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Apple Introduces New G5 iMac
peatbakke writes "Well, here it is. Looks like the rumors of computer+monitor combined into a sleek little case were true." It's mostly what you'd expect both design-wise and specwise. And I want it.
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So how long until we get a new slashdot icon that looks like this model?
Here is a larger view of the inside of the machine. It's one hell of a lot more accessible than the last imac (or any of the imacs to date, for that matter).
:)
Reminds me of the layout of my favourite pizzabox machines - just standing up
It's a pretty rad computer considering what it is.
/application bundles for the mac.
Cue all the comments about 5200 geforce not being enough -- it's not meant for that.
"They should have had a 2 gighz in there " - that would eat into the market above it.
It is for offices and for homes -
The criticisms are:
If you are going to make it like a TV... they should have gone all the way and put a TV tuner in there - this is the killer app to beat microsoft on and to complete the iLife suite. An Apple (with all the associated easiness) TV center with maybe a grey one for corporate use with no TV.
The other critcism is that they should have a place in their product line for a headless box, so that all the hackers can get their grubby paws onto it and innovate on OSX - but really that constitutes competition with their other product lines, and constitutes competition with their own software so they won't do it.
They are family centric, gamers (yeah yeah, apple gamers, oxymoron, kekeke) can up the ante to a dual g5...so the only criticism left is that there aren't many good (I know there are options, but not outstanding ones) TV tuner
I hope I've cleared up alot of the "OMG only a 5200 nvidia" bullshit here - that's not it's purpose. But if it's purpose is that lazy kind of home desktop, it should have TV. But perhaps apple is thinking ahead to a TCPIP broadband world and a movie service along the lines of iTunes (pixar distribution channel anyone?) - it does leave a gap in their product line though.
Oh, and as slashdot still hasn't posted this story I'll add the "Looks like they were trying to get the g5 into a tablet/laptop but didn't quite make it" joke, which goes hand in hand with the "omg no g5 laptops yet". Slashdot is so predictable.
Sidenote - IBM should bring out said headless box, black alu case like the NeXT with a single G5 in it clocked a 2gighz and a 100% linux compat mobo.... That would soon become a cult item I imagine - but apple would have a fit because it would encorage all the unix geeks on their platform to swap and it would encorage a strong user base of a ppc linux to get going. So, like I say, not going to happen. Actually, can someone enlighten the thread as to who *owns* the G5? Could IBM do this?
speculation/discourse.... check
questioning of realworld performance combined with gamer
joke...... check
omg look the graphs on game performance have no scale.... check..stfu you are boring me....
g5 hotness jokes..... check
256 mem ram not enough.... check
wistfully wanting some other company to release a headless apple because apple won't.... check
questioning of apple users sexual preferences.... check
raise question of one buttoned mouse..... maybe they have a one buttoned mouse by default because it forces their app/UI designers to be creative - let those that want two buttons have them... but let all apps be designed with only one in mind (remember that gnome desktop designers who are hiding everything and anying, even if it should be there - although I don't mind spatial atm, I can see it going too far). Let us hear the end of the one buttoned mouse whinging.......
and wait for it...."I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of one of the new iMacs (a 1.6gighz G5 w/256 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that."
exhausting most of the pointless cliched bullshit in a slashdot thread before it's begun.... priceless^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprofit!!!
and hell, and I don't even own a fucking apple.
Not trolling... just giving something for discussion. If anybody buys me one, I promise I'll add an apple section to tech-recipes. :)
$1,299.00
17-inch widescreen LCD
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
512K L2 cache
533MHz frontside bus
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
80GB Serial ATA hard drive
Slot-load Combo Drive
$1,499.00
17-inch widescreen LCD
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
512K L2 cache
600MHz frontside bus
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
80GB Serial ATA hard drive
Slot-load SuperDrive
$1,899.00
20-inch widescreen LCD
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
512K L2 cache
600MHz frontside bus
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
160GB Serial ATA hard drive
Slot-load SuperDrive
Dell Dimension 4600C Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor (2.80GHz, 533 FSB)
Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition WHXP
Memory 256MB Dual Channel shared DDR SDRAM at 333MHz
Monitors Dell Multifunction LCD TV/Monitor Selected Below TV [320-2913] 5
Video Cards Integrated Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 IV
Hard Drive 40GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive 40 [341-0836] 8
Floppy Drive and Additional Storage Devices No Floppy Drive Included NFD
Mouse Dell® 2-button scroll mouse SM
Network Interface Integrated 10/100 Ethernet IN
Modem 56K PCI Data/Fax Modem DFAX
CD or DVD Drive FREE UPGRADE! 24X CD-RW/ DVD Combo Drive
Dell W1700 LCD TV w/1 Yr Svc Qty 1
FREE Dell 720 Color Printer with 1 Yr Advanced Exchange Service Qty 1
TOTAL: $1,373.00
looks just like something Microsoft is trying to push... oh yeh the tablet pc
Wait for the patents from Apple?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I certainly miss the old Desk lamp design, time to find another desk lamp.
i remember reading a macworld in 1994 showing conceptual designs from the apple industrial design department.
:)
they had something like this (along with a mac based on the tizio lamp, and a tablet mac)
too bad gateway got it to market a few years ago
I like it better than the last one, for me this is the true iMac with a flat screen. Let's hope i will have enought money to buy it before they release the next one...those damn PCs are cheap!
I guess when someone shoots the monitor and says they destroyed the computer I can't laugh at the movie anymore.
Leave it to apple to spoil my bad action movie jokes...
While I never really liked the look of previous iMacs, I must give Apple kudos on this one.
It looks *extremely* slick, and I these would look so much better as the terminals in librarys and what have you, although probably way overkill.
And the one cord in the back is a far cry from my desk, lol.
This thing is only shipped with 256M of RAM by default? And only upgradable to 2GB?
The old iMacs could hold 1GB. This one is about 10 times faster and maxes out at twice the memory. This is pretty poor. Why does apple insist on shipping systems with such little memory.
Also, why is the FSB at 1/3 of the clockspeed of the CPU, as opposed to 1/2?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It looks great, has a G5, comparable power to a PC and isn't so expensive. (remember it's including a very nice 20 inch screen).
Interesting points, it has a VESA compliant arm, so you can wall mount it easily. And Apple still haven't managed to get a clue about RAM, shipping a PC with 256 MB of ram is NOT ACCEPTABLE anymore.
this is not 1999, OS X needs at least 512 MB to run well.
Because it looks an awful lot like the pictures the rumour sites (including Slashdot) posted: and were "admitted to be fakes"!!).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
It looked like this but was black and had a smaller lcd (which was the style at the time) with a blazingly fast 486 processor...
http://www.monorailcomputer.org/index.html
The most amazing space-saving feature is that it holds it's own power supply in that thin enclosure, so no ugly power bricks sitting on your desk or floor. If I didn't already have a dual 2.5Ghz G5 coming, this would look pretty attractive.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
Inside, you'll find enough modern technology to make even nerds drool. /me looks on as drool slowly pours from his chin to lightly touch the submit button...
Nice pic but it is slow already.. :|
I've mirrored the above image here
It's as inexpensive as a IBM clone and worth more in value.
As an aside, this weekend I called apple care to get my logic board on my G3 Ibook replaced for the third time. I wasn't pleased, and I asked for a new one. Guess what? They're shipping a new Ibook G4 1gz for me. That's service. Barring the fact that the hard ware was faulty, they really came through on this one. That's why I buy apple.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
...You can't price style, baby! :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
As posted here: http://live.macobserver.com/article/2004/07/paris2 004_keynote.shtml
:-) - posted by Bryan
Paris 2004 - Live Coverage of Steve Jobs Keynote
3:00AM CDT, August 31st, 2004
[4:44 AM] We aren't sure that the unit shown on stage was an actual working unit. It may have been a body with a paper display covering it. We aren't sure, of course, but we wanted to make note of that. - posted by Bryan
[4:41 AM] We are seeing a video for the new iMac now. Apple is comparing it to the iPod, the way the music player sits in the Dock. Also, the video says "From the creator of the iPod," showing that Apple is trying to leverage the success of the music player. Jonathan Ive says it is "quiet and utterly serene" in the video. - posted by Bryan
[4:38 AM] US$1299 - 17" 256 MB RAM, Combo Drive, 80 GB drive, 64 MB video card. This compares to US$1799 for the old starting iMac.
US$1499 - 17", with 1.8 GHz.
US$1899 - 20" display (1680 x 1050), 2.2" thick, 1.8 GHz G5, 256 MB RAM, 160 GB drive, SuperDrive, and same 64 MB video card.
They will begin shipping in mid-September! - posted by Bryan
[4:37 AM] You can unscrew three screws, and the entire back comes off. The crowd loves it!
The G5 module, when looking at the back, is on the right side. There are three fans in the unit, and it is "quiet as a whisper." - posted by Bryan
[4:35 AM] SuperDrive. 1.8 GHz G5. 600 MHz frontside bus. 400 MHz DDR RAM, up to 2 GB. Serial ATA hard drives, AGP 8X graphic slots. The speakers are mounted on the bottom, so they reflect off the desk, up to the user. The keyboard will slide underneath the display when you are not using it.
There are three 5 USB (3 2.0, 2 1.1), two FireWire, a modem slot, Ethernet (10/100 Base-T), audio-in, audio-out, both headphone and optical), power button on the bottom. - posted by Bryan
[4:34 AM] "Everyone is ging to be asking "where does the computer go?"
All of the connectors are on the left side, all in a row. Again, the crowd is going wild. - posted by Bryan
[4:33 AM] It's white in color, and the crowd is going wild. It has a grey Apple logo on front. Everyhting fits together right behind the display. - posted by Bryan
[4:32 AM] It looks like just a Cinema Display with a DVD slot loader on right side towards the top. Aluminum foot. It's the world's thinest desktop computer, at less than 2" thick. - posted by Bryan
[4:31 AM] The iMac G5 demonstration has begun. - posted by Bryan
[4:31 AM] Apple has sold 7.5 million iMacs, which works out to2.38 per minute over six years. - posted by Bryan
[4:29 AM] The iChat demo ended with Bertrand Serlet video conferencing in. The crowd loved his brief conversation in French. - posted by Bryan
[4:20 AM] We're on to iChat now. The last time we saw such a demo, it included lots of people from around the world in Apple's very cool iChat AV update in Tiger. That does, of course, bring to mind the idea that perhaps will see a certain iCEO who is in northern California, and if we do, we might even see some new hardware... - posted by Bryan
[4:19 AM] Mr. Schiller has moved on to demonstrating the iLife suite. This is the same demo that we have seen before... - posted by Bryan
[4:09 AM] We've moved on to Dashboard, Apple's implementation of a Widget engine. - posted by Bryan
[4:05 AM] For those keeping score at home, the US Apple Store is now, and finally, offline. - posted by Bryan
[4:02 AM] Well, Mr. Schiller went on to a H.264 demo instead of the iMac. Go figure. Interestingly, he specifically did not mention any release dates for this new digital video technology.
From H.264, we are moving on to a demonstration of Safari RSS. - posted by Bryan
[3:54 AM] During Mr. Schiller's Spotlight demonstration, he "found" a document on his demo Mac called "New Products Demo." This will, undoubtedly, be the new iMac everyone is waiting to see.
[3:43 AM]
I will work to elevate you, just enough to bring you down
Is it me, or does this picture show a lot of condensers?
Most motherboards I have seen don't have so many, or not so big. Or am I wrong?
Just wondering...
The new iMac design is pretty similar to the "spy shots" that popped up on the net a few days back (which itself turned out to be a hoax). I wonder if the person who took those picturew knew how close he actually was......
There's never enough when you have too little
So when do we see the touch screen version?
This would make for a perfect kiosk installation.
I want one, or two...
Torcuill
That's a 1.6 or 1.8GHz G5 processor, 533 or 600MHz frontside bus, 256MB DDR SDRAM running at 400MHz and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB graphics memory. So you'll be able to play Worlds of Warcraft, Doom III and other fantastic entertainment.
Is there a Mac Doom III out yet? Can we have some benchmarks?
Ok, it is just monitor, which should be a good thing, but what happened to esthetics?
At first, I was a little underwhelmed with the design. Hey, it just looks like their monitor; big deal. But after looking at it for a while, I like it.
Conceptually, this is even more impressive than Apple's previous G4 Cube design. In that case, you had a Kleenex-sized box that housed the computer. Now it's all housed in the screen, along with the slot loading drive. Leads me to think they'll have a G5 PowerBook sometime soon.
I also like the way Apple is explicitly marketing it as an upsell to their wildly successful iPod.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
...that cooling would be a problem in this form factor, wouldn't you? Sure, I know that the chips Apple uses don't run at the blistering, silicon-melting temperatures of the Athlon-XP, but the new hard drive I got not so long ago runs hot enough to be uncomfortable to the touch. How do they get away with it?
:-D
Another thing: It really does look so far, so iMac, doesn't it? I suppose that I'm the only one who likes having a nice big chunky case to show for my money?
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
The graphics-card is lame, the bus-speed is lower compared to G5, but overall... the design. It's just plain boring. When was the last time that apple-addicts were bored when a new machine was introduced?
- 5159
Yes, Apple, I'm bored. The G4 iMac was a lot more interesting to look at than this machine. And design is what apple-addicts are really looking after.
Here's some nice examples for great iMac designs: http://www.mackompass.de/
PLUS: no heating problems here? Picture from iside: http://forum.macnews.de/forum/show?mid=8894.1839.
Now we get to see if postponing all of the iMac sales a couple months ago allowed them to get ready for the demand these new computers will have. It will be interesting if the delay will mean shipping dates closer to now than X-Mas.
Original source for the images. Apple's bandwidth and servers are probably a little more /. proof
how does it read those mini CDs if it has a slot in CD player and no tray?
Looks kinda heavy (what's its weight?) with somewhat inadequate support/stand. When it falls (and, say, the screen breaks) do they cover it w/ warranty?
Please use Coraled URL's, they will last much longer. Like this.
Starting with the new headphone jack that's also a mini-optical plug. So you can watch DVDs and listen to them in 5.1 surround sound. You'll also find a passel of USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 connectors for your camera, camcorder or gamepad. Or if you want to connect your iMac to your TV or a digital projector, the mini-VGA port gives you the option. The line in jack lets you record an electric guitar into GarageBand
Kind of funny, how silly this makes Windows Media Center PCs look. Even small form-factor cubes don't look as sexy as this. Exactly the type of machine that could adorn any room in a house. Good work, Apple.
You can grab the images from Apple's iMac G5 PR images page.
...They'd like their design back:
o dd etails.asp?system_id=prf5sc&seg=hm
http://products.gateway.com/products/GConfig/pr
Seriously, a few models back they had a PIII based on a i810 platform complete with an all-in-one design, side loading CD-ROM/PCMCIA, etc. Not as slick, same concept.
What is old, is new again!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Errr, it's not made for that... it's 17 pounds, lacks an internal battery, lacks a touchscreen, lacks a stylus....
This looks like a great device!
It may just turn out to be the first Apple I ever buy.
Another big advantage is that now PC clone makers will undoubtedly start making look-alikes, which is good for everyone...
For the Apple-lovers who think this is really news, have a look at this:
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/iopener.php
Still a good move from Apple!
...meet the i-Opener. The year 2000 called, they want their computer design back.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
So how much does it weigh?
Never confuse volume with power.
