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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 glad to see Apple rolling out Thunderbolt to their whole lineup and not restricting it to the high end. Anything they can do to promote this and get it mainstream for all computers will be a benefit to the industry and end users. Tangles of cords, switching cords, and unchainable unintelligent standards have been hampering us for too long. No, I don't want to have to have a computer in between my video camera and my high capacity storage drive. No, I don't want to have more than one cable between my monitor and computer and yes I want to plug USB devices, microphones, hard drives, etc. to the device on top of my desk instead of climbing under it. The throughput and flexibility here has been needed for a long time. Come on industry, full speed ahead with this one!
Intel decided to move optical interconnects to the cables themselves. Short Thunderbolt cables will be entirely copper; long cables will have an optical transceiver built into each end.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I know not reading TFA is par for the course on slashdot, but if you managed to read the summary - all two lines of it - you might have discovered the following hint that these are not laptops: (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch)
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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.
Which is why for several years there all USB devices shipped only in bondi blue to match the look of the iMac? Sorry, but Apple basically created the mainstream USB peripheral market before the PC market caught up and started using them as well.
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.
Anon. Coward writes:
>>>ATSC? what a pile of garbage, and MPEG-2?! COME ON! At least the EU got h.264 from the start
h.264 aka MPEG4 didn't exist when ATSC was finalized in 1996 and broadcasts started in 97. They used the best codec available at the time of development.
Could have been worse. The Japanese version of HDTV was developed in the early 80s and isn't digital at all. It's an analog format called MUSE which occupies 3 channels to send one single program. - The US could have easily been stuck with that same format, if the FCC had followed Reagan's directive to copy it.
As for the other issues, "overscan" was developed because everyone was still using CRTs in the 90s. The mid-90s engineers had no idea that flat screen LCDs would be able to display a viewable picture. (Back then most lcds were crap.) And 1080i is based off the original japanese standard.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Tell her to click on the 'refurbished' link on the Apple store. She'll probably find the 24" model for 25% less than it was a week ago.
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Revisionist history? I thought Apple was very, very anti-USB and pro-firewire? Heck the first iPod didn't even interface to USB (and therefore couldn't talk to anything but macs). That's how anti-USB apple was initially.
No, not revisionist history at all. Apple was never anti-USB for the types of low speed devices USB 1 was originally designed to handle. Firewire was for significantly higher bandwidth applications of the type USB wasn't originally designed for.
This would be why Apple never released a Firewire mouse or keyboard. You have to recall when USB was originally introduced, it's fastest speed was only 1.5Mbps -- it wasn't until USB 1.1 that "high speed" mode was introduced, running at 12Mbps. Firewire 1 on the other hand, was 400Mbps -- or about 33 times faster. Where USB 1 was painful for external storage, Firewire flew.
This was the situation Apple faced when the iPod 1 was released (which, I should point out, was a Mac-only device at the time, as iTunes hadn't been ported to Windows yet, and the formatted file system out of the box was HFS). They had a choice between slow USB 1 (USB 2 was standardized at the end of 2001. The iPod 1 was released in October 2001, so at the time the iPod 1 was released, virtually all USB ports on consumer machines ran at a maximum of 12Mbps), or fast Firewire 1.
So it was purely about speed -- a device that could store up to 10GB of data (iPod 2's, released in July 2002, could store up to 20GB) needed something faster than 12Mbps. By the time USB 2 become more ubiquitous, Apple released the iPod 3 (April 2003) with USB sync support.
None of which indicates anything about being anti-USB; USB simply wasn't up to the task when the first two generations of iPod were released, whereas Firewire was.
Yaz.
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.