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Thin Mini-ITX Platform Enables DIY iMacs
crookedvulture writes "Shipments of all-in-one PCs are growing exponentially faster than those for typical desktops. Unfortunately, highly integrated systems like the iMac have traditionally made it difficult to replace or upgrade parts. And forget about assembling an all-in-one for yourself. Now, however, Intel has developed a Thin Mini-ITX platform that allows system builders and end users to put together all-in-one systems with standard parts. This hands-on look at Thin Mini-ITX pieces together an ersatz iMac using off-the-shelf components, and the process is pretty easy. While the end result isn't quite as slick as one of Apple's creations, parts can be swapped out with ease, and the configuration can be tailored to suit one's needs."
You're advocating violating the OS X EULA!
Heresy!!!
are growing exponentially faster than
you keep using that expression... it does not mean what you think it does
factor 966971: 966971
This is kinda like a kit-car Lamborghini set that people like to put together. Now you too can have a lamborghini, with a chevy V8 on a chevy frame!
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The article is about a similar form factor to an iMac, not running OS X.
They aren't talking about building Hackintoshes here, just DIY PC-in-a-monitor.
It has a fan...
You might want to have that looked at... LOL
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
i don't have an imac but i've ready that apple uses very high quality displays for them and that dell sells a similar monitor for $800 or so
sure you can build something cheaper, but you aren't saving anything if you cheapen out on the monitor
Let's hope that some of the major retail PC makers pick up on this, and start making their own.
I love Apple, but I'd also love to see some competition out there for them in areas like this, to ensure that they always have a good reason to be keeping one step ahead. ;-D
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I've had a 27" iMac running at home powered on 24/7 for over two years now. It has never shut itself off due to over heating.
I'm guessing you either got a faulty unit or your school room is a pig sty or you're lying.
Sounds like you may have had a faulty device then. Either that, or your environment was generally too hot for the work you were doing on it.
I got one for my mom, and we have several in the office. Not once has anyone ever reported such an issue.
If you believe this, then you believe that Apple stopped making Macs in 2006, because no Intel Mac uses Open Firmware; the use the Extensible Firmware Interface instead.
Most people I know who have bought iMacs have done so because they were the cheapest desktop Macs available (and they wanted both a desktop and OS X). When the Mac Mini was introduced, this was still often the case if they didn't already have a display to use. It's also fairly popular with the 'we can afford to by Macs for our secretaries' demographic for machines in visible positions, but it never seemed like a particularly practical form factor. Other companies have launched all-in-one machines before, but none has been a commercial success, and I'd have expected it to be if there were a real demand for them.
Marketing this as the self-build crowd seems especially weird, as self-builders tend to either want expandability or something that they can't get from an OEM, and this form factor is weak in both. There are already a lot of nice Mini ITX HTPC cases, and they let you upgrade the monitor separately from the rest of the machine, if you want to...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This could be WAY bigger than just making iMac clones. Combine that with the new video hardware coming onto the market that permits greater than 1080p resolution displays, and that this new form factor could be made dirt cheap, this could usher in the era of interactive wallscreen devices.
I always figured it would be great to have some cheap tablets mounted into walls for various applications, for example, being able to quickly check the weather report before heading out the door. But something like this would be even cooler.
Nice to see Apple losing their prime advantage: looks.
Now we just have to wait until Intel comes with DIY phones.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Say what?
Both my high school and college used a large number of iMacs. I don't think one ever overheated on me, in the six years we had them. And we did some decently-power-hungry things with them (I once tried to compute the XKCD number on one - long story short, it didn't work).
Now, there was a problem in one lab, where running all of them at once at full brightness would trip the breaker for the room, but that's a building power fault, not a computer power fault.
Which generation was it that you used? All of the ones I've used were post-Intel ones, and I've heard the G4/G5 iMacs were terrible at heat management - I know the G5 Power Macs the graphics department had generated more heat than the server room.
WTF does this have to do with iMacs?
