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iMac Gets Thunderbolt I/O, Quad-core
fergus07 writes "Apple's desktop lineup has typically pushed users requiring plenty of fast I/O towards the Mac Pro — but the latest iMac refresh has broken the tradition. Quad-core Sandy Bridge CPUs and faster ATI Radeon HD GPUs are welcomed, but it's the addition of Thunderbolt ports (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch) that really ups the ante for a number of professional users."
Especially since you can count the number of PC models shipping with a Blu-Ray drive on one hand. Now that spells demand.
I am sure the few people who need a Blu-Ray can buy themselves an external drive (e.g. LaCie has one). Especially if they start coming out with Thunderbolt connectors.
So it's a new laptop with some pretty unremarkable new features. This article is different from the 100 other "latest new product" offers that arrive in my junk email box, how? ...apart from the fact it's on Slashdot and not in my junk email folder of course.
I'm pretty sure that H.264 is todays most common high definition video format, not BluRay, and I'm pretty sure that there is a significant proportion of the population getting along fine without BD-ROM functionality.
Not saying it wouldn't be a nice-to-have, but its far from required. Infact, in any of the PCs I have built or bought in the past three years, not once did a thought occur to me to even consider BluRay as a capability to include.
Apple don't give a damn about BluRay, they have iTunes - thats the direction they want you to go in....
USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.
Sure it did. When Apple released their iMac there was a rush to release peripherals to support them. Before that nobody really cared about USB despite the fact that it was present on the majority of PCs. People were fine with serial and parallel ports - there was simply insufficient reasons to switch to USB. Remember that USB 1.0 (or 1.1) was not actually that fast and came with a pile of driver issues (due to how new it was). It also added to the work that the CPU was required to do, something that is irrelevant today but quite relevant for a p200.
So Apple did jumpstart the USB market. Not that it would not have happened eventually on it's own, Apple just made it happen sooner. Their actions caused peripheral manufacturers to adopt the standard sooner then they would have liked to. Remember those early devices? Most were standard serial/parallel devices with a built in USB to serial/parallel converter. Ugly, but necessary if they wanted a piece of the iMac peripheral market.
Buy a Mac Pro, all that stuff will run miserably on an iMac as it is -- I can't recommend a RAID to anyone that doesn't need five nines of availability, multiple HD video streams of bandwidth, wants to keep spare disks, and doesn't need less than 4 terabytes of uninterrupted blocks (RAIDs aren't backup). If you want an iMac and a RAID you're doing it wrong, or your integrator is a con artist. If you want to do CAD or need more than two monitors you aren't in the iMac segment -- these are machines for home users, students and offices, people who are cost and space conscious but still want or need a Mac.
Apple has segments, just like Microsoft, Honda or anyone else. Behold the power of marketing and positioning to create better user experiences, simplify support and lower costs.
Even better, buy a PC, it'll be cheaper. I've been reassured countless times here on /. that Mac OS X is a buggy, proprietary, toy operating system that insults power users and there's nothing to recommend it, so why this sudden desire to send Apple a special order?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.