Wow, this is alot more innovative than the desk lamp design. Throw in airport extreme, hi speed rf keyboard/mouse, and this is a pretty sweet comp to just set up in the kitchen or something. Ya know, for rich people. This really seems to be getting back to the spirit of the original design. The desk lamp always looked ugly and fragile to me, and ugly in comparison to the new G5 towers.
A GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. You can get better video in a PowerBook. I guess that settles it: no Doom 3 for OS X.
Hopefully Virginia Tech won't take all of them...
Apple always seems to do this on their low-end machines as a cost-savings measure, and yes, it is somewhat annoying. BUT, if you really need more than 2GB of RAM, you may as well just spend a little extra money and get one of the dual G5 desktops, where you can get 4 or 8GB. Let's be honest, I can't imagine most home users are going to be craving 2GB+ of memory in their ~$1500 iMac.
I'd be willing to bet the FSB thing is also a cost saving measure, and perhaps a way to better differentiate their "pro" desktop line from the iMacs.
a vertical design for an all in one computer with an lcd seems to make the most sense. but when apple introduced the first lcd imac, they said that one of the first ideas was a vertical design, and they scrapped that, because there was a problem with the optical drive, that in a vertical position it could only spin up to a certain speed (or something like that...). what's changed that not they DO want a vertical design now?
Looking at this picture, I don't want to imagine what an iMac setup would look like once you get some peripherals plugged in.
Say you plug in a printer, a scanner, a digital camera dock, and iPod dock, some amplified speakers, your ethernet cable, perhaps the phone cable for faxing, and a firewire hard disk, that thing will have 8 cables just hanging there, on the side of the machine, with no support whatsoever. And since there's nothing below the connectors but thin air, what the user will see is a bunch of cables just hanging from the back of the machine. I'm no design engineering guru, but that wasn't too well thought-out, was it? Notice that all the photos are of the iMac with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
They should've put the connectors on the stand, near the bottom. Or in the middle of the screen, with a cable guide on the stand.
But as always, I'll wait to see one in person before passing a definitive judgement. I was wronged by the previous iMacs' pictures, this might be no different.
..that in one of the original (old LCD) iMac commercials, the chief designer mentioned coming up with a design like this, just to have it rejected my Steve Jobs?
I'd be grateful if anyone would provide a link to that commercial.
I thought the original reason Apple put the CD/DVD drive in the base of the iMac and avoided a design like this was because their engineers said it was better to have the disc spinning while flat. Did they change their mind, or is the hardware just better now that they can mount the CD behind the monitor at an angle like this?
Why don't you just look at the price on their online store. It ranges from $1299 to $1800+. That's not that expensive for a computer with a flat panel monitor IMHO.
I was about ready to start cutting my wrists in despair at the thought of servicing it, but your picture has reassured me that Apple may be back on the right track for serviceability in the iMac models.
...does it come in blueberry?
I think Apple are showing us the future of things to come. However, once the electronics become so integrated into the display, how will Apple products be any more appealing then their PC counterparts? It's like telling LCD's apart... How many of us walk into a store and bow down in amazement at the new style of LCD out?
How long do you think it will be before a clueless mac fanboy claims that a flatscreen PC like this was an Apple innovation?
Don't get me wrong, this is very cool, I'd love to have a G5 OSX system in a package so small, but there's a certain segment of mac fans who seem all too eager to attribute innovation to Apple where such credit is undue.
They took the PC system Monorail and painted the case white and called it a Mac. And Mac-ies say PC's steal from them.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
i was worried about the stability of the apple flat screen monitors myself when they first came out. i went to look at them and pushed them around quite hard. even the 30" was extremely stable. since the imacs have a plastic case rather than aluminum and only come in 17" and 20" models, i have to assume its more than adequately stable.
I like it a lot, based on initial impression. It also looks to be a lot more user-serviceable than the previous generation (where all you could swap out was the AirPort/Extreme card and the one RAM slot). That's nice.
I see they kept the PowerMac/iMac performance differential in part by using a 3x multiplier instead of the 2x that the PowerMacs use. That's OK - a 533 or 600 MHz FSB is still zippy.
The question I have is really about upgrades. Most importantly, can this model finally take an aftermarket internal Bluetooth module? All the previous versions only offer Bluetooth as a BTO option through the Apple Store online (except when it's standard equipment like on the PowerBooks). If you don't buy it at build time, you have to buy a 3rd party USB dongle. With access to the insides, that is now hopefully a thing of the past.
Will more VRAM be available as a BTO option? Right now, all 3 models ship with 64MB, and in my brief look online there did not appear to be an upgrade option. If the iMac is going to sell at all in the gaming market, there will probably need to be a 128MB option available. I wouldn't count on a better graphics processor, though, anytime soon. Apple likes to underpower the iMacs.
With this out there, will the eMac see a minor speedbump anytime soon? The two have traditionally had pretty much the same motherboard design - I don't expect a G5 eMac anytime soon, but maybe we'll get a 1.5 GHz G4 at some point now.
Most importantly, will normal human beings actually be able to buy these in stores anytime this year, or are we going to have to wait for the Tooth Fairy to deliver more G5 chips?
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Troll?
I can play Doom 3 just fine with my GF4ti 4400.
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
Well, I'm dissapointed at the design. The previous design with the rounded based and the moving screen was much nicer looking, plus more practical and functional as well.
With this model I can see the following problems:
1. You will now see a million wires coming out of the right side of the machine, hanging in mid-air and visible at all times.
2. All that white space at the bottom of the display makes it look like a waste of space (of course it's probably used for the internal electronics, but geez, couldn't they think of a better design?).
3. The display now only rotates in one single dimension (either tilts up or down) as opposed to the previous iMac multi-dimensions of fredom).
4. That base seems awefully inadecuate for so much weight on top of it. Seems like if it is very easy to drop the display sideways if you have a crouded desk and move things around a lot.
5. This design has been created before by the big guys (IBM and Compaq/HP I think had/have something similar), why not come up with something as cool as the iPod? (it's a shame they say on the website "from the creators of iPod" - if I was one of the iPod designers I'd be shamed...).
6. And how about a $999 model?
"That's a nice looking monitor ... what, that's the whole computer? Wow!"
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
What? You can open it up? And upgrade the RAM? And the hard drive too? This isn't an iMac at all!
click this!
I have 1 GB of ram and a 1 GHz G4, and yet I can't run out of ram, despite running 61 programs (as shown above).
And REAL programs, Photoshop, Word, etc.
OS X handles Ram well.
laptop on a stick folks, laptop on a stick.
ôó
You're forgetting Apple's inimitable approach to style. No other monitor has that ugly unused area at the bottom. What did they think they were designing - a laptop keyboard?
And seeing as his salary is $1 a year its just about worth it.
/.
And yes I do know about the planes and the stock options and the fact that he is filthy rich or "well compensated" , but somebody had to say it or it wouldnt be
If they made a smaller version with a touch screen that detaches from the stand, they would have a tablet. Hopefully this is a direction they will explore in subsequent revs.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
this looks like a really good deal. As well as the excellent and comprehensive iLife suite of applications, you get Quicken 2004, a trial of MS Office, and a couple of 3D games. What more does the average user need?
There will be a new iMac before theres time to design one.
There are two groups that apple needs to appeal to with this model, gamers and the hard core corporate client. Until now they have been neglected at huge cost to the company. They had a chance to break into both of those markets with one machine with this release!!! And they clearly have taken a different road. Well time will tell.
Look, Ive used macs since the orignal - that just had 1Mb of ram! - and I always will. I just hope that Jobs starts putting comercial realities ahead of his personal ipod manic agenda and starts putting the boot into Gates at long last.
(sorry for the AC but I'm posting away from my home computer and dont have the login here)
I grew up with a Commodore64 where the keyboard was holding everything. Now it is in the monitor. I am wondering who comes up with an in-mouse architecture.
Is that swiss francs? If so, the exchange rate has gone to the crapper since I visited (admittedly, 10 years ago), or Apple gouges the Swiss mercilessly.
Hey, 1998 called, they want their iMac jokes back.
Yes, we all know that its bad to lose the monitor on an iMac.
Come on people, lets try to branch out in our Mac bashing.
Yes. It's an iMac. One unit. If it breaks, they'll fix it.
After almost 10 years of Apple doing this,
you would think that people would get the concept.
I really like the new iMacs. To me they seem to have a quite reasonable price tag. Considering what you get (20" at 1600-something, 1.8Ghz G5, perfect design) in the top machine around 1800$ do not seem that expensive.
Another thing that is really really perfect about these new machines is the lack of cables. The iMac G5 seems to be destined to be operated wirelessly in any way. You get Airport Extreme for networking, Bluetooth for Mouse&Keyboard and Airport Express for sound transfer. The only cable remaining is the power cable. You can practically put this machine anywhere you want without creating chaos. Very very sweet.
but it'll suck ass *more* on a 5200 as they're crap, despite being "dx 9 compliant".
Does anybody have a guess as to what the little arrow in the middle is pointing at?
print "Yet another p{erl,ython} hacker\n",
My wife just saw the new imac and she hates it. Said she still wants one of the old ones.
On another note I really dont like the idea of the proc and other devices so close to the monitor, it's probably harder to update than the older design and with considerations for heat updates beyond adding memory would void the warranty.
Yup, meet the future look of pretty much every computer... I should begin by saying that I am an industrial designer and I therefor have a pretty hardcore Apple fetish. That being said, the coolness of the new iMac has nothing to do with design and everything to do with some extremely impressive engineering to shoehorn the G5 into that small a space... Fact of the matter is, processing speed has gotten to the point where computers are 'Fast Enough' for most people and they would rather have a smaller form factor then a quicker computer. It began hitting a few years ago when the office wonks started lusting after laptops more and more and that trend is going to continue. In 5 years, laptops are going to have enough CUP and GPU horsepower to satisfy even the most dedicated gamer, 3D and motion picture geeks. When that happens, expect even high end desktop workstations to be nothing more then an LCD panel with a "computing module" snapped onto the back. Unfortunately, I wonder what this is going to do for Apple. Having a huge ID department is great when you have these big products that people want and you can make them look pretty, but once our computers become a thin box with an LCD on the front, is anyone going to care? Sure the devil is in the details (look at how uber sex the lineup of ports on the back of the new iMac is!), but those aren't very hard to get right. Look at the market for Plasma TVs- nobody cares about style because they are all identical, so people make purchase decisions based on what they can afford first and which unit offers the best performance/$ within that price range. Style is never a consideration. What happens to Apple when the form factor of computers get standardized and simplified to a point where there is simply no room for an industrial designer to work with?
adding a TV tuner would be a disaster. If you didn't have one already, you'd be forced by Law to buy a TV license with your new iMac whether you wanted to use it as a TV or not. This would add an extra £121 ($216.90) to the cost of your computer.
Most people don't buy a computer to watch TV on, so why should we pay extra for functionality we don't need?
It's the Ultra model, so it has v. fast RAM. Also, I can play Doom III on my geforce 2 with 64mb. Sure, it's not blisteringly fast, but it works.
how is what I said a troll? They claim on their site that you can play Doom 3 on their machine, but I seriously doubt the 5200 Ultra could run it, or at least, not playably.
and the Ti4400 is a fair bit faster than the 5200 Ultra as well
This is starting to make my Cube look not so cool. Must add more internal LED's. And where's my G5 processor upgrade card?
I drank what? -- Socrates
From the looks of that form factor we might not be as far from G5 powerbooks as we thought? I think I'll still wait for those.
Although, if they had just included a battery and touch screen we'd have the perfect tablet "PC" for giants.
About the cables, there's a port in the stand to let you snake all your cables through a central point where they'll largely be hidden from view.
If they can shove a G5 in a case that tiny... and IBM can produce the G5 with the power saving features (which supposively they can)... why can't we have a Powerbook G5 already!?!
According to the specs,
Size and weight (20-inch)
* Height: 18.6 inches (47.2 cm)
* Width: 19.4 inches (49.3 cm)
* Depth: 7.4 inches (18.9 cm)
* Weight: 25.2 pounds (11.4 kg)
Size and weight (17-inch)
* Height: 16.9 inches (43.0 cm)
* Width: 16.8 inches (42.6 cm)
* Depth: 6.8 inches (17.3 cm)
* Weight: 18.5 pounds (8.4 kg)
Watch me build my house
Disney's been there already:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/2622064540785942/
This computer, at least the display, looks pretty enough for me to consider placing it in the living room. I don't know about a TV tuner, but if I had a computer in the living room, I would definitely want to use it as a home entertainment system, to play MP3s, DVDs etc. And in that case, I want a way to control the computer without an ungainly keyboard and annoying mouse in plain view. (Yes, nice as the Mac keyboards are, I still don't want to have one on the desk all day).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Does anyone else realize that you could turn this into a tablet PC by just cutting off the base and giving it a touchscreen (oh yeah, and a really heavy battery ;-)? It does seem like Apple's getting closer to a tablet, with things this integrated.
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Seriously. My big fear is, how sturdy is that stand? I raise this fear because at work every single one of our Apple flat panel displays is now held up by velcroing the feet to the desk and leaning the monitor against something - the stands all snapped off.
I wonder why the USB ports are located on the back of the computer. It would be quite inconvenient if you want to plug in, say, a USB memory stick.
Please use Coraled URL's, they will last much longer.
;)
Coral seems hosed at the moment actually!
Join the Free Software Foundation
I just noticed on that picture that the electric cord goes into the back of the screen through a hole in the stand. This is guaranteed by Murphy to be eventually pulled out when you tilt the screen backwards.
Sindri Traustason.
...with a bunch of heterogenious wires (usb, firewire, ethernet, audio, etc) sticking out of it? How about getting a single cable (stylish: curly, textured, fuchsia) port replicator thing going on....
The only crap part about it is here in Florida you must present a federal tax ID because we have some sort of anti-scam law which won't let an individual purchase an extended warranty (from anyone, not just Apple).
This is finally the Mac I can afford and justify the purchase price on. I was going to buy a G4 Digital Audio motherboard for $200, a cpu for $350, video card, memory, hard drive, case, power supply, etc... but why even bother now? It would've cost me $800 to have a nice G4, why not just spend a few hundred more and get a brand new G5 iMac with a warranty and then an extra $250 for two more years of warranty.
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Thanks. I'd just about talked myself out of not desiring one of these until you showed me this.
looks a little less today compared with its 'little brother' (the iMac 20")
20" Cinema Display : $1299
20" G5 IMac : $1899
That's a lot of extra gear for $600.00, isn't it? So, is the iMac a great deal or the Cinema Display now less of one?
And to think I was thiiiis close to picking up a Cinema 20" for my Powerbook...
Save a few hundred bucks, be forced into Microsofts' world, hmm ... choices, choices ...
No thanks. You'd have to pay me to use Windows over OSX.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Did Jonathan Ive retire or something, this seems butt-ass ugly.
Oh well I was expecting the new iMac to be a Tablet connected to a WiFi base station, where the Tablet would hold the processer and harddrive and the base could carry the Superdrive, airport and the ports.
Artist will always make art.
I don't think so, but one thing is that it would definitely be quite "portable". That is, if I wanted to go on holiday and have a PC, this would do the job - a lot better than a big grey box and monitor. It could even work for lan party kit.
Apparently, you can.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm never quite sure what the motivation for buying an all-in-one box has over purchasing a laptop. Granted the performance specs are a bit better on this new machine and the screen a touch bigger, but I don't see this as the machine someone will buy for power computing anyway. I love being able to sit anywhere in my house and work on my laptop.