[sarcasm] Breaking news: Intel sued by Apple for patent infringement. Apple has sued CPU manufacturer Intel claiming infringement of their patent on the design of small, compact, all-in-one devices that can run OSX. Apple filed the lawsuit in a federal court located in western Texas. They are asking for an injunction against Intel as well as an award of $5,000 for each device sold by Intel. Apple has claimed that the only reason people buy something other than an Apple device is because they can and therefore every sale of these devices by Intel represents a lost sale for Apple. [/sarcasm]
They do seem to cap the upper limit at a VERY low level. You can't just skyrocket it then post offensive stuff with the padding, lol. I don't know if it's variable or not but this new account (lol) seems to have a lot more padding against hater mod-downs than my old one.
Why do people automatically assume ONE bad device == all such devices are bad? It's called "birth mortality". When a device is not properly assembled and dies early (or other serious flaws). Just because 1 Mac suffered birth defects does not mean the other 100,000 Macs were bad. Your school should have simply traded the bad Mac for a good Mac.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Yeah. Overheating is a problem with fanless macs. Sometimes you can prevent this by flipping it upsidedown from time to time and giving the components at the top time to cool.
This technique is called the Hot Apple Turnover.
I currently work at a location with 41 27" iMacs, and I used to work at an authorized repair depot for apple. I have repaired and handled MANY of these machines, and I can tell you they don't "shut down due to overheating". They will clock themselves down to a point where the machine is excruciatingly slow, but the aluminum back of the machine will act as a large enough heatsink to keep the processor cool at whatever speed it clocks down to (probably something like 200mhz judging by the slowdown).
There are three components that would likely cause the symptoms that you describe:
1. DC/SATA Cable - on early 27" (and some 21.5") iMacs, these would short out somewhere along the cable and cause all sorts of shutdown and sleep issues. It was a bitch to fix but generally the first part we would replace if we couldn't determine the cause of a problem.
2. Power supply - Even someone as simple-minded as you would probably understand how a faulty power supply could cause this issue - not "Steve Jobs hating fans".
3. Display Inverter Board - The inverter board on early 27" units would fail regularly, causing the screen to go black, and making standard luddite users think the whole machine powered off.
Steve Jobs did not hate fans. Steve Jobs hated loud and obtrusive fans. The 24 and 27" cinema/thunderbolt displays contain fans, and every iBook, PowerBook, and MacBook (including the air) has had at least 1 fan (the 15" before late 2009 and 17" up until they cancelled it had 2).
Get your facts straight, your single anecdotal story != true for every iMac.
Weird, i made 3 posts that became -1 (troll) in within the past week and my karma's still excellent. Maybe your cumulative karma was just barely in the excellent range and the one troll was enough to knock you down?
Slashdot works in mysterious ways...
That desktop in the article is some hideous looking shit. What crap OEM plastered that fisher-price shit all over Windows?
I went on a tear a few months ago and got something like 30 -1 flamebait/troll posts in a day and my karma went to terrible. Got 3 +5s a couple of days later and was back to good then got a couple of small upmods and was back to excellent. I've had a good past few days so this is probably a good time for me to let a couple of people have it. :)
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I think Steve Jobs must have loved fans judging by the jet engine I call a 2010 unibody macbook pro on my desk.
The idea looked good... until I saw that you can't install a graphics card. That's the one thing that these all-in-ones lack - decient graphics. Considering there are laptops with gtx 680, I don't see why we can have them in an all-in-one
Karma is overrated.
"Made in imitation; artificial, especially of an inferior quality."
It's pretty hard to tell how many were bad with Apple for any product. They more or less cover-up all of their product flaws. They even go as far as deleting community forum threads to avoid acknowledging a problem.
ahh yes - you were holding it wrong!
There have been several all-in-ones made by various PC manufacturers. My friend had an HP with a touchscreen that he hung on the wall in the kitchen.
None of them have really been successful. They tend to either cost as much as an iMac or be compromised in some way. Intel releasing a new form factor isn't going to do much to change anything, except to let individuals and mom and pop shops build them.
looks at his UID
looks like he is both.
ahh yes - you were holding it wrong!
I know you're trolling, but... umm... yes?
In the years of iMac use I have had, even taxing the thing a high CPU load for long periods during the summer (and I have no AC) the fans have barely ever ramped up enough to hear them.
