Apple Confirms G5 Based iMac to Ship in September

evn writes "Apple Insider and Yahoo News are carrying stories about Apple's 3rd quarter report including confirmation of a G5 iMac during Apple's webcast conference call to discuss the filing: 'IBM's manufacturing problems have also impacted our next generation iMac. We normally don't talk about unannounced products but we feel you need to know about the current situation. The new iMac is based on the G5 processor. We could not secure the necessary supply of G5 processors to launch our new iMac on schedule: and as we indicated a few weeks ago, we now plan to announce and ship it in september.' Apple made $61 million dollars profit on $2.01 billion dollars in Q3/04 and had the highest CPU shipments in three and a half years."

Comments

Cooling

[jdwest]

Cooling issues are at the heart. For those who did not catch it, Apple unloaded on IBM today during the Q3 conference call for delays. IBM promises to have its wafer problems fixed by Q1.

Re:Cooling

[gerardrj]

No.. supply issues are the problem. This was clearly asked and answered in the call.

Question from Steve Malinivich: "To continue on the PPC issue, there's been some suggestion on the web that you have a heating issue with iMac as well, are you saying that's not at all the problem and that its purely the availability of microprocessors?"

Answer: "Steve: The processor is the most critical factor."

They don't say that heat is not an issue at all, but they clearly state that processor supply is, as you say, at the heart. Once can easily see that heating, while perhaps a concern, is not what's causing the delay.

Re:I have no idea how they are going to get G5 iMa

[JamieF]

If you're really in such a hurry, you could lift a finger to try to speed things up.

I just went to www.apple.com/store and clicked through the configurator for the 3 featured G5 configs. No changes, just Select->Continue->Continue from the store main page to get to the shopping cart where there's a ship time estimate.

The dual 1.8GHz: 3-5 business days.
The dual 2GHz: 3-5 business days.
The dual 2.5GHz: 4-6 weeks.

Changing the configuration delays things a bit, but not much. I took the dual-2.0GHz G5 and maxed out the RAM, HD, and video card options, and now it says 7-10 business days.

It looks to me like only the dual 2.5GHz G5 is in short supply (not surprising since it's probably the one that IBM is having the hardest time making the CPU for, though that's just my speculation). The other models aren't. Cancel your order for a dual 2.5 and get a 1.8 or 2.0 dual G5 instead, and tweak the config to your heart's content. Or, if you really really need that 2.5, wait. If you're in a tearing hurry, you could probably walk into an Apple retail store and walk out with one the same day.

Alternatively, you could buy your G5 from MacWarehouse or Outpost.com. Some of them will add RAM and stuff for you; others might not. Outpost.com says they can ship the dual 1.8 and dual 2.0 same-day. CDW says they have dual-1.6 G5's also available same day. This is right on their search results page. I didn't even pick up the phone to find this out. I searched for "G5" on Outpost.com, and MacWarehouse had a link to the closeout 1.6GHz model on their home page.

Using C|Net shopper to find the best price on a dual 2.0GHz G5 shows a list of merchants in which every single one claims to have this model in stock now.

This took me about 10 minutes of surfing to find out. Maybe you should spend a few minutes yourself since it's your computer order?

Re:How relevant are Apple now?

[wfberg]

Apple made $61 million dollars profit on $2.01 billion dollars in Q3/04 and had the highest CPU shipments in three and a half years

That's a miniscule amount when you look at the profits of just about any other tech company. $61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.

R&D costs are, well, costs. Profit is what you're left with after you've paid your costs. Like R&D.

According to AAPL's SEC filings, it spends about $120 million every 3 months on R&D (or about 480 million dollars per year).

Dell spent LESS than that, at $464 million for R&D, even though their turnover is 6 times Apple's, and their profit is $3 billion. Relative to Dell, Apple spends wild amounts of money on R&D.

Of course, all that pales in comparison with IBM's $5 billion R&D budget, but then, IBM is also in the business of researching things that Apple uses in its products, like the G5 processor for example (hard to miss that one, really..)

Re:Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?

[Matrix9180]

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh &story=Tell_Adam_Hes_An_Asshole.txt
http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

For a bit more on "Osborne"