I just noticed on that picture that the electric cord goes into the back of the screen through a hole in the stand. This is guaranteed by Murphy to be eventually pulled out when you tilt the screen backwards.
:-)
If the Quicktime VR is anything to go by, it doesn't need that power cord anyway!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Technically its of course neat. But a generic white box is pretty uninteresting IMHO. Without the Apple logo I think most Apple users wouldn't look twice and just assume its a another LCD monitor. Of course Apple fans will just respond saying THAT'S THE POINT. Yeah well its boring.
In short its got no style. We have seen this lcd-all-in-one design before now its just happens to be a G5 inside. The previous Imac and things like the Cube were much more interesting. Maybe they'll offer Colored versions to spice it up? Too bad you can't buy the old version with a G5 in it.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The new design looks a lot like a laptop computer (without a lid) on a base. Right now it's obviously a desktop model with no internal battery but how hard would it be to make it portable? It would be pretty darn useful even if it was fairly heavy just to be able to take with you to meetings in the office. Once the meeting's over you go back to your office/cubicle and pop it back onto the base and plug it into the wall outlet. Of course it would need to take handwritten notes with a stylus (like Tablet PCs) but it would be a very useful feature and might lead to more sales for Apple, especially in the business market.
With a product that sells worldwide, you really have to ask what kind of TV tuner you expect to be put in it. A good old analog one that would be obsolete in just a few years? Or ATSC? Maybe a cable tuner, now that the cable card would allow you to use non-proprieatary boxes. Or DVB for Europe, but which one, terrestial, satellite or cable? Or maybe an analog HDTV tuner for Japan?
Personally, I'd think that some hooks, holes, clamps or whatever to strap a small 3rd party tuner like the eyeTV on the back would be the way to go.
Hmm. Reminds me an awful lot of my Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. In fact, it's even more like this old prototype that Apple made while designing the TAM.
They're very similar, except, of course, that the new iMac doesn't come with a built-in TV tuner, FM radio, remote control, or matching pen-and-pencil set.
On the other hand, it runs faster than the TAM's 250Mhz, too...
-Mark
If they can fit a G5 inside that box we should be seeing powerbook G5's soon. The heat issue with the G5 seems to be solved.
Well, no shit.
Enthusiast buys PowerMac. Average joe buys iMac.
Just like with your muscles, if you don't use your brain you lose it.
I can't believe that Apple has not gone to a 2 button mouse with a wheel. I can't remember the last time I saw anyone with a Linux/Windows machine that was not using a scroll mouse. It is clearly a design that overwhelming majority of users find useful.
I know you can buy third party mice, but it just seems ridiculous not to incorporate it into what you get from Apple. Also, for people who have added a scroll mouse to their Macs, how well supported are the additional buttons and scroll wheel across various Mac applications?
As cool as it is, as much as it calls to my inner artist, I just can't justify buying one.
Hell, I just put together a screaming fast Athlon 64 machine with a gig of RAM, a faster HDD, and DVD-R, for the same price as the base model G5.
Just doesn't make sense where it counts: My wallet. True, my new machine didn't come with a nice new display, but then again, I didn't NEED one.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
The Dell pony can't run OS X. That is its main weakness.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
A while back, I put an iOpener together. It looks like this design borrowed heavily from designs of the past.
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Dell does consumer 64bit systems for that price? You're missing one of the big points of the G5.
;)
Sorry, you can't just price up from Dell now
I do not think that a man such as Jobs would ever let minor concerns such as sound engineering or the laws of physics get in the way of his vision.
They mention a mini-VGA port for "mirroring" several times. The GPU (Nvidia FX 5200) definitely supports dual heads, I wonder if this is disabled on the iMac.
I would like the small size of this system.. But, dual head operation is a requirement for me.
Back when we were comparing the internally 16 bit 8086 to the interally 32 bit 68000, it directly mattered because programmers found it easier to work with nice simple 32 bit integers to access memory than resort to paging and other such tricks. I doubt that 64 bit pointers are going to be anything like as important in the next half-decade, especially now that virtually everyone programs at a higher level.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
They should of used a wireless kb and mouse. I think it will look bad once you get a bunch of cables hangin' off the side. Plus how well will it balance with a bunch of outboard gear hang from one side.
Are you kidding? Maybe the design is semi-alike, but then again, how many ways can you arrange a computer inside a tiny box?
.2 inches). Honestly, are you just trying to find a reason to beat on them?
Take a look at that gateway. All the pieces are outside the monitor. It's quite bulky, and not nearly as easy on the eye. Gateway didn't want to work as much, they just attached the LCD to the box. Apple shoved all the parts into a backing of a LCD, and it's only two inches thick (give or take
There are only so many ways to package up a computer, and I'd say Apple's new way is quite different from that Gateway model. Sure, it's closer in resemblance to that gateway when compared to a traditional desktop with external CRT or LCD...but come on. Give Apple credit where credit is due.
That would bee cool, or not quite...
:-)) :-)
You would have a mouse draining battery faster than my car
It would run at 50 degrees celcius (9 million farenheits.. imbicile americans..
It would make your hand glow from the radiowaves to the wireless screen and WI-FI
I would buy it in an instant...
spelling is for people who doens't know better...
So much for Apple style. :-/
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Yeah, those 18 extra comments about homosexuals are really interesting and informative. What a jackass.
Does anyone else think this sounds disturbingly sick?
The Mac runs OS X, while the Dell runs Windows XP.
You couldn't pay me $1,373 to use the Dell, but I'll likely buy one of these new iMacs.
If you think about what a capacitor is, I don't think it is all that thermally sensitive. After all, the biggest, crappiest and hottest capacitors are going to be inside the PSU.
In my experience, electrolytic capacitors, which have a liquid dialetric, tend to fail as this liquid migrates from one end of the capacitor to another. Inside they're built like a jelly roll, and all the jelly leaks to one end, changing the capacitance value and sometimes creating shorts.
I can see how heat might make this problem worse, but the biggest problem is gravity and the orientation of the capacitors. I don't know how many pieces of old equipment like video terminals I've "fixed" by having their users "put them to bed" by turning them upside down at the end of the day. These capacitors look like they're laid out horizontally, which I think will tend to make them last longer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Its called Virtual PC. Its sold by the hacker group known as Microsoft.
can't be far away... if they got it into a 2" enclosure OK...
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http://www.apple.com/retail/shadyside/ A new Mac store in Western Pa. It will be opening Sept 4th. I couldn't think of a better place to put a Mac store. This is realy great seeing how the nearest Mac repair place is in Cranberry.
Life is marked by pain.
For only 1300? Get out! I'll take 2 please.
Not only how sturdy is it, but how stable is it. I think this will come with a "Do not buy if clumsy, have small kids, or pets" sticker. Seriously, it looks to me as if it will be very easy to knock this thing over. The base to the stand is very small compared to the width and the height of the unit. Perhaps if you nail it down it might be OK.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The problem with this and most Macs is downtime due to equipment failure. Now to get the monitor fixed the whole machine needs to be serviced. Add in the cost of not using common "PC" parts and the care and feeding of it might get very expensive.
A few years ago I bought an iMac 400 DV from the Apple Store (online). I had it less than a week when the monitor died. They instruct me to take it to a locally authorized service center for repair. It came back after five weeks. Plugged it in and the monitor only showed magenta. Back to the shop for another six weeks. No less than 20 calls to Apple later they finally gave me a new iMac. I'm sorry, but for what they charge they should've taken back my one week old Mac and shipped me a new one. IMO it was BS that I had to bug them so much to do the right thing.
Now look at my GNU/Linux x86 box. There's nothing on it that I can't repair or replace within 24 hours and for a lot less than the Mac. Price out a replacement slot loading CD drive for this new iMac. I'm guessing atleast $200 for the combo and $300 for the DVD-RW.
Downtime for service is way, way too high for Macs.
Here's is my plea: Please turn out a Mac MATX board. I'll buy my own parts and when the power supply or CD drive craps out I can fix it in a matter of hours and not weeks.
Jobs is a control freak and would never do it. Too bad. So I use my eMac only for video editing and Photoshop (10% of the time), storing my work on an external FW drive and my Gentoo box for everthing else because I simply can not depend on the Mac.
Macs are beautiful machines, have an excellent GUI, includes incredible apps (again, like iMoive), have a rock solid OS but I would never buy one if it was to be my only computer. Waiting weeks for service (and being without a computer) is unacceptable.
IMO this new iMac is just another step in the wrong direction leading to more downtime per machine.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Can Macs run MythTV? I know that porting attempts were underway. I never saw any results. I have no idea what tuner hardware would work with MythTV on a Mac. A Mac with PVR and home theater capabilities, especially with all the DVD tools Apple advertises, would be a great product. At least, it is what I want to buy. I just cannot find all the pieces for Mac.
This is just like DVDs. I'm waiting until the aluminum edition comes out. :)
There is no pleasing some people...
I'm simply saving some guys bandwidth a little, speeding things up and saving people from clicking through "usage agreements" and converting proprietary formats.
Oh, and the site is hosted in Telehouse London. I'm sure with the LINX they have more than enough bandwidth.
Take off the stand and mount it to the wall, one cord! +5!
well you would HAVE TO subsrcibe to GEZ which ist around 15 Euros a month.
Wether you actually watch TV or just play games
Sony PCVV300G
m as terid=2932674&found=1&search=Sony%20PCVV30 0G
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php?
Sony Vaio PCV-V300G - P4 2.8 GHz - 15" TFT Type - Personal computer Form Factor - All-in-one Dimensions (WxDxH) - 15 in x 7 in x 13 in Weight - 16.8 lbs Processor - 1 x Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Cache Memory - 512 KB L2 cache Cache Per Processor - 512 KB RAM - 512 MB (installed) / 1 GB (max) - DDR SDRAM - 333 MHz - PC2700 Storage Controller - IDE Hard Drive - 1 x 200 GB - standard - DMA/ATA-100 (Ultra) Optical Storage - 1 x DVDdRW Card Reader - Card reader Monitor - Flat panel display - 15" - TFT active matrix Graphics Controller - SiS 651 Video Input - TV tuner Audio Output - Sound card - stereo Communications - Fax / modem - 56 Kbps ( V.90 ) Networking - Network adapter - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet OS Provided - Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
$1560
Admittedly not as clean looking, or as large an lcd, but a more worthy comparison. I'd go over the obvious differences, but anyone here should be able to figure them out. . .
What I've thought computers should be for quite some time. Actually looks a lot like their 20th anniversary mac.
g e= gallery&model=anniversary
http://www.apple-history.com/frames/body.php?pa
Good stuff. I want more people to make computers with very similar form factors. Actually I believe Gateway had one for a while, but I could be mistaken.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
If there was a clone of me that pathetic, I'd strangle the thing to death. I'd be doing it and the world a favor. Not that I'd need to strangle it -- breathing on its own would be too complicated for it.
How many days does a $300 clone last, particularly running Windows?
Maybe this will scratch that itch:
Keyspan.com
If you have a bluetooth enabled phone (or bluetooth enabled Palm OS device) you can use Salling Clicker software to control your Mac from across the room.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The next step and what people really want is a unit that can be a Desktop and a Notebook. So all it needs is a way to attach the base when in desktop mode or maybe a retractable one, that one is easy, and the ability to 'flip/rotate' the LCD from Desktop to Notebook mode.
Now if that had been released today I would have been doing the Oooh and awww stuff! It is good to see that Apple Zealots haven't changed in 14+ years, which was the last time I went to an Apple product introduction, for the blazing fast IIfx!!
Wow, you aren't kidding. I used to service those original iMacs while working at CompUSSR. You had to disassemble half the machine to put more RAM in it. Replacing almost any other component required you to discharge the freaking caps on the monitor for fear of electrocution. Not fun stuff.
Well, if you look at those little throw back video games from Atari and such, that is exactly what they are doing. They have everything contained in the joystick. You just hook it up to a tv.
glad steve put aside the purist comments about placing components with the last iMac and let them get the machine down to what was necessary.
add an airport extreme card, airport express bto bluetooth and bto the bluetooth keyboard and mouse and you have a 1-wire computer - mains power only needed to do just about anything including well amp'd external audio...
only thing i'd add would be a trackpadded keyboard option like the spartacus - one less set of batteries to worry about bluetoothing and hey it works for the laptops...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It's a sleek and contained design, but it reminds me of one of the new cinema displays in plastic with serious underbite. The photos don't show it very well, but the top layer of the bevel surrounding the screen is clear plastic, which looks quite nice, but I don't think it completely saves the design. I was personally expecting something much more exciting, but looking at it straight on, you can almost fool yourself into thinking you are looking at an eMac missing its speakers.
With this design to complete their lineup, its easy to see that they wanted the iMac to be to the Powermac, as the iBook is to the Powerbook. There are similar form factors between the consumer and pro lines (if you had one of the new aluminum displays for your powermac), and the same materials for each side of the divide.
While I like the idea behind iMacs I would like to be able to swap out certain elements at my leisure.
So, if paying a premium to lose flexibility is your boat then so be it. Me, I would like the option of upgrading the monitor without throwing away the machine behind it.
Comparing overall value is what the previous poster was getting at. That is one hell of a premium your willing to pay to have it in a design which looks like but offers less flexibilty.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why do you ask? Do you believe there's a significant difference between the commodity parts used in $200 machines and the ones used in Dells?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I am excited aboutthe new iMac G5 because it allows apple to gain more expertise and hopefully economies of scale when purchasing components that can serve tripple-product-line-duty in the iMac G5, iBook, and PowerBook lines.
Apple is good at finding clever ways to reuse good ideas. For one example we can turn to is the "Wow" moment every iPod owner has had when opening the cube shaped box it comes in and remarking on how expensive that packaging must have been for Apple. It makes a good impression, but certainly added to the cost. But wait, Apple reused the same cube design no only on the iPod mini, but also for the iSight and the Airport Express. Just one example of Apple innovation re-visited.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I keep waiting for these to show up at reasonable prices for *any* system, but I actually suspected that Apple would include it in their systems. With standalone DVD recorders sporting this technology selling for $300, I can't imagine that the chipsets are all that expensive.
I have a P43.2c system at home, and even single pass MPEG2 encoding for DVD (TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress) runs at maybe 125% of real time. Multiple pass encoding runs at 200% of real time or worse.
What's the big obstacle to a decent MPEG2 encoder chip that can do single pass encoding at 50% of RT or 25% of RT? Admittedly you hit some ceilings on disk bandwidth trying to read DV-AVI files at 4x, but is it really that hard?
exactly, looks great without anything plugged into it, what about when you have 10 cords hangin out the back dragging it down...
but it sure does look purdy
Gekido's Lair
http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/L295PB.asp
I've been selling and servicing PCs from that family for years. Great machines, low power, easy service.
IBM A50: Needs double the HD space, the graphics are poor and there is no upgrade option which is a worry, the TFT you listed isn't a widescreen, it is a huge hulking box, not an all-in-one system, it looks foul, it only comes with a basic CD-ROM drive, not a combo CDRW/DVD drive (which IBM charge $160 for). I'm within a whisker of the low-end G5 price already, and I've got a nest of cables and a computer I can't just walk to the lounge/garden with and use there if I want. Also, I'm sick and tired of Windows XP fucking up.
This is the best value iMac I've seen for years.
My TFT monitor (AG Neovo F-419 - budget 19" model) is 2" thick. This iMac is the same size, but adds a whole quite powerful computer! I'd get this if I was looking for a new computer. I suppose it also shows that Apple are 1" away from making a PowerBook G5.