If he had an iMac that was overheating "an average of 3 times per class period" then it was either faulty or installed inside an oven, or inside a case that restricted airflow to the heatsinks (not a problem unique to the iMac).
He's really very short on... charm!
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Should you use the disk drive there is a good chance you will not get the disk back.
You can't buy one at retail with the OS, as Apple has somehow managed to make the right of resale illegal due to EULA, even though other software makers have had opposite court rulings. Or at least nobody's been brave enough to try since Psystar's minor goofs that Apple did find tiny licensing issues with.
These days if you want to be as legal as possible, you still have to find a retail copy of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) as the only place to buy it is now in the App Store within OS X.
Lifehacker has a number of good guides on what parts to get and what chipsets to avoid. It's really not hard at all to put together compatible hardware now that there are boot loaders like Chameleon or Chimera.
You then have to update to the later version of Snow Leopard to get the App store, and then buy Mountain Lion in the App Store. They figure if you can't buy it without owning a Mac first, you can't legally make a Hackintosh. And they buy back old Snow Leopard discs - they don't want them on retail shelves.
MobileMe was giving out a free copy of Snow Leopard to any user who logged in with a special link just before they closed their doors. I logged into several accounts and stocked up on copies for myself.
So, in other words == != =
Ok, so his Mac didn't fail due to overheating, but for any of the numerous reasons you listed. You've just multiplied the number of issues Macs have. With all of those problems, they're dying left and right. Unreliable piles of shit, just like everything made by Apple.
So other brands of computers don't have LCD displays, power supplies or SATA power cables? Good to know! How do non-Apple laptops display the UI without a display though?
Karma is overrated.
It's not if it stops you from taking part in discussions. If you get too many downvotes (deserved or not) you end up with a posting cap per 24 hour period.
Of course he's lying. He's declaring that Apple hardware can break just like any other PC. [/sarcasm]
My Apple horror story is a an nv9400 Mac Mini. The thing cooked itself to death. A logic board replacement didn't help either.
Compact machines are tricky but they have certain obvious engineering challenges. If a machine burns your hand when you touch it, that might be a problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
He's not trolling. He's expressing a contrary opinion.
Calling you a blinded cult follower. ---- THAT is trolling/flaming.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What is a liquid crystal display display? Must be one of those magical Apple technologies.
The most rational thing that people can do is make judgements about their own personal first hand experiences and second hand experiences from people they know and trust.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Except there is nothing remarkable about a Mac. It is no Ferrari.
It's more like a Lincoln or Mercury.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I dunno. Perhaps people that use PCs are just used to having cheaper devices that provide more features while being more maintainable and more upgradeable.
Embed your PC into your monitor so that you can reuse neither?
Only seems to make sense to form over function types and people that live in overpriced studio apartments.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually it was a two day offtopic war with apk over host files. You'd have had to have been there.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Please stop feeding Apple's "we invented everything!" hubris. This is just a computer attached to a monitor, which is an obvious combination that has been around since there have been computers small enough to attach to monitors.
Ahh look. It's the white knight here to defend Apple with his anecdotal evidence.
My anecdotal evidence is just as valid as the OP's anecdotal evidence based on a data set of one alleged machine.
Take that for what it's worth, or is his post "valid data" because it criticises Apple?
[iMacs] will clock themselves down to a point where the machine is excruciatingly slow... DC/SATA Cable - on early 27" (and some 21.5") iMacs, these would short out somewhere along the cable and cause all sorts of shutdown and sleep issues. It was a bitch to fix... faulty power supply could cause this issue... The inverter board on early 27" units would fail regularly, causing the screen to go black, and making standard luddite users think the whole machine powered off...
So, in short, "your Mac died of something else, therefore it doesn't count"? I'm not sure whether you've technically won the argument, but your post isn't exactly a great advert for the reliability of Macs.
The old G4/G5 towers were also pretty impressive for fan noise.
HP had a deskstand that would take some of their small-form-factor PCs like the dc7900 and an HP LCD and make an all-in-one PC with the SFF case mounted behind the display. I don't think it was available ready-built.
Not going to lie, I thought they were going to review a thinclient...kind of seems like a better idea, with the space constraints.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
For that matter, plenty of case options that mount to the VESA ports on the back of a typical monitor (where the stand isn't using the vesa ports).
