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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.
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.
So it's a new laptop with some pretty unremarkable new features.
You clearly didn't read the article or even know what an iMac is (hint: desktop). You can choose to ignore Apple stories by using Slashdot's account preferences, but instead choose to spam us with your ignorance.
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Oh but it makes *all* the difference. It doesn't change the product, but it does show everyone that you didn't actually read TFA, TFS or TFHeadline before rushing in your excitement to post a redundant comment.
It will certainly help to weight your comments on future articles.