Whatever anybody says about the price one thing is for sure. There is no PC on the planet that will hold its value better than a Mac.
Take a look at a 1 year old Dell or IBM anything even servers and then take a look at a 1 year old Mac. The PC will be at least 50% less and the Mac will have dropped about $100.
After a year the PC becomes worthless and the Mac still has a good value. 2 yr old iMacs are still worth quite a bit of their original price, especially if they have the SuperDrive. How much is a 2 year old Dell worth?
When ever a person asks about buying a PC vs. a Mac that is the first thing I try to explane to them.
IBM ... could make such a device but ... Probably painfully ugly compared to the Apple, NeXT and Cobalt cubes ... I would buy it just because I already own the other three.
You forgot one cube with a PowerPC processor: the GameCube, which has a Gekko processor with a PPC 750 ("G3") core.
Perhaps the guy that setup the hoax earlier in the week actually did know something afterall..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I call shenanigans. The 30" displays aren't shipping yet, and I've yet to see an Apple store that actually has one on display.
Where'd you see one at?
That said, I agree that the stands are *very* stable, but I've only seen them on the 20" and 23" displays.
Its beautiful but I bet when you plug everything in those cords are going to make that impressive floating screen look more like squid with a ton of tennacles.
I love Apples and have been eagerly awaiting the new iMac G5, but as I view photos, it is only the specs and price (which I think are very competitive, even against the mass market of PC clones), that entice me to the new product line, not the style.
I say that as I sit before my iMac G4. Basically, I have adopted the logic of my little sister, who used to think the monitor was the computer and the CPU was the power supply. To me, the computer is just monitor and peripherals. I do not care about the case or external devices, save how convenient they are to reach when needed.
That said, I feel the new iMac G5 has diluted the attractiveness of the flatscreen because it has added visual weight to the LCD that in the iMac G4 incarnation, nicely blended with the background becuase of the clear housing around it.
Like I said, jury is out on this one and I look forward to seeing it in person.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
They discuss how they did put a lot of effort into designing it so that the stand connects to it's center of gravity so it should be pretty stable (knowing Apple, this is the kind of thing they probably spent a tremendous amount of time on).
-Tom
Right. Now take that same machine, upgrade the video card to a GeForce FX 5200, the hard drive to 80 gig (from 40) and the CDR/DVD drive to a DVD-RW. You can't do it on that model from IBM, but from manufacturers where you can, your loadout is in the $1300 range -- and it's hardly integrated, so it's hardly a fair comparison. The closest thing I've seen is the Sony W700G, which is much wider and deeper and starts aroung $1900.
Furthermore, pricing the cost of buying your own hardware and putting it in isn't fair, and it's silly besides. Who wants to buy half a computer, especially if you're in the market for an all-in-one?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
If one could plug a form-factor-appropriate battery pack to the back of the unit, and if the screen were touch sensative for a stylus, this would be a sweet tablet!
Perhaps the size would have to come down and therefore the specs (even a dual core G4 instead of the G5?) but I am betting we will see more innovation out of this design than the single purpose of the iMac G4 design.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Huh?
Why do you need 2 optical drives in a G5 tower? And if you do, what's stopping you from adding a second one?
AFAIK, Apple has never shipped a machine with 2 optical drives, even as a build-to-order option.
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
is it just me or did apple discover an entirely new shade of blue for the promo graphics?
...and that's all there is to it.
There's this new technology called Firewire that lets you use external drives fast&easy. Put your secondary optical drive in a Firewire enclosure and it shows up automatically in OS X. It's included with the new iMacs.
And despite losing your potential sale, these puppies will definetly sellout immediately when they are released.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
I fail to see how this is anything but a laptop with the keyboard and the battery removed.
Closer still are TabletPCs, but again, with less functionality and portability.
G5 in there is nice, but with the base model only having 256MB of ram, all that nice processing power will go to waste as the hard drive thrashes away.
Once you add in enough ram to make it nice, I am sure the price will put it at about the same place as a mid-to-high end laptop.
Did you buy a Neuros today?
Amazing, even the blowers look the same!
Those Xserve bastards are so darn quiet, not to mention fast. If, as it seems, they are putting Xserve technology into an iMac, this may be a huge winner.
Indeed I was wondering why would Apple bother about noise for a server destined to be locked away in a climatized room. Now I can see the answer: optimize technology across the board so that both the high-end, low-volume and the low-end, high-volume products can benefit. If you can speak of low-end for Apple, that is.
Well, time to configure my cluster.
We're still looking at well below $1,300.
Again, I covered that in my comment. It's EXPANDABLE, therefore the IBM represents better value. It's also the case that because it's not integrated, and because of that expandability, IBM's should, by rights, cost MORE than Apple's. Tell that to all the people saying 256Mb isn't a problem, because everyone can upgrade straight away using the ultra-cheap RAM prices.In any case, you're missing the point. The person I responded to said that the iMac is somehow comparable in price now to IBM clones. Fact is, you can get an IBM clone for a hell of a lot less than that, and the "real thing" - with the added benefit expandability - for a fraction less.
This is not a cheap machine, when compared to others of similar spec or just when looking at the entry level price regardless of spec. It's a little absurd for people to claim otherwise. By all means claim it's beautiful, claim grandma can't cope with more than one wire, (though two box vs three box doesn't seem a significant difference to me, grandma would be better off with a laptop), claim OS X is the best OS in the world (I like it very much too), but quit the pretense that this is somehow "low cost" or "competitive" - no bloody way is it either.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
iMac G5 VESA Mount Adapter Kit
$29.00
Available for order in October.
Allows your iMac G5 to be used with VESA compliant mounting solutions such as wall mounts and articulating arms.
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
Sure, marketing people never get carried away. I'm sure that all the drivvle to come from Dell, Gateway, NVidia, ATI, VIA, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft is perfectly accurate, and never EVER stretches anything.
Perhaps you like this better:
The iMac G5 offers mediocre built-in graphics capabilities. Like, for instance, the so-so widescreen display. Mac OS X version 10.3 "Panther," provides you with the world's most mid-range -- and most graphics-using -- operating system. And then there's the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics processor with 64MB of DDR SDRAM. It's a combination that delivers middle-of-the-road 2D and 3D graphics performance and a semi-immersive, pixelated, and distorted gaming experience with half the frame rate of our professional systems.
Yeah, that makes me want to buy one. Hell, I'll buy two after that stunning writeup. Here's my credit card!!
Always remember that marketing people are SELLING product, and that by making a comparison to the last model, they can get away with saying things like "unparalleled performace"
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
There is also no practical difference between a Porche and a Subaru on a road with a speed limit of 65. That doesn't mean that if I could get the Porche for a small percentage more than the Subaru I wouldn't take the porche.
:)
(ok, maybe i wouldn't)
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
from: http://www.apple.com/imac/:
"Back up your iTunes collection or make a mix CD for that special someone. [emphasis added]"
Um, that would be a CD full of songs to which you own the copyright, right? Riiiiight...
Now, before we get into the "slashdotters don't have teh g1rlfriends LOL OMG BBQ" jokes, or the "my iMac is my special someone" crowd, I'd like to say that this just really, really makes me sick. You can't have it both ways. We are either allowed to share music, or we aren't. (I know Apple != RIAA etc., but they are a Large Corporate Entity, and presumably wouldn't encourage something that is 100% against the wishes of the **AA) So what's the deal? I can see it now: "All Combo-drive Macs come with Shrink! Share your DVDs with your friends!"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
DIP switches?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Apple store is charging $1299 for the 20" monitor, but only $1899 for the iMac with the 20" monitor. Does that make sense to anyone?
Cinema Display Monitors are much better than the screeens found in the iMacs, for the same size. I am talking about current models of course, but I assume it will be the same for the upcoming ones. The viewing angle is much wider, the backlighting much more uniform, etc. iMac screens are essentially laptop screen.
Sorry, that might be enough for all of my music, maybe even all of my photos. But I have very little music (in comparison to most of my friends. ) and almost no photos. I know people who cannot fit even half their music on an iPod. There is a reason that people lobbied to get 80gig hard drive packs for their Neuros.
I like that the hard disks are SATA though! That is pretty cool.Did you buy a Neuros today?
I think they're going to use it as an excuse to push their wireless peripherals (bluetooth keyboard/mouse, Airport Extreme). I'm surprised it doesn't have integrated speakers -- or will they upgrade the Airport Express to handle all audio instead of just iTunes?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Comparing Apples to Oranges....Dells
Ok iMac is low-end so compare to cheapest Dell with almost the same functionality.
Dell w 17 inch lcd = $1377 yet it is not an all-in-one
Dell with 20" lcd = $1887
Specs for the Dells otherwise:
Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz (533 FSB)
Windows XP Pro (Can't compare Home to OS X because OS X has all the features of Pro and more)
256 Megs RAM
80 gig hd/160 with 20 inch screen
Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+RW/+R) w/double layer write capability
Fireiwre PCI adapter
128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card with TV-Out and DVI
What your not getting with the Dells:
Gigabit Ethernet
Widescreen LCD
All in One enclosure
64 bit capability->Especially for linux users
A design that begs to be seen, not shoved under a desk.
What your not getting with the iMac:
64 extra megs in the viedo card.
Crap trial software you have to remove
The lower end Dell (17") was made to compare with the mid range iMac. $122 isn't all that much considering what benefits you will gain. (IMO).
At the higher end, there is no question in my mind that the iMac is by far the better deal for merely 12 dollars extra.
Feel free to try doing the spec work on your own elsewhere. Just make sure you don't compare OS X to Windows XP Home. OS X's capabilities far outstrip those of XP Home. And if your selling to businesses that need to join a domain, you would need Pro anyway.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. -- FDR
Hell,it's better than the first iMac. Not sure if it's better than the last one, but I don't really care.
Curious: does anyone know what the pixel burnout policy is on those things? Most LCD manufacturers have some threshold whereby if X # of pixels burnout, they replace the monitor. Since LCDs are still -- somewhat -- a new technology, and far from perfected, there will be pixels burning out on some percentage of those screens. For a LCD manufactors, that means a % of monitors that have to be replaced. For Apple, that will mean a % of computers (expensive computers) that have to be replaced.
I'm guessing the threshold will be worse than the current standard (typically 2-4 pixels) based on this, but I'm not sure. Anyone find that in the fine print somewhere?
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
Wow... they built a laptop. Congratulations.
While I do think that the GeForce 5200 is a good enough card for an iMac... (Apple does offer a selection of systems that come with more power)
I hope that soon they will move to the next generation NVIDIA card. Even the baseline 6600 (as opposed to a 6800 Ultra) would give improved performance without a big difference in cost, since the 5200 will start to be replaced by a value NVIDIA 6xxx card.
Of course this may only be due to the timing of the NVIDIA launch and more Apple systems will use cards based on the 6xxx line when it matures.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I think the older iMac is far cooler, in terms of design. It was also very unique. The new G5 iMac is a been-there, done-that design that PC manufacturers have been making for a while now. Like Pelham Sloane started shipping back in January.
I think part of the appeal of the older iMac was that it was so well-designed and had such a completely unique look. This new one's only real unique look is that it's white with a brushed metal stand. Oooooo.
It sucks that it isn't height-adjustable anymore, too. That was one thing I really liked about the old one.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
for the love of christ, steve jobs please put a damn link light on the nics. this has been the one thing that has bothered me about macs. link lights are one of those things that you take for granted until you don't have one, trouble shooting is so much easier with link lights.
lose != loose
What about Firewire?
What about optical audio out?
What about Gigabit Ethernet?
What about an 80 Gig Hard Drive
What about no anual virus license?
What about the iLife Software Suite?
What about the free printer (through October)?
What about not having to use XP home edition?
How price-competitive is your IBM now?
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Absolutely. There's big money to be made from print quality images.
Lower corners
These look like speakers, but not sure...
Internal speakers
But a good though!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
..its looks like a damn nice piece of hardware.
/office needs.
It is exactly what I would reccomend for the person who has:
A)some money.
B)taste.
C)no interest in games.
D)only multimedia / mail
E)no interest in spending time on maintenance.
I'm EASILY cranking on a G4 with "only" 1.5 gigs of ram, doing 3D, motion graphics, animation, flash, photoshop etc. Saying 2 gigs of RAM is a limitation is laughable. ivanjs Art/Design/Music: http://homepage.mac.com/johnselvia/
my geforce fx 5200 ultra 64mb of ram is for sale on ebay at the moment currently selling for $30. I upgraded ant it was sooo worth it for doom3 (Geforce 5700 256mb ram)
This is way too expensive. $2000 for the iMac, plus I have to buy MacPC, MS-Windows 3.11, and a 3.5" floppy drive just so I can load up my 40-floppy version of MS-Office 6.0.
Who are they kidding? I'd rather buy a Dell!
most manufacturers will not replace/repair a LCD unless there are at least 8 dead pixels.
what manufacturer only requires 2-4 dead pixels?
the history of the world
Don't forget that you can purchase with a discount through the education store or the gov't employee store (if either apply):
Education store: Government store:
$1,199.00 $1,221.00
17-inch widescreen LCD
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
$1,399.00 $1,409.00
17-inch widescreen LCD
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
$1,799.00 $1,785.00
20-inch widescreen LCD
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
if someone really wants a TV tuner (like in a dorm or apartment?) there are a few firewire TV tuners for mac..... including the el gato device that makes youur TV a TiVo-like device.
honestly a TV tuner card never meant jack to me because my cable company has always required the box for tuning (even in the analog days) and i dont think digital cable tuners really exist yet in machines or as 3rd party devices... right? i know our digital boxes have a mac address that cable guy had to autherize and connect to our account.
it would seem like a device better left to 3rd party.... or just a line in kinda thing.
o_O Oh, the nostalgia!
Yes... it is the return of the fabled "pizza box" Mac, isn't it? Of course, the critics didn't want it to still have a display to drive up the price point, though.
I personally will wait for the first rev. IBM's 90nm process is still too flaky for me to trust the "first generation" of the "third generation" system
Those who complain about affect & effect on
I'd like to see various mounting solutions built just for this model.
;)). When you want uninterrupted surface for writing or organizing, etc, swing the whole computer away.
;)
Imagine:
- the 17" as a (passenger-area) movie machine in a car / van / minivan. (And I've seen some installs of much smaller and worse displays that cost more than this one's base model, too, and which couldn't do a lot of things a computer-based system could, like play any formats for which codecs exists, also act as a GPS display, or overqualified MP3 player, etc.)
- a thin storage spot on the back or side of a desk; when you need the computer, swing it up from there (something like old typewriter table shelves, but not quite as dangerously spring-loaded
- ceiling-attached pole/arm mount that doesn't need a desk surface at all, except perhaps as a place to put a keyboard and mouse. With several mounting spots in a room, and somewhat of a gooseneck, you could move the machine around, adjust the height, etc. Movies in bed without a big cantilevered horizontal surface, a web-cam interface in the kitchen so you can keep an eye on driveway, apt. building entrance, etc.
- An easel-type floor-mounted stand, turning one into a TV-for-the-evening, an art-gallery display, a temporary 2nd machine next to another one or next to a rack of machines in a data center, a less elaborate movies-in-bed machine, a demo screen for small-group presentations, etc.
- An octopus cart; there are some smart laptop carts (mostly built for Apple laptops, though I guess there are others for Dells, etc), set up so laptops can be stored in, charged in, and locked up in one rolling cart -- they're basically marketed as portable computing labs. One for G5s might only hold 3 or 4, but in a way that lets people work side by side on their own machines, and later have the whole collection secured in in the deepest keep of the castle. And there could be some slots for iBooks or other laptops, too
Anyhow. That is a beautiful design -- congratulations, Apple.