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Best ever Apple comment, thank you.
I'm gonna go have a snack now, I'm feeling hungry for some reason.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
I think it was an older model TouchSmart:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/touchsmart/index.html
Or people who value desk space.
There are lots of arguments for all in one computers. People rarely upgrade their machines, almost never maintain them themselves, and usually replace the monitor at the same time as the computer. Just because you don't see the point doesn't mean that everyone who does use them is a rich hipster.
Clown College, perhaps?
I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
If it looks like a Mac and quacks like a Mac and runs OS X like a Mac, it's a Mac.
That bolded item? It doesn't do that. The article headline should be 'Thin Mini-ITX Platform Enables New All in One PCs'. The mention of 'iMacs' was just a bit of linkbait.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
My anecdotal evidence is just as valid as the OP's anecdotal evidence based on a data set of one alleged machine. Take that for what it's worth, or is his post "valid data" because it criticises Apple?
Finding one black sheep in the herd says more about their presence than finding a white sheep does about their absence. Imagine he'd said "Flying the space shuttle is dangerous, I went to see a launch once and it blew up" then you replying "Well I went to a launch too and it didn't blow up, so it must be safe", that wouldn't make much sense. Unless the failure rate is close to 100% one anecdotal working machine doesn't really say anything.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It was hot as hell in there! At least 85. But still, it was a computer lab classroom so it was 1 mac surrounded by about 30 PCs all with socket 775 Pentium 4 w/HT (and those run HOT!) and not a single PC overheated. Just the 2 inch thick, fanless mac. And this was like 5 years ago so no, it did not have fans, person who attempted to correct me above. We all put our hands around it. It had no air coming out of anywhere.
No the assignment operator is ":=" : ^ P
It looks more like a giant iPad on a stand, it doesn't look like an iMac. The article is about hardware and not building a Hackintosh, so please read the article before posting. It Looks like what it is, a cheap housing for a small format motherboard, and it sounds OK to me. I would like to have seen a complete price breakdown too. No optical drive? interesting trend?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
He's not trolling. He's expressing a contrary opinion.
It's a shame how often those two are mixed up in /. .
Sometimes the design just sucks for different conditions. Some macs (especially the cube and some mac mini models) just were not designed for hot conditions and other machines that just happen to be in much larger cases with better airflow cope better. In both cases the things are getting pushed beyond the expected limits by being always on in a crowded room with a tin roof in the tropics.
So yes, in some conditions all of some model of macs and most PCs suck but it's not as if it doesn't warn you on the box. They are not appliances designed for a rough life but instead designed for a comfortable environment.
If the ambient temperature is high enough the heatsink doesn't really help much. Some PCs just happen to have a higher maximum operating temperature than fanless macs, but it usually doesn't matter becuase by the time things get that hot it's a pretty awful working environment. BTW, my old mac (eMac) has a fan so the shitloads of heat it produces via it's CRT can get out and it can run when the ambient temperature is at tropical summer levels.
Nice strawman.
There are (were) five space shuttles, involved in the very dangerous business of launching into space. The comparison to a mass market consumer product manufactured on the million unit plus scale is simply not applicable.
There will *always* be lemons in mass market products - no production line or assembly process is perfect. The original poster is claiming that the design of the iMac is the reason it "overheated and average of 3 times per class period". I'm simply saying if they had an iMac that did that, then it was clearly faulty or installed in a place where airflow to the vents was restricted. His user experience of the iMac is atypical (but note this does not mean the iMac never fails or never ships from the factory broken).
One anecdotal working machine "doesn't really say anything" in the same way that one broken machine "doesn't really say anything". I only talked about my own personal machine though. If we include other machines that I have helped to set up then it's more like 10 or 15 working ones to his one bad one, plus one bad one of mine that shipped with a faulty fan speed sensor causing one of the three internal fans to run at high speed so it was slightly noisier than the other 10 in the room. Apple fixed it quickly and easily. It never overheated.
Don't you only need one? Isn't MS the only one with the insane "you don't own the OS your computer does".
Yes I remember when you did that.
Steve Jobs did not hate fans. Steve Jobs hated loud and obtrusive fans.
