the towers, and they come with anything a *normal* user (ie, someone who doesn't play FPS or need SATA RAID) would need built-in.
The fact that its an "all new iMac" line hints at these models being G5 based. I don't see Apple completely redesinging the iMac just to release another G4 version. This would mean another complete redesign before they go G5. IBM seems to claim that the 970FX can run at very low power consumptions and is even suitable for a laptop. I am almost certain that these iMacs will be G5 based.
I can't quite figure out why Apple didn't roll out a prototype of the iMac at WWDC or spill a few pictures to the rumor sites (to quickly remove later). Is there more buzz to be had by not hinting at what's to come? I mean Apple stock took a 6% drop in the futures market already -- wouldn't building up some kind of semi-tangible excitment help mitigate that?
;^D Toss your stockholders a bone!
Apparently not, as Apple seems to make pretty smart PR moves, but I still wonder -- Why not spill the beans now? I suppose the G5 in the iMac is a shoo-in at this point (and we'd be disappointed if it wasn't), but how about another hint or two? Maybe it'll show movies from the net and replace your TV. Maybe the floppy's back!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
d) Apple engineers are trying to get the G5 into a form factor that is up to apple standards, not Dell Standards.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'd have to disagree with you here. I think knowing enough about computers to be comfy opening the case is optional. Or should be.
People don't purchase cars they can't open the hood. They know when the clothes drier is making funny noises they need to take a look inside and see what's causing the blockage.
Beyond adding gas and -- maybe -- changing the oil, I'm betting that most people take their car to a mechanic for maintenance.
I did build a PC once, and kept upgrading the hardware for years. But it was a hobby, very much like my Dad used to tinker with cars. Eventually I got tired of that hobby ... and I bought an iMac.
Yet when someone's Outlook toolbar "magically" disappears, they don't bother to look at all for the right-click menu they just used. They call support, we come over, show them for the 80th time how to turn menus on and off, then they immediately choose to forget it.
I think it's less "choosing to forget" than having different priorities about what's worth remembering. It may be hard to believe, but remembering details about using computers is not high on everyone's attention priority list.
Look again. The JP computers were SGIs and Macs. The GUI our little vegetarian hacker used was an SGI demo of a 3D file system interface. You can find it here:
m l
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.ht
A G4 iMac gives you the UNIX capability and graphics of an SGI machine (I worked with them around 1990) with the ease of use of a Mac. Plus it is more powerful than your old Cray. JP today could be done on iMacs.
Considering that the SGI machine that I worked with cost as much as a house back then, and Macs were much more expensive, the iMac is a real bargain. You can also pick up the iMac and smack a raptor with it, which you can't do with the other computers used in JP very easily.
A pity we can't get a port of the game "Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis" for the Mac. I really, really love that game! It would be so cool to control my parks on a real iMac.
"Oh yeah: 'Oooh!' 'Aaah!'; that's how it always starts, but then later there's running and um.. screaming."
Ian Malcolm, The Lost World: Jurassic Park