Tim
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You are right - computers start at $299 - but I still have my original iMac 233 from 1997. It is a very functional computer and does most everything my G5 2.0Ghz can do - that I do.
I've added a 466Mhz G4, firewire, extra memory, a faster hard drive and lots of other enhancements.
A PC from 1997 that was on the low end scale of price - could hardly be upgraded anywhere close to the moderness of this iMac from the same time.
If I buy a new iMac - you will have spent MORE than me with your $299 PCs within 7 years.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
In Germany, a TV license is necessary whether you operate the equipment or not, whether you hook up and antenna or not. It's enough to have the device ready.
Private licenses often cover for more than one machine.
But I remember that this doesn't apply to businesses.
I guess there are good reasons for not including a TV card by default. But it would have been a smart move to offer this as a built-in add-on!
Multiple mouse buttons are very useful for a few commonly-used actions. Middle-clicking to open a link in a new tab is one I use a lot, and the equivalent command-clicking on a Mac is much less convenient (requires me to set down my cup of coffee and use both hands just to open a simple link). The lack of a scroll wheel is pretty irritating too.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Factor in this difference and an AMD64 workstation may look rather better value. Of course, design junkies would just get the mac anyway. You can't really put a price on chic.
Games are already well past the point where the CPU mattered too much. There used to be a time when the CPU had to both handle the graphics (or at least the T&L part) and plot believable strategies. Nowadays it basically does neither.
In fact, it does extremely little more than serve as a front-end or IO processor for the GPU. Not only has the GPU taken over the graphics pretty much completely, the games have also been simplified (or dumbed down, if you will) to the point of being little more than 3D tech demos.
Which brings us to the real point:
For Doom 3 the graphics card is the bottleneck, period. Followed at a looong distance by the memory bandwidth that the CPU is seeing. (Hence the 1 MB cache Athlon 64 models and the Socket 939 models doing so well.) And CPU speed is pretty much the last factor.
Any other modern games show the same trend, and fortunately they'll still behave the same when ported to the Mac.
So basically if you're playing games on a 5200, it doesn't even matter how fast the G5 is. That machine is basically castrated to the point of being useless for anything more graphically intensive than Europa Universalis (a 2D game), even if you put a (non-existent) 3 GHz A64 or G5 in it.
"I'd say a 2GHz G5 would perform very well with the right video card, on par with at LEAST an Intel 2.4GHz machine with similar RAM and video card."
A very reasonable observation. Which unfortunately just serves to further hammer the point that the 5200 in that iMac is a joke.
Noone sane would call a P4 with a 5200 in it a "gaming PC". They might call it "that cheap box I've built for mum and dad to read email on", but definitely not a "gaming PC".
So basically, I don't know... Apple has a very good chance of making a good gaming machine nowadays. As you've said, with the latest graphics card, it ought to perform pretty much the same as a PC with the same graphics card.
Except they insist on making some crap with a 5200 in it, and no option to get a real graphics card instead. Oh well...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The 20" display in the iMac is likely to be produced in much larger quantities, and have a higher rate of defects (dead pixels, etc). The 20" cinema display is a high quality LCD, designed for those who need total colour reliability, sharpness etc. The iMac display is designed for home / office users, who are unlikely to have such high demands.
If the new iMac is anything like the new Cinema Displays, it will be fine. The new displays are much more stable than they appear to be from just looking at them. They appear to be unstable particularly with respect to side to side movement, but on the contrary, they are remarkably stable.
umm, why do they put a piece of garbage in there? The FX 5200 is what, the low end card a gen and a half ago?
Geez, how about a 5900SE/XT even if you have to clock it a little slow for heat dissipation and sound.. Or a mobile ATI 9800 chipset that DOESN'T SUCK...
At least make a nicer vidcard an option for phuxake.. Read the tomshardware comparo and weep...
I'm remembering the last time I upgraded the RAM on a first-gen iMac. Nothing like having to pop out the CRT to access the main-board. Fortunately we have an apple-certified repair shop down the street. Sure it can be expensive, but my time isn't exactly cheap either.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Electrolytic capacitors are very heat sensitive, if you "think about what it is"; it's a liquid-filled device. They're rated for a fixed lifetime, and that lifetime is a certain number of hours at a certain temperature. The "fixed lifetime" bit is why electrolytic capacitors are NEVER milspec-rated; they can't be. Tantalum capacitors are, but they're a)expensive b)take up more space c)expensive d)expensive.
The original poster you responded to was naive. For example- the capacitors could be high-temperature rated; the case will say so. I forget the ratings but 85 degrees C and 105 degrees C are coming to mind. The hour rating also varies drastically- you can buy some that will last 4-5 times longer than others. You can buy 'overvoltage' capacitors that are rated well above the voltage you'll be using(though they'll be larger). So on, etc. As previously mentioned, they could also be tantalum.
Furthermore, he/she/it seems to think heat will be a problem off the PSU. No doubt it uses convection, and notice the PSU is at the bottom of the machine, getting the coolest air? my G4 17" PB power supply brick runs fairly cool under normal use- and it has no venting, it's a solid plastic case. In fact, I just found it buried under my jacket on the rug- well insulated- and it's lukewarm. Charging the battery is another matter, but the G5 imac doesn't have one of those.
So, honestly, I think everyone is not giving Apple a chance on this one and engaging in a lot of slack-jawed armchair engineering. Given the potential for fire and whatnot, I'm sure Apple was very careful about thermal design. What I find more interesting is that none of the photos are real- they're very clearly CG mockups. 3-4 week delivery? Hahah. AHAHAHAHAHAH. AHAHAHAHAHAAH [collapses from heart attack from laughing fit].
Please help metamoderate.
Top heavy comes to mind. Does the stand come with an optional nut and bolt?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
...never mind, it prolly does. I'll have my medicine now. Thank you.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Macs have longer active lives than PCs since there is much less built-in obsolescence. I can run MacOS X well on my five-year old iMac or PowerMac.
........... $ 1,299 ......... 1xlifetime = 100 ..... 5 years ......... $1,399
............. $ 600 ........3 year life x100 = 300 per lifetime of machine ......... $ 1,000
If you have a lousy monitor left in a corner the PC is much cheaper than the Mac. But if you want your employees to survive without eyestrain you probably want to fix its lifespan at three years. This means replacing the monitor at the same time as the PC.
The cost of spyware and virus protection/removal solutions is about $50 per machine, plus $1,000-odd on the server level, plus about $100 per year per machine for roughly one technician hour a year of support.
Mac
Visits
Lifetime
Total
Cost/year... $279
PC
Visits
Spyware+AV Software... $100
Total
Cost per year: $333
If we add a cheap monitor for $100 it goes up to $366. But then you should really compare it to the $799 eMac, not the $1,299 iMac, which would actually increase Apple's advantage.
if we add a 17" LCD for $500 it goes up to $458.
Visits may be a gross underestimate. I've seen PCs messed up so badly that it's been cheaper to buy a new PC than to figure out what's wrong.
This doesn't even include the server-based AV software you should also buy.
See? The Mac isn't half bad when it comes to a reasonable cost perspective with all costs included. Not to mention that Apple Mail + iCal costs nothing, while Outlook + Exchange are obscenely expensive.
D
I upgraded one before we figured out it was actually cheaper to send the units to an apple-certifed repair center. Disemboweling those things took hours and practically an electrician's certification. The next model did provide a door to access the RAM and ROM slots, but of course that really doesn't help fix the pile of machines you bought already.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Ummm....how many desktop users REALLY add PCI cards to their machines? If they need to then there is the tower design. For a vast majority of users the box has everything they need and it's space efficient.
Geeky folks like to pull stuff out and play with it but most people just want a computer that WORKS and does its job over the course of its life. They don't need to change graphics cards, modems, and if they need a disk drive they can plug in FireWire or USB2.
Explain to my why this is bad now...
I'll consider an Apple iMac (or laptop for that matter) when they come out with the same resolution as the 23" Cinema Display (1920x1200, commonly called WUXGA). Then I can watch HDTV natively (there is a stand alone box option for Apple now) and I'll have more pixels for showing digital photos.
Dara
My PowerBook has one mouse button. Unless I am mistaken, there is no way to add a second or third one. Therefore, I have to use command-click to open a link in a new window, when having additional buttons (instead of one unnecessarily gigantic one) would be much more convenient.
Also, I don't think it counts as power users. Most reasonably intelligent 60-year-olds can figure out two mouse buttons at least, once you explain to them that the left mouse button clicks on things, and the right mouse button brings up context menus, generally speaking.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Really? Holy crap. I've got the same kit and I get less than half the FPS you do. What is this tweaking you're talking about?
While I'm sure no one will read this anyway here it goes: I see a lot of people that make unreasonable requests that show that they have obviously missed the point somewhere along but there is one thing I think they could and should include. It would be nice if they put one or two PCMCIA slots on the thing. It wouldn't add too much to the size of it and it would give some expandibility without eating into the PowerMac's market I think. It would also be something to throw in the faces one of the most common complaints. It may eat into there blue-tooth and wireless module sales though.
I'm also moderately surprised --though I think it's no big deal-- that they only support 5.1 surround sound when Intel's new motherboards and laptops will support 7.1. I mean functionally it's not that big a difference considering how many people are willing to shell out for top-notch computer speakers but I'd think it be a source of pride for Apple.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I would have liked it if they had made a 'pizza box' with a flat metal front faceplate with a socket right in the middle that carried the power and video connectors for directly mounting a seperate LCD screen. It'd make it easier to replace/upgradeable, without completely ruining the all-in-one visual design (you'd wind up with a seam around the edge, but not bad). Essentially, make the system into an LCD dock.
So you have piece A ('pizza box', the system, with a front-facing socket) and piece B (LCD with connector specially designed to jack into the socket on the pizza box). Allow people to buy them seperately and I can envision scenarios like many pizzas, one monitor which you move from place to place as you move, or many monitors and one pizza, which you can carry from work to home almost like a laptop minus the battery.
I don't know. I'm just rambling.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
10 minutes ago, I generated (and printed!!!) a web order (order # W9259055, which has mysteriously disappeared), consisting of:
iMac 1.6GHz w/ 17" TFT
1GB DDR400 SDRAM - 2 DIMMs
Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
Accessory kit
Bluetooth Module + Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse + Mac OS X - U.S. English
Power Supply
250GB Serial ATA drive
For $1,823.00 (all of that stuff)
Also, on that order appears Quicken 2005 for Mac at $69.95.
When I went back to check on my saved order, it was gone. Re-Generating the identical order, my wife's new apple now costs $2483.00.
W9259862
iMac 1.6GHz w/17" TFT Z094 1 $2,483.00 $2,483.00
1GB DDR400 SDRAM - 2 DIMMs 065-4715
Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) 065-4704
Accessory kit 065-4695
Bluetooth Module + Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse + Mac OS X - U.S. English 065-4721
Power Supply 065-5255
250GB Serial ATA drive 065-4720
That's $660 in about 10 minutes.
I planned on getting it for her birthday next year...
At this rate, it will cost:
$34,715,183.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I agree with you with this point. Apple historically has always been behind on the supply side. They never seem to be able to estimate demand or scale up when well when it rises, resulting in delayed orders. Its a shame.
No, you just need to lock down the config tight enough so that can't happen
We have an entire team of guys at our college that specialize in one and only thing. Windows PCs. Yet, they have trouble locking down the computer because Windows and Windows programmers have picked up alot of bad habits over the years. Allowing Limited Userby default to even write to the root of the C:\ drive, the root of Program Files, last but not least the root of the Windows directory. Even after locking down most things. Our computers where hit by NetSky.
Here is a short example C:\Program Files\Common Files\McNeel Shared\Teen Porn 16.jpg.pif has been deleted. C:\Program Files\Common Files\McNeel Shared\Virii Sourcecode.scr Found the W32/Netsky.c@MM virus !!! C:\Program Files\Common Files\McNeel Shared\Virii Sourcecode.scr has been deleted. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Best Matrix Screensaver.scr Found the W32/Netsky.c@MM virus !!! C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Best Matrix Screensaver.scr has been deleted. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\CDO\Best Matrix Screensaver.scr Found the W32/Netsky.c@MM virus !!! C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\CDO\Best Matrix Screensaver.scr has been deleted. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\CDO\Dark Angels.pif
It just goes to show that the Windows OS is inherited from a single user system, and doesn't think about where and how a user can install malware and virii ..etc throughout the system, infecting other users. We've been using Unix and now Linux for the last 20 years and I've never as many problems on Windows on other
platforms like Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Mac OSX.
Just an FYI for college-nerds, I just checked with the Apple store and students have to wait until 9/15 to get a discounted purchase. On the upside, now I know when I'm getting my new toy ;)
> I can buy 4, THAT'S RIGHT FOUR, PC's for the same price as one iMac.
Interesting. I just spec'ed a shitty dell with specs comparable to the iMac, and it turned 100$ higher.
The one button mouse lost. If you have to go to the keyboard to get extra functionality (Apple users do), then its time to buck up and admit that the one button design simply is no longer useful.
If running Linux is your concern, you have your choice of Gentoo, Yellow Dog, and Debian for PPC hardware, not to mention NetBSD (which is what makes of the underpinnings of OS X anyway.)
I just like being able to close the lid on my damn laptop and have it go to sleep and wake reliably when I open it again. Everything else merely requires installing GCC and automake.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
This is a false argument, and clearly from someone who has never used OS X. Why would you have to hire three? Why not one, or one part time since OS X needs so little support? As people migrate over to Mac OS X, you will need less admins. There's your cost savings.
Perhaps you are a windows admin yourself.... hmmmmmm.
either create a gaming PC, or a media/office/ PC.
This in-between shit is no good. And their price point is too high. for 1500 I can build myself a kickass gaming PC that's double the performance of that one. Sure it'll be an ugly tower, but christ.. I can still HIDE a tower.
They clearly haven't seen my desk.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
All Apple products have at least $150 worth of cuteness built in.
sup
If you are sane and want more RAM then you will aos be unable to return the computer as Apple will deem it "custom". So they cut down on returns by crippling the default model.
e.g. Our department specs maybe something like this
1.8 GHz G5 processor
40 GB harddrive
CD-RW drive
512 MB to 1 GB RAM
3 Year service
My department doesn't need the secretarial staff to have 80GB drive nor a DVD-R burning SuperDrive. Yet, I'm forced to buy those components if I want the 1.8GHz machine instead of the 1.6GHz. I don't expect Apple to be able to customize like Dell does (penny pinching moves like excluding a $2.41 mouse pad) , but I just feel that I lack the ability to squeeze the most out, by not being able to configure the machines to our needs hampers purchasing sometimes. For administrative and coporate jobs and people who need a basic terminal a 40GB HDD and a CD-RW burner are great. Our users typical need enough processor power, for 3-4 years down the road and enough RAM to run 5-8 concurrent applications as they typically do.
I love Macs, I still use my G4 AGP daily, but this design IS NOT revolutionary. Even before Gateway, I saw intel-based machines at CompUSA that had all of the guts built in to the LCD. It was black, and not as slick looking as the new imac, but it was virtually the same. This is a very useful design, and I would recommend it to a friend, but lets tone down the accolades...
"Now take that same machine, upgrade the video card to a GeForce FX 5200"
Fair enough, but it can be done. How easy and cheap will it be to upgrade the iMac card?