Then why does my Mini sound like a vacuum cleaner when the CPU does more than just idle? It is literally the loudest computer I've ever owned.
Seriously, the first time the blower kicked in, I was shocked at how loud it is (not to mention the fact that the cooler is either at idle or full blast. There is no grey area).
No, cpu6502's use of the "==" comparison operator was *quite* correct, though it would *also* have been correct (with a slightly different context) written with the "=" assignment operator.
And ultimately, when you want to write proper and good looking natural language text, you don't use characters like '=', '/', '+', etc. but replace them with proper real words.
My computer is powered by CoolBreeze(TM)* and MarvelType(TM)** technologies.
*) It has a fan
**) It has a keyboard
Just because 1 Mac suffered birth defects does not mean the other 100,000 Macs were bad. Your school should have simply traded the bad Mac for a good Mac.
But, didn't you know, one bad Mac spoils the bunch!
I have friends who may eventually choose to do it. Just being prepared. It will be online only for probably the rest of its existence. That, and I do computer repair from time to time, and I run across people who have Leopard - and there's no App Store in Leopard. They have to find someone to sell them the Snow Leopard disc just to get the App store to install the newer OS.
He's not trolling. He's expressing a contrary opinion.
"you were holding it wrong!" is not a "contrary opinion". At best it's a stale catch phrase - often used by trolls.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
It was hot as hell in there! At least 85. But still, it was a computer lab classroom so it was 1 mac surrounded by about 30 PCs all with socket 775 Pentium 4 w/HT (and those run HOT!) and not a single PC overheated. Just the 2 inch thick, fanless mac. And this was like 5 years ago so no, it did not have fans, person who attempted to correct me above. We all put our hands around it. It had no air coming out of anywhere.
If it had no fan, it was already at least 6 years old 5 years ago. What color was it?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Acer made a shockingly similar one several years ago but with an Atom chip (so no overheating problems, lol) and it was slow, the touchscreen was sluggish, and overall it sucked lol.
Why would it need a touchscreen?
The only major uses I've ever seen for a touchscreen all-in-one like an iMac are for a kiosk machine of some sort, or a POS system (fancy cash register).
For normal use, as various people (including, I believe, Steve Jobs) have noted, it's just too darn hard on the arms.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
One anecdotal working machine "doesn't really say anything" in the same way that one broken machine "doesn't really say anything".
Only if expected percentage of working machines is 50%. If that is your expectation, sure. Not mine though, given the $$$ they cost.
If the expected percentage of working machine is 99%, 99 anecdotal working machines "doesn't really say anything" in the same way that one broken machine "doesn't really say anything".
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
when you want to write proper and good looking natural language text
That is irrelevant. Ohh, you forgot? This is /.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Exactly, but the poster above me was attempting to claim that the OP's anecdotal machine that overheats 3 times per class period as more valid than my suggestion that he had a duff one (assuming the original report is accurate - if it was overheating and shutting down that frequently you'd simply stop using it).
My point was that comparing it to the space shuttle is not valid, since one of those is a custom built, 5-of-a-kind limited production run item that performed a very dangerous task compared to a mass market consumer device made by the million. One broken one is not representative of the experience of the vast majority. Without polling a statistically significant population of iMac owners then both anecdotes don't really say much, but given that the internet is not aflame with stories about iMacs shutting down "an average of 3 times per class period" I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's an atypical user experience.
That's the thing, I was excellent for about two straight years.
Nope.
No your point was (at least what I quoted and responded to ) that anecdotal positive and negative evidence is equally invalid for a mass marketed device. That is seriously wrong. Anecdotal negative evidence is far less invalid, 99 times less invalid under the stated assumptions, than anecdotal positive evidence.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Oh well, I'm still on Tiger so on my mac haven't been paying much attention. However with the hardware (1.42GHz PowerPc G4) it's apparently not well supported by a newer OS X, and I mostly have the mac for occasional use so I don't feel totally lost when I go near OS X.
I agree that the change you are writing about sucks.
Even if it supported it, I couldn't imagine running Leopard on that hardware. It's so slow that everybody who could upgraded in droves when Snow Leopard came out.