They had a really good breakdown of CPU versus GPU in Doom 3. The CPU still matters, especially at low resolutions.
-I am an elective eunuch.
How many desks are we talking here? For an organization under 500, I can see getting away with two admins pretty easily - and that's if the Mac admins do other things too.
I've seen it happen, pre-OS X.
± 29 dB
Odd but they left off the firewire 800 ports.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why not one, or one part time
Oh yeah, a part time tech. What a wonderful idea. Maybe you can take advantage of that iCrashwhenyouwant software to schedule the problems around when the part-timer is in? Or are you only planning on hiring Mac techs who live a 2 minute walk from the office?
since OS X needs so little support?
And that's pretty damn funny. Real life case at a place I once worked, there was 40 PCs deployed, and three Macs. Fully a quarter of the support tickets generated for the whole company came from the three Macs. I especially got a kick out of how often the graphics guy would curse that his Mac crashed on him - again! and he lost what he was working on.
that thing is hella sweet.. i'm a straight up PC user.. I have been for years.. the only time I've ever bothered using macs was in High School for yearbook projects and what not..
honestly, the money you pay for this kind of computer is almost identical to how much a graphic artist, or studio producer would pay for an optimal PC to use for such applications like the Adobe Suite..
Its worth the money spent.. It looks MUCH cooler than anything I've ever seen.. saves so much space.. and will run those applications like a champ..
if ya want gaming, then why are you commenting on this thread in the first place?
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
For two reasons -
1) Remember the spectrum that they combined with a built in cassette player? Remember how when the tape deck failed, you had to bin the whole machine? Oh wait..iPod...battery....replace whole unit.. I think I'm beginning to see a pattern here.
2) Heat, heat and heat! From the pictures, that case doesn't appear to be particularly well ventilated, and there just can't be the room in there for a decent fan airflow. Pop a half-decent graphics card in there, play highly intensive games, wait a year and a half, and you have a potential fiasco on your hands. No matter how pretty a box looks, I would never buy it if I didn't think it could practically ensure a prelonged period of intensive use.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I use Airport Extreme, you INSENSITIVE CLOD!
The PC industry tends to have cheap hardware and relatively pricey integral software ($300 for XP Pro non-upgrade, MS Office even more) while Apple, being a singluar source, can subsidize its software development with hardware sales. People scoff at the yearly $150 OSX upgrades, but I can assure you that without $2k starting model towers and pricey iPods, it would be a lot worse.
I do not own any Apple hardware, but I would love one of the new 30" displays if nVidia or ATI would release a consumer-level PC-based 2xdual link graphics card. (These monitors are one area where they are probably not making off too much like bandits...)
I love Apple and what they are trying to do, but why must they cower in a corner? Apple insists on telling it's consumers what they should want, but not why they should want it. All Apple has to do to sell their computers is tell people why they should want to buy them, and they know it. People will never get over the fact that they are more expensive than what Dell is trying to sell them today unless Apple says "Hey, we design our hardware and software together because it's more stable and can make you more productive. Now watch as I show you that you can play games and use Microsoft Office files on a Mac..."
It's just a shame to see a platform purposefully remain "underground" when it could benefit from so much innovation if it was more mainstream.
Networking seems more like the cable you'd have on a company desktop - better performance, cheaper, and way way less security headache than wireless.
Incidentally, the stand looks like it has a sort of cable holder thing, to make things a little bit neater. And you can of course always get a cable snake thingy if you're plugging in lots of stuff.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
... and I have to agree. It's far from ugly, but the design does not look as "inspired" as that of the G4 iMac. Very practical (especially regarding the footprint), but not as innovating or attention-catching as its predecessor. The 20" version does look very good though, with the bigger screen making the white part below look quite small.
;)
What really caught my eyes though are the 30" screens. Two of them side by side makes for a truly impressing sight! Too bad nearly no one can afford them and the G5 to make them run...
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So that when the computer becomes obsolete, you can still use it as a plain old LCD monitor.
Or plug in your laptop and use it as a monitor.
I was expecting to see basically this design but with the dvd in the base.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
1. The old iMac had a lightweight screen that floated almost magically above the computer and was easily adjusted to any angle with the touch of one finger. The new iMac almost returns us to the old days of bulky and immovable CRTs. To adjust your screen you have to move your entire computer. Duh! Like we were asking for that.
2. The old iMac didn't let you add anything internally, but at least you could discretely add a Firewire drive with out-of-sight cabling. With the new iMac, all cabling will be dangling in the air for all to see and making adjusting the screen an even greater hassle. Now the monitor will go where the cabling wants and not where you or I want. Lean back while listening on headphones and your screen tilts at an odd angle. What a stroke of genius!
3. Apple's always tended to make computers that get too hot, with the notable exception of the outsized G5 'blimp hanger' desktop. Are those G5s crammed into such a small form factor with limited circulation going to run hot as a toaster? Probably. Look for baked, yellowing white plastic inside a year. Look for the silly folks who bought this Edsel to whine and ask for Apple to fix the problem.
The pitiful thing is that this product isn't even 'innovative.' Sony already has a computer with a similar form factor and it's not exactly selling like hot cakes, for much the same reasons listed above. If someone wants a screen/computer combo, a laptop makes far more sense. This beast has all the disadvantages of a laptop with none of the advantages.
At least we can be happy about one thing. They didn't use their flashing lights patent on this one--the Mac for five-year-old boys who never grew up. "It flashes and squawks. It must be good!"
Yes, I'm sure some of these beasts will sell. Some people are so ga-ga over Apple's designs--good or awful, they'd buy a Mac if it were brown and looked like a pile of cattle poop, flies and all. (Attention Apple design!)
It's easy to see why, in spite of the best OS on the planet Apple's market share is in the low single digits. Apple makes well-designed laptops and they sell well. But their desktops seemed to be designed by the weirdest characters in Dilbert cartoons. And they sell pitifully and almost in spite of their designs. People buy them because they have to, not because they want to.
What the public wants in desktops is shown by what they buy in the Windows world--a reasonably priced box (color irrelevant) with modest features but easily customized to suit. What Apple sells is far from that. Buyers are forced to choose between an always slightly weird iMac that can't be upgraded and an overpriced (and currently oversized) desktop with more trendy features (i.e. optical video out) than most of us want, but so poorly designed it can't hold more than two internal and one external drive.
I'd love to upgrade my aging beige G3. The Windows/Linux world is filled with hardware that would suit. Unfortunately, When it comes to desktops, Apple keeps coming out with dumb stuff like this new iMac. They design computers to win awards from weird magazines rather than give the public what it wants.
--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle
Look, Ive used macs since the orignal - that just had 1Mb of ram!
g e=gallery&model=128k
The first Mac had 128K of RAM:
http://www.apple-history.com/noframes/body.php?pa
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Do you mean, they couldn't grasp, even when faced with the fact, that it was indeed easier to get stuff done? Or, that they couldn't figure out how it could be easier, not accepting the argument that a quieter computer is an easier computer?
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Any Windows admin should be able to learn everything that needs to be done to set up Macs in a few days since the Macs are secure out of the box. Windows is much harder to deal with than a Mac, so any admin who is worth his/her pay should have no problems whatsoever.
All theory is gray
Yeah, I realized it had speakers after I read some more -- I should have known better than to assume just because I couldn't see them : (
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Is it just me, or does the AirPort Extreme card look different than the regular one. It looks more like an AirPort card (802.11b) to me, but I know the computer has AP Extreme...
Disclaimer: This comment was generated by a Flock of Trained Microsoft Programmers for Aqua_Geek.
So you put it in the kitchen - never mind greasy fingerprints, try on cheese-sauce fingerprints for size!
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
The original iMac was basically a laptop wrapped around a tube. The iMacs are always using laptop components rather than desktop components. All that really changes from one design to the next are the cosmetics.
In Sweden you would have to pay a TV-license, which is about 160, since the iMac would include a TV-tuner. Here in Sweden, it is the TV-tuner which require a license, not the action (watching tellie) you want to perform.
Yes, this makes it mandatory to get a license when you buy a graphics card with TIVO-capabilies. But in contrast to when buying a TV, the retailer don't have to report you to Radiotjänst (Radio Services) who manages the licensing.
You just do not know how to shop at Dell
At least Apple doesn't have quite as many layers of price confusion.
Another option is to build your own PC. If Dell can sell a bundle like that for $700 it's probably possible to go the cheap route on a few of the options and build a similar system for $600. (Or stay at the $700 price point, upgrading a few options or getting a cooler looking case).
I think I'll keep my desktop PC and my PowerBook G4.
For larger systems such as powermacs and probably iMacs, serious repairs are done at your house. For laptops, they send you a prepaid shipment box which you use to overnight to them (and they then overnight it back to you).
Regards,
-JD-
So, let's see. I can get a complete, well-equipped G5 computer with a 20" monitor for $1899. Yet their stand-alone 20" monitor is $1299.
My first thought was "wow, that means the cost of building the computer part must be less than $600". Then I came to my senses and realized that it really means the stand-alone monitors must have huge profit margins. I've always felt that their monitors were the most overpriced products in their portfolio. I think this proves it.
No flames, please. I'm a major Mac-head. I just thought the cost difference between the products was revealing.
I used to work in Apple's flagship retail store in San Francisco. All the POS systems ("cash registers," 7 of them) are iMac G4's, about one revision before the last ones. Just from the way the customers behaved when I worked there, I know that if they don't hurry up and replace those with a currently-shipping model, the customers are going to constantly be asking about them and they won't care what kind of processor, they'll be pissed. Some people are just going to still like the 'lampshade' iMacs better and of course my former coworkers are going to have to tell them they're not for sale. Oh man.
Oh, and the "internet cafe" computers are also G4 iMacs. I also wonder if they're going to replace those. I think there are 16 of them. I think they should, in the interest of not getting people jazzed about a model you no longer sell.
If Apple can cram a G5 motherboard and a 17 inch LCD into a case 2 inches thick, they should be able to do something simular packing job with one of their notebooks, no?
Sure, the battery life probably won't be the greatest in the world, but folks like video editors and Photoshop junkies would probably appreciate having mobile that has the power of a G5.
So, what's the hold up, Apple? Where's my G5 Powerbook?!?
Assume that one is out of the office, on vacation, sick, or otherwise busy at all times. Then you need two people as the core staff available at all times, which is probably a minimum to get stuff done.
This has nothing to do with Mac tech support issues - anything in business typically must be staffed for three or more people to cover all contingencies.
If you can get away with two, you need three. Periodically people do go on vacation and get sick.
I'd love to rip off the mount and hang these on the walls of my house as wireless home automatition interface points, full computing points, and gorgeous fluid screensavers drawing from the networked best-photos library when not in use.
If only they had a touch-screen to make most automation control quick.
Hey !
what will PC makers like dell, acer etc do....? can someone else reverse engineer imac--- i mean open and see whts inside and then make something like that for PC too?is it gonna be possible?
i think it wud be gr8 to hav a PC like that....to do that...who needs to bring abt the biggest change reqd from the present status...
Why does yahoo do this
The G4 had dual drives.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The new iMac has a Serial ATA hard drive in the $1299 model. If you want that in a Dell, you'll have to pay $1699.
My Blog Sucks.
KCSM, south of San Francisco, stopped analog broadcast on channel 60 and is digital-only. The specific reason is they lost their transmitter site lease. It was a forerunner of things to come, though, to see the blue screen of analog death they had for a week or so...
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
You say, "at a place I once worked," but fail to say when that was or what the circumstances were. In my experience, Macs rend to get short shrift re.: tech support. Usually this took the form of "It's a Mac, we don't understand them, and we need to appease those who want to use them, so there are the two Macs--Enjoy!"
I don't see how, especially with OSX, you would get many support requests. You must have worked in a true Wintel house where people hated/were scared of Macs!
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
The only reason this release is good is so that we can all move along to what we're REALLY waiting for - the G5 Powerbook! nothing to see here, move along... :D
Now, playing Doom 3 well is hardly the entire measure of a computer, so I don't want to bash the new iMac. It has its charms. I might be recommending it to a 65 year-old who I know needs new a machine for digital photography, but we'll have to see first if it is sufficiently adjustable and comfortable for viewing; he might be better served, actually, by the last generation iMac.
But Doom 3? Please. The FX5200 is a value card, sold for ~$50 retail. That's a shocking choice for a $1300 luxury computer--you'd expect to find it in, say, a $600 generic box. It simply does not have sufficient pixel pipelines nor video RAM (Apple has seen fit to use the "cheap seats" version with only 64 mb).
On a P4 3ghz, the underachieving FX5200 gets a whopping 20 fps in Doom 3 at the lowest possible quality settings (640x480, all effects turned off). TweakPC, in Germany, has a useful chart showing where the card falls in comparison to modern video cards: 25th place..
Not sure why this was at -1?!! This is the best Luser vs. Luser I've ever seen!! Anti-linux apple luser pitted against an equally troll-skilled adversary in the form of an anti-apple linux luser! Amazing battle of the superpowers!!! :D
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
I agree with you but since the iPod is yet to be FW800, I don't think Jobs thought it was needed yet! ;D
In the next OS X apple is working on an API that will send alot of comutationaly complex stuff to the video card. They showed a demo applying filters to video in real time (edge detection etc...) at the last keynote.
I think this is the solution apple is looking at, not just having speciallized mpeg2 hardware
I'm optimistic about getting extremely optimized game libraries to Mac OS in near future. Practically all game development companies will be shipping games for PS 3 and XBox 2, both of which contain a modified version of G5. When you get the new high-end iMac, you're buying something very close to the current XBox 2 development reference platform!
So getting the optimized game libraries and developers who know how to develop games for G5 should only be a matter of time. Major coolness!
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
yes, that moment does exist. just last night I "opened" a preopened iPod box and thought it was pretty neat. just wish it wasn't so overpackaged as now I have to tear apart the box just to recycle it.
Does anyone remember the TV commercials when the last generation of iMacs came out that compared the range of screen motion of an iMac and the Dell equivaltent? Basically, they were doging on the Dells for not being all flexible and poseable, but now they have gone with what appears to me to be pretty much the same design. Am I off my rocker, or has Apple reversed the typical cycle of innovation and repication?
On the other hand, to play the devil's advocate, I suspect that for people, it is a drawback, no that they will really need the extension features, but because they might. This includes of course many in the /. crowd, but also some 'semi-technical people', who might want to keep one open option.
You don't need a internal extension now, but what about tomorrow? The real question is, will the 'next big thing (tm)' be usable using a firewire or an USB 2.0 connection (and if yes will this be convenient / expensive).
You might argue that FW has enough bandwidth to handle anything you can connect to a simple PCI connector, and you would be right. You could also argue that there is no 'next big thing' that would connect via PCI to the machine. I would agree, the next big thing is probably going to have its own processor and have an ethernet connector, but if you look in the past, all the external interfaces could mostly be added to machines using internal connectors:
- SCSI
- Ethernet
- SCSI 2
- USB
- Fast Ethernet
- Firewire
- USB 2.0
- Gigabit ethernet
- Firewire 2
Notice a pattern?The second factor is convenience. You can add a serial port to a Mac via an USB dongle. You can add a memory stick card reader using USB. This is nice but means cables, lots of cables. Between an PCI USB card and an USB hub, there is little difference in price, but one is compact and does not need a power supply.
If you look at single block Macintoshes, many had a single extension slot:
- the SE line (my SE/30 had an ethernet card).
- the SI
- the LC line
- the pizza box PPCs (6xxx)
- the one in all PPCs (5xxx)
- 20th anniversary machine
All I wanted to say is that I feel, for many, extension slots are not so much a direct need than an insurance against future change. To a large extent, I agree that this is irrational, but on the other hand there are many irrational things about computers that decide if we will or not buy them.So everyone is all amped up about a non-portable tablet computer?
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
- 1.8 Ghz G5
- 1Gb
- 800Mhz FSB
- 160Gb HD
- NO MONITOR
at 900.00$ if you did that then you would be backlogged for the next year with orders. But i dont think Jobs believes in that. The fact is that OSX is unix that is easy to use. it beat the shit out of SUN in price and usability. they gay posters and winners are just 12 year old script kiddies who couldnt afford a decent computer to begin with....but a 'boxless head'. This is why I love Apple's stuff. No matter how many steps ahead you think, they've already run past and taken all the breadcrumbs!
You must think in Russian.
The entry-level G5 is cheaper than the original iMac was when it was introduced (at 2k$ or 2200, I forget which) in 1998.
Macs have been getting cheaper. If anything, it's Apple's raging hardon for flat panels that's keeping the prices up.
sorry, as a lifelong mac user (well, since 1984) i am disappointed. why not release a LCD-free imac in the same form factor for $499 that I can plug my own monitor into?
.
i know apple is not about market share, it's about the "user experience", but until apple gives the unwashed masses a lower price point the mac will remain a boutique item. a recent survey show that a majority of people looking to purchase a new computer were interested in buying a mac - until sticker shock set in.
apple simply must address the lower end of the consumer market if they are going to play in that space . .
Ask Me About... The 80's!
So, why would I want a notebook on a stand? Why wouldn't I want a regular notebook?
Sure, this thing may be a bit larger, like a desknote, but come on. What's the point?
Of these support calls how many were "how do I change my wall paper", "Where is 'My Computer'", "How do I make a short cut", "I can't eject the cdrom", and other such requests that would normaly come from a person that has used nothing but MicroCrap there whole computing life. I work for a school district with 75% mac, we have 2 admins, one for our legacy OS 9 stuff and the other for OSX, we have two full time mac repair techs and 2 that that do both pc and mac. We have 16 techs for PC repair and 4 people for the Administration. This is for over 5000 computers total both mac and PC.
Where is the TCO savings? Lets see 6 people to support 3750 Macs and 20 people to Support 1250 PC's With the average cost of 166k/yr (three admins for 500k/yr) per employee from the Parent post, the cost per unit to support is
Mac is $265.60 per year
PC is $2656.00 per year
Support for the macs is one tenth the cost of the PCs. There is your cost savings. This is based on real numbers of employees and Computers. You do the math and prove me wrong.
Side note, I started of in PC only support and moved to Mac only. Mac is much easier to learn and to support. Yes Macs crach but a hell of lot less often the PC's do.
Ahh.. The mind what a wonderful trap!
Considering all the fans that the destop model has, how do they cool this thing? Since the G5 chip has to be sitting behind the LCD, what does the heat do to the LCD over time?
The Mac may be foolproof but the Mac community produces a better class of fool.
Hell, I'd like one of these new machines myself, so much less crap on the desk, especially with the bluetooth keyboard. But no way would I buy 500, put them in front of everyone from engineers to MBAs and expect one part-time admin take care of the lot.
The Japanese who are always demanding less footprint from their electronics already have something that is JUST like this. The technology is already 3 years years old and Apple is just coming out with this now?
See more about here it here. FMWorld. If you can read Japanese that would be very helpful. The translated site should be here but I think there is something wrong with Babelfish...
I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but it's designed almost precisely like an old PC design. Everything but the keyboard and mouse were in one unit on those, and they were flat just like this. I last remember seeing them 6 years ago at a CompUSA.
-]Phreak Out[-
"256MB DDR SDRAM running at 400MHz and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB graphics memory. So you'll be able to play Worlds of Warcraft, Doom III and other fantastic entertainment."
Can anyone say "marketing BS"? Well yeah, it'll run Doom 3... at 640by480 on low details, running at 15FPS! Note that the system requirements of Doom 3 specify 384MB of RAM as the absolute mimimum, and this system has 256MB of RAM.
I mean, lets take an Apple laptop without a battery, put the screen on the top of the lid, stick it on a stand and make it so the lid does not open, put a 5200U in it and charge £1350! (And then market it to gamers, claiming it'll run Doom 3)
Its not to say its a bad computer, but it is anything but a gaming or graphics-oriented computer.
If you have a legitimate argument to back that up, let's hear it. However, the fact is I can price similar spec'd real IBMs for less than $1,299, and IBM clones for a few hundred dollars.
And, yes, as I pointed out earlier, this does include comparable optical drives (indeed, you'd be hard pressed to buy a combo drive right now, your IBM equivalent would most likely have a DVD burner compared to the $1,299 iMac's combo drive). FSB is a performance issue, I'm certain my example PC runs, in practice, at a comparable speed. Neither the IBM nor the iMac includes wireless, but the IBM can be upgraded to support 802.11g for next to nothing, it's $99 for the iMac.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
OS X
G5
Size
Con:
Weak, outdated, non-replaceable GPU (sigh)
Loss of telescoping arm
Style:
The last iMac was inspired by a sunflower. And this one, by what? Hanging file folders?
Generally I like spare, modernist industrial design. But from Apple we had come to expect a humanizing influence on the form factor: you know, wit, imagination. Dessicated and stringy, the new iMac looks like a supermodel captured by a taxidermist. Did they really have to drain the last ounce of whismy from the design?
Fully a quarter of the support tickets generated for the whole company came from the three Macs.
Sorry dude, I was almost believing you until you pulled this whopper out of your ass. If you are going to troll, at least try to make up shit that sounds remotely like the truth.
I'm SO happy about this design, I knew when the G5 iMac came out I would want one. But luckily I much prefer the design of my G4 iMac. Or, as it is about to become 'The Much sought after G4 iMac', I suspect.
because it sounds as if you haven't really used apple products before, not to mention it's usually gamers/artists that need such power (dual 3.0?), notice I didn't say always. Tell me, how is apple's 17" or 20" shorter VERTICALLY than the samsung? The widescreen allows many things that we all use to be set off to the side yet (allowing, for example gkrellm, IM/mail indicators, and so on), which is a great way to have them on screen but still work on a window that is probably still at a standard size (800x600, 1024....), such as when using the web, as many pages are designed with specific sizes in mind. This a big selling point with ANY larger monitor, but using/having extra horizontal space (in apple's "nonstandard way") is damn useful when the world operates on standard pc sizes which usually fill vert/horiz most of the time (i.e. to NOT use the extra space in the margin for such little things is a waste, and to simply buy a bigger monitor seems to be an over the top solution, as the same perspective/proportions would exist, that is it would still be "mostly square"). It's well known that people can't get enough vertical space, and most people don't even use all available horizontal, preferring instead to "maximize"/fullscreen apps, usually leaving a lot of whitespace down the right side of most apps. The 20" apple screen is capable of 1680 x 1050, darn respectable when you consider that it is a full 1.3" shorter !!! The apple display is not only very thin (read the specs, it's 2.2" on the 20" model, less on the 17"), and that's including the guts of the machine. I realize that you (will?) own a powermac, and I am talking about the imac (since that is what the article is about), but I thought it on topic as pimping another $bigexpensivedisplay would be worthless to imac owners as the display comes with it (love or hate the idea, it exists). So I'm still not sure why it seems that you IMPLY that programmers (at least you that is) are less efficient unless than other programmers with more viewable lines (given the same task). I code as well, and I don't see how the loss of only a few lines makes me more or less of a developer. Strange, but we seemed to make it this far in the industry without these things (though I am spoiled now and wouldn't go back for anything), I am guessing you simply posted to let people here know that you code, and you will be doing so with a fast, pretty machine and a large expensive display, then you let us know which $flavorofthemonth monitor programmers SHOULD be using (by implication again, I guess it wasn't enough to say "more lines=less paging through logs/debug sessions). Sorry bout the bite, I guess I'm just tired of seeing so many worthless offtopic posts which add nothing to the real discussion, and merely serve to worsen the S/N ratio here. I suppose I should end on that note. So long pot, kettle out
Actually, the one thing that I would love to see is have Apple officially support dual-monitors on the iMac and eMac. As I understand it, the video card supports it, but it has been set to "off" in the parameter RAM and Apple provides no way of turning it on (though others have given instructions).
Why?
I think it would help shut up the "I already have a monitor"/headless iMac crowd. Because now they can plug-in their extra monitor to their iMac/eMac and have a dual-monitor system. And when they do this and see how nice Apple displays are (compared with the "free" monitor they got when buying their Dell), they'll understand the advantages even better.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Uh... he's comparing Apples to Apples (who make excellent LCD displays), not apples to oranges. Pretty basic comparison.
Get it?
I was just looking at these digital picture frames (e.g. http://digi-frame.com/) which can hang on a wall and run through a slideshow. The 17" frames at the website I gave run for about $2000; this new iMac would probably work just as well for cheaper.... (Can they be hung on a wall, I wonder? Maybe a little heavy. And you'd have to buy a nice frame to put around it.)
Under Mac OS 7, 8, or even 9, the Macs might have been crashing enough to have been frustrating. This is the problem with many anti-Mac arguments, they are out of date, only applying to Macs from several years ago.
Under OS X, this is deeply unlikely to happen (never say never on Slashdot...). Also, your saying that you 'got a kick' out of the Mac user's frustration clearly shows your personal Wintel bias via a bit of schadenfreude. Looks like you didn't lift a finger to help.
Anyone else notice the front side bus is slower than on the PMacs? The 1.8Ghz has only a 600Mhz FSB, the 1.8 PMac had a 900Mhz one. Are these some kind of different chip?
I thought all the CRT iMacs had a little trap door in their bum that gave you access to the Ram. I know the DV models had this.
Now hard drive replacements were a major bitch (they lived under the CD drive at the front and there was a fair bit of stuff to pull out before you could get to it.
Go out and get sailing!
That is, can one pull out the cpu and/or graphics card, or are they soldered to the board as in in previous imacs/emacs?
Failed your networking class didn't you.
Actual workstations/desktop user systems outnumber actual SERVERS by HOW much?
Viruses are all about maximum TOTAL penetration into a user-base.
As such, while servers (with lots of processing power and oodles of bandwidth) are a nice find, it's more preferrable to infect a few hundred less powerful desktop systems, especially if a lot of them are on cable modems or DSL.
While Apache may be the most prevalent WEB SERVER on the planet, it's residing on one of the smallesr OS installations in the market. And *nix server installs are outnumbered by Windows desktop installs by, what? A factor of fifteen or greater?
Silly Brand Zealot!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So they cut the bus to 1/3rd the Clock Speed. For the categories it is targeted it won't be noticeable as it would be for a researcher, developer, ecetera.
The Screen Real Estate is a major improvement. The prior iMac had nothing remotely like the specs of these new screens. The 20 in at 16 x 10 is a major step up for their LCDs that aren't a Cinema Display.
The fact the high end is just over US $2k and picturing an end consumer with a 160 Gig drive, so on and so forth, the only modification most will make is to bump up the RAM. Big deal. That issue is solved rapidely.
Add an Air Port Extreme with a Base station in the House and being that it is only 21lbs take it where you want and relax. It's a lot easier to move this desktop system than a PowerMac G5 in one shot.
This has a less Medical Office look and a more Business Office appearance that will help propel sales into the Enterprise markets.
I think that any guy who would buy a computer based on the appearance alone is more likely to have a BOYFRIEND in their future.
So no laptop huh? Hey you're a CS student, more power to you if you want to build your own Opteron. However, I would argue that the best CS students would be those who not only could build a Wintel machine and run Windows, but those who could effortlessly shift to Linux and OSX as well.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Wow!! They made a dell desktop that runs OS X?!?!?!?
yeah, can't you guys complain about the mouse or something?
1000KB=1MB, not Mb Bytes and bits are different units, slapass
After doing a couple (so help us we had 12 of those accursed first gen ones), I could have it part, a hard drive pulled or ram upgraded, and back together in 15 minutes. Far longer than it should take, but still not an eternity.
Mod point free since 2001
Weren't around for Code Red, were you?
e nc /data/codered.worm.html
That was a very nasty virus that only attacked IIS web servers.
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/v
Yes this is true. I jsut upgraded a first gen iMac over the weekend, and it has the "Bum Tray" in it.
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
And was he running OSX? Be honest, now.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I'm sorry I don't see your argument or it doesn't hold water. Deploying software on a Mac and maintaining updates and administration on a Mac OSX is far lower than any other computer I've come across. We have a hetrogenous enviroment in our department. Aside from Windows PCs we have SGI Irix, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Mac OSX.
the 1st gen iMacs you had to undo several screws on the bottom, unplug the monitor cable, and slide the entire logic board out of the machine to access the RAM. The CRT stayed in place, not sure what that post was talking about. It was a bit of a bitch, but after you do a few, it only takes a couple minutes to add RAM. The little trap door was added with the DV models, I believe.
Please, just goes to show how poor your techs were. I worked at a research hospital were I supported over 2000, yes OVER 2000, macs running OS 8, OS 9 by myself. You know what I spent most my time doing, surfing the internet waiting for a ticket to come in, while the PC guys were swamped with tickets trying to support about 250 systems a piece. Once things went to OS X, they made me run PC calls to help out the PC techs, I spent 95% of the time doing PC work, and probably 4% was helping users with specialized lab equipment and software.
I know people who support Mac installations just as large part time with no problems. Ask school teachers who have had to deal with IT dorks coming in and forcing them to switch to PCs which they prefer and how much their IT costs went through the roof. Most school that did this went from having someone come out when they had a problem to having to have a IT staff there 5 days a week, all day long.
Look, Ive used macs since the orignal - that just had 1Mb of ram!
The original Macintosh had only 128k of RAM. The first Mac one could have one megabyte of RAM in was the Macintosh Plus, which came out two years later.
I won't try to justify my knowledge of Macs by stating I've been using them since the beginning, my first Mac was a IIsi. But I will point out I seem to know more than you do about your own computer. I'll also point out the iMac is by Apple's own definition a consumer machine, so I'm not shocked the new iMac wasn't built for the "hard core corporate client." A gamer may be a type of consumer, but they are more prosumer, and haven't considered the iMac in the past because the screen nor the graphics card can be upgarded.
If you're looking for an iMac to satisfy both of these users, you will be looking for a very long time. The two groups are opposites in term of needs.
Does a corporate user need a high-horsepower graphics card? No.
Is 5.1 sound important to Powerpoint presentations? No.
Does a company want systems that just get the job done without being extravagently expensive? Yes.
Is liquid cooling necessary in the workplace? No.
Does extra piping for liquid cooling annoy IT guys trying to replace a bad NIC? Yes.
The "Est Ship" column on a completed order page sez -- 3-4 weeks.
This is for a 20" model configured with double the default RAM (total 512MB) and no additional options.
Same estimated shipping time if you go with the 20" model and all options set to default.
So this is a pre-announce then?
Yes, that certainly is a nice chunk of what I'm looking for. Thanks for pointing that out.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I was trying to train college interns on how to do it. And not "handy with a screwdriver" type interns. The "would bleed to death of a sheet metal cut" interns.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
... here are some apps that might be of assistance (use at your own risk, blahbity blah blah):
LinkUp
Puts a little "light" in your menu bar
or
Skwonk!
Makes sounds depending upon the types of packets going through. There's even a barnyard sounds pack you can use with it
From a company that's pushed Gig-E down to the laptops for litereally years...Constraining this unit to 100Mbit will limit it's use in various settings over the next couple of year. Just when desktop gigabit is finally becoming affordable and the idea of fast netboots and installs and moving large video files around and other such activities were becoming possible....
Otherwise a strong product in terms of design, price, performance, etc.
John Soward...University of Kentucky
I think it looks fantastic, but what about that patent Apple filed for the LED lights in the display housing? Now *that* is what I really wanted to see in the new new iMac. Make the whole bottom lip colored fading into white at the top, or something. It's not like that would be too hard to engineer.
your full of crap.
Sorry, no. Let's look at the G5 SPEC score that Apple uses in their ads for the dual G5 2.0 GHz. Slightly behind a Dell dual Xeon 2.4 GHz. Ah, but that's a Xeon not a P4. Well SPEC also shows that a single P4 at 2.4 GHz is slightly ahead of a single Xeon of the same speed. It would be very conservative to say that a single CPU iMac G5 1.8 GHz is equivalent to a 2.4 GHz P4.
SPECint_rate 2000
16.9 Apple Dual G5 2.0 GHz
17.2 Dell 530 Dual Xeon 2.4 GHz
9.56 Dell 530 Xeon 2.4 GHz
10.0 Dell WorkStation 340 P4 2.4 GHz
on their xbox2's... ;)
Maybe something like these and this would help in your lab. Although a BT mouse is a bitch to use once it's been secured this way. =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This machine looks like it was designed to get prices down. The stand looks like it is much cheaper to make than the previous one. Does it detach turning it into a tablet PC? Might it be possible with this or later models to remove the PSU and put in battery pack? This design has more legs in terms of subsidary models and price reductions later that any Imac so far
cheers
I'm the Mac guy at a small liberal arts college (4 campuses in three counties). We have around 120 Macs (staff, faculty, labs) and just one of me. Installing new Macs is a bit of a pain as I have to drive out to where ever they have to go but once set up, they're no problem.
In the last year, since upgrading every G3 to G4, I've had only one hard drive fail and two mice stolen. When I took the job, and found out how many Macs they had, I asked the head of IT if he really needed a full time Mac guy. As it is, I feel like the Maytag guy. Oh well, at least I get lots of time to play around with Final Cut and Maya (no, I don't waste my time with webcomics and Fark).
I drank what? -- Socrates
Overclocked processor, and case lighting to make it go even faster.
Still could use a video-out. Hmm...
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
The first iMac design was a notebook wrapped around a tube. The second iMac design was a notebook as the base for a stand. The new iMac design is, as you say, a notebook on a stand. They all offer the same advantages a more compact and convenient desktop.
You probably want to fire that one. Problem solved.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Apple: "The Display is the Computer"
Sun: "The computer is the network"
Microsoft: ???
SCO: "Profit!"
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
I'm really suprised that no one has mentioned that there is a 17" model configured with no optical drive at all! Sells for $1,099 (edu pricing)
The G4 (74xx) chips are produced by Freescale/Motorola, not IBM. The G4 is just a cooler, and lower frequency chip than the G5s, though hotter than the G3s (75x) produced by IBM.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
" You may not alter, or modify the Image, in whole or in part, for any reason."
That mean no color correction or any editing to make it fit the process you are using.
The portability of the new design has caused me some concern. We've gone through a break-in and I don't want to lose the 'easy to move' model.
I have reviewed the specs but cannot find a 'Kensington Slot" mentioned. Does it have one?
20" iMac $1899
20" CinemaDisplay $1299
difference $ 600
This shows that Apple could reintroduce a G5 cube and price it aggresively under $1000.
Would you buy a Cube if it had the following?
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
512K L2 cache
600MHz frontside bus
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
160GB Serial ATA hard drive
Slot-load SuperDrive
Bluetooth
One empty PCI slot
Ditch the clear plastics, make Bluetooth standard and sell it without a mouse and keyboard.
Give customers the option of buying Apple's wired or Bluetooth mice/keyboard or third party peripherals.
It would be a switcher friendly Mac.
The original iMac was $1299.
I have been in Linux land for a long time, but all my old Macs used to be able to use the VGA as a second display. Even the Power Computing Clone did this, even though their manual said it couldn't.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
If you want to buy a Dell, call the sales line. Seriously- pick out what you want on the web, drop it in a shopping cart, then get someone on the phone, point them at a cart, and say you need it cheaper. The sales folks have discounts available to them that aren't on the site, and can usually knock another 5% off without working too hard.
If you're buying a server, the discounts are deeper... the sales folks are very aggressive, and you can often get a better price than their poor resellers can.
-R
I am not a mac fan, and even I have to admit that's the most insane looking computer I have ever seen in my life.
OK, I'll bite. I built a whitebox 6 months ago Athlon XP 512 megs of ram, geforce Ti4200 128 megs ram, wireless from linksys Nvidia Nforce mobo with 400 fsb. WinXP pro
I start up the computer--new. Outlook doesn't work. Fine that's a Office Suite problem. I can't share my wireless network if I'm hooked up to a router. I have to plug in my cable modem directly to the router because win xp doesn't understand spoofed addresses and MUST have 192.168.0.1 on it's main connection in order to share internet.
Problem two. I swapped out my video card for a all in wonder. I actually had to call microsoft to continue using my own software. BTW MS Office harrassed me to about it too.
Problem 3--anytime I go to bandwidth intensive applications on my windows box, my USB mouse stops working.
Problem 4-- windows can't do three things at the same time. Upon bootup, I can't load my wireless drivers, access the internet or open a web browser at the same time. Infact, I can't do anything without the screen freezing up for about five minutes after my computer starts.
Problem 5 -- internet explorer--need i say more?
I'm used to tabbed browsing. I'm used to automatic pop up blocking. I've not had a site take over my computer for quite a long while with firefox/mozilla.
Problem 6--dvd authoring takes about twice as long on the windows box.
You might say that the combination of hardware and software I have is the problem. I would counter that i purchased all products that were made for windows xp. I should not have problems if I want them all to work together.
More info. ON this same box, seperate harddrive I run 3 flavors of linux (testing purposes) all three--suse, fedora and gentoo run without a hitch. all the hardware. from initrd to gdm, only about thirty seconds.
Don't fool yourself. WIndows is a nightmare.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Okay. My mobile phone USB adaptor. It stopped recognising it. I tried reinstalling it. No luck. It turns out that Windows does per-USB port driver installation, so you can't switch USB ports for a device. I'd changed my monitor, including USB hub. My phone's USB adaptor never worked again. I'm told I have to wipe and reinstall. Fuck that. An OS should just handle attached devices automatically.
I've seen this design before, although I'm sure Apple did a much better job than Monorail. The older Apple designs were more innovative.
I swear to God I was literally dreaming about this new iMac last night! Although the one in my dream was butt-ugly (not that the real one is much prettier). It's not like I have been hanging out for this - I don't even want one! - but I guess I'm officially a Mac fanboy now. Oh, the shame ...
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
OK here's my +4 Informative to your +5 Funny:
/. reacts to Apple weilding the DMCA against an emu hacker, maybe with an EFF countersuit in the fray, while the bootable x86 DVD of MacOS X floats around on BitTorrent with SCO claiming full ownership...
qemu has had ppc32 support for a while and has been able to boot a PowerPC Linux kernel on an x86 box since around April. They have also had basic PREP (PPC REference Platform) video support since May. Basically, booting a PowerPC Mac OS X CD on x86 has become a relatively straightforward matter of blackboxing Apple's low level firmware and hacking out video/network/etc stub drivers. From a performance point of view, it is very likely a modern x86 CPU (especially x86-64) can emulate a 600 MHz PowerPC G3 in near-real time (AKA faster than most java apps).
qemu is not there yet, but it's very clearly headed in that direction.
Obviously, whoever pulls MacOS X86 off first is going to need an Enron-sized legal team and maybe a few bodyguards. Should be fun to see how
At least maybe we can settle a few hardware wars when AMD executes PPC32 faster than Motorola.
For this price, LCD included, do you really suppose to play DOOM III?
Throw in 200$ more and you'll get 1 Gb RAM from Kingston, then play.
And don't be troll
The metasploit.org guys actually demonstrated a remote exploit in MacOS X during Defcon 0xC. IIRC it was samba based, but I guess the Apple fanboys will try to weasel out of counting it because samba is off by default, even though a large number of corporate users enable it to interoperate with Windows PCs.
Also, I suspect you actually meant "... just as BSD itself is famous for dying". Slashdot does not tolerate low fidelity trolls, so please review your lines next time.
Can you honesty say there are any two-year old computers you would buy rather than building a new cheap PC yourself? You are going to have to be fiddling with a lot of components regardless.
There's a very, very good reason those two-year old PC's are worth so much les s- even with a name brand like Dell buying a a two-year old PC is like buying a Yugo with 100k miles already on it!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What will be your primary use of the computer? If they say mainly for web surfing/emailing/office applications I would definately tell them to buy a PC, and I would definately advise them on how to secure their box against worms/virii
It's damn nice of you to offer people unlimited free tech support to secure boxes against worms and virii. I got a little tired of that and tell people to buy Macs who just want to surf and run office applications, so I won't have to help them more than once every few years.
You can only eat so many free cookies before you tire of them, so I'm glad to be out of THAT tech support job.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't want to imagine what an iMac setup would look like once you get some peripherals plugged in.
Say you plug in a printer, a scanner, a digital camera dock, and iPod dock, some amplified speakers, your ethernet cable, perhaps the phone cable for faxing, and a firewire hard disk...
But they already have that covered. Ethernet and printer and speakers? Airport Express covers those needs (internal speakers are good enough for computer alerts). They can all be in a cabinet somewhere else.
For other things it's convienient enough to get to the ports you can tuck them away - I have a firewire CF reader but I don't leave it hooked up usually. The iPod dock is the only thing I could see leaving out all the time for most people, though I only dock once in a while and don't have that out either. Actually I was a little surprised the iMac did not come with an iPod dock built into the top somewhere!
With the bluetooth keyboard and mouse, this really could have only the power cord and be very usable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think it is a driver problem, I've had printers work fine with switching USB port, but this thing just doesn't want to work now.
So far as I know, the design that embeds the former box into the LCD as a whole is not unique, at least the manufacturer Lenovo(which used to be named Legend) has used this kind of concept years ago.<A href="http://202.113.16.117/upload/file/1094010759 lu.jpg">Click here to see the picture.</a>
Will Apple be sued by Cola on outlets form, or Cola will use that in next commercial?
You forget that you can't buy the Mac without a software license.
:(
No, but you can give the software back and get refunded. My sister did. There's a maximum delay of about 15 days, though, which I did let pass
blah
Of course, there are always the 2 usb ports that exist on every Apple keyboard...
"To adopt Macs we must hire at least three [admins] to keep things going."
For one Mac? Or for hundreds of Macs? Real world example of Mac support costs: throughout the 1990's, I worked as a half-time Mac support person on a college campus with around 80 Macs (OS 8 and 9, no X out yet). That's 20 hours per week supporting 80 computers (about a third laptops), or roughly 15 minutes per week (to average the numbers. At the time there were about 350 Windows PCs (all Windows 95 and 98) on the same campus, with four full-time staff and five half-time college students to support them. That's 260 hours per week for 350 PCs, or 40 minutes per week (average). And these numbers assume that a full work week is 40 hours, but most of the PC guys (and a gal) routinely worked 50 or 60 hours, whereas I stuck to 20 hours almost every week. Furthermore, our Macs had a much lower turnover rate (e.g. we replaced Macs every 3-4 years instead of 2-3 years). This isn't because of some kind of purchasing bias from the IT department; replacements were generally ordered as requested by faculty and staff.
However, if you really want to inflate your Mac support costs, have a Windows support technician try to fix a Mac. He'll take ten times longer than a Mac guy because he won't know what the hell he's doing. And it will still be broken when he's done.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I really meant it, hence the "pretty easily" in my post. One person can handle the day-to-day Mac administration in most environments.
± 29 dB
The complete article
Click and help me get an iPod?
In terms of locking this sucker down (I am in charge of locking equipment down where I am), does the the actual computer come off the stand easily? Does anyone know if I will have to lock down the base AND figure out how to lock down the actual computer as well? Thanks! Heather
At one place I worked, you had your choice of duo-chrome monitors for the white-box specials we ran. Would you like red-green, blue-green or red-blue?
You also had the choice of the 13" or if you were lucky the massive 15". This was only a few years ago.
...536.870912 megabyte DIMM, please?
MiB and KiB and so forth were invented by apologists for the hard drive industry, so that they could get away with misrepresenting the size of their drives.
Measuring anything on a computer in decimal is just plain stupid. Overloading 'mega-' and 'kilo-' as meaning 1024 * 1024 and 1024 when used in computer terms is only confusing to those who deliberately wish it to be so.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Or you mean like Apple started shipping back in May... of 1997!
GPL Deconstructed
... adding a TV tuner would mean you would be required by law to register it as TV device and henceforth pay a monthly fee for public broadcasting - whether you want/use the TV tuner or not.
i don't think that would be very popular here...
>Where'd you see one at?
;-)
they had one on display at WWDC SF. also there was one at Steve Jobs' house when i was over there playing fooseball. ok, so i made that last part up.
anyway, i suspect they were on display in Paris as well and i'm pretty sure i remember seeing a pic of one at the Boston show. thousands of (non-Apple) people probably have had a chance to see one live by this point.
i think it's funny that you are calling somebody an "imbicile" and can't even spell the word correctly. it's similar to somebody telling me "your stupid"
If it breaks, they'll fix it.
Ah yes, Applecare.
Good stuff, but pricey. brings the total for the entry level iMac to $1468.
For around $1500, I should bloody well hope they'd provide killer support. that's more than twice what I've paid for any computer in the past ten years, including my own Mac.
they sell a low-end 17" machine for $799
:->) but because I have good visual acuity and all those little dots on a shadow-mask (and I don't care if it's made of invar, adamantine, or cavorite, it's still got fuzzy uneven pixels) bother me. The idea of paying $800 for an all-in-one that I'm going to want to shove under my desk because the $170 CTX 17" monitor on my hotrodded beige G3 makes it look sick... well, it just burns me up.
The problem with the eMac is that its monitor is not at all competitive with the freestanding monitors you'd put on a PC you bought for $300 or even $500.
I can buy a nice aperture-grille (trinitron-clone) 17" monitor for under $200. Sony doesn't charge huge license fees for their technology any more, presumably because they're feeling price-pressure from LCDs, so I can't believe a decent 17" CRT would add significantly to the parts cost for the eMac.
I'd love to see a low-end headless Apple box for more like $400
I could probably swing $600 for a headless eMac. Not because I'm a geek (they could even make it look like an iPod and I wouldn't mind
They would get significant market share with a nice iPod-styled iSlab.
My company [...] has no Mac admins. To adopt Macs we must hire at least three to keep things going.
Why are you assuming that you need "at least three" Mac admins? Are you just assuming that the staffing load for Macs is comparable to that of Windows PCs, or do you have some objective reason for this figure?
This isn't a stolen design, any more than the Mac II was stolen from the IBM PC. There's certain general designs that are obvious for any class of devices, and if you're going to build an all-in-one personal computer with an LCD screen one of the obvious designs is an LCD monitor with the computer in the back. You might as well complain that they have buttons and wires.