Thanks to ongoing lawsuit, we know that Apple's iPad outsold the Galaxy tablets by a margin of 20 to 1 when the Galaxy tablets launched. In the most recent quarter (which may not be complete), Samsung only sold 37k Galaxy tablets. For reference, during it's slowest quarter the iPad sold 63k units per day.
Much like the iPod market, Apple is absolutely crushing people in tablets. The Kindle Fire has been be the best competitor, and it seems to have lost it's sales. The Nexus 7 is a much more compelling device, so we'll see what happens there. Apple doesn't have the lead in phones (only 16% of the market), but they have 71% of smartphone profits. Android may be moving more units, but that's not a good trend.
My understanding of Wayland says that it wouldn't bother Valve at all.
If you use a toolkit that has been ported to Wayland, you use the toolkit and nothing changes.
If you use a toolkit that hasn't been ported, you'd just run the X server that runs as a Wayland client, so things keep working.
But the important thing is running OpenGL, which works just fine in Wayland (which is built on OpenGL).
Unless Valve is writing their own rendering directly against X (which seems like it would be an idiotic thing to do in general, especially considering Wayland has been coming for over 2 years), I wouldn't think this would really effect them. In fact, they could decide to go Wayland only (assuming it's done enough at that point) and avoid whatever hassle X might have given them.
That's my understanding as well. It would work like OS X where the X server is just another application you can launch that then handles the X clients.
Wayland supports X11 in the same way OS X does. There is an X server running as a Wayland client. It would work like a normal X server, doing all it's own compositing, etc., and then send the output to Wayland to be composited with all the other programs/windows.
If you launch the X client, normal X programs should continue to work.
I believe they specifically decided not to even try to make Wayland network transparent. I think you'd either have to run the program on the remote host and transfer everything VNC style, or implement your own GUI/processing separation and handle the networking between the two yourself.
There are people who use X forwarding, you're obviously one. I believe Wayland was designed from the ground up to make things easier for the client.
Wayland is designed to fix a lot of the problems that X has. X, for historical reasons, does a TON of things. It has network transparency, it's responsible for input, for setting up the graphics card's memory and registers, drawing various primitive shapes, font rendering, etc.
But today 99% of the time people don't use the network transparency stuff in X, they run locally. But all sorts of memory has to be shuffled around. X mandates all sorts of bitmap formats that must be supported. Today the kernel, through KMS, can setup the graphics card. We have libraries like Cairo to draw basic shapes. Then there are all sorts of weird things that have been hacked into/onto X to support common features like resizing and rotating your desktop.
Wayland basically started with a blank slate. The kernel can setup the video card, so it won't do that. Most people don't use network transparency, so it doesn't do that (you can run an X client on Wayland, for when you still need the feature). The GUI toolkits and OpenGL libraries already draw everything, so it doesn't do that stuff.
LWN had an article from two years ago about what Wayland set out to accomplish. Things may have changed since there, here are twoupdates from LWN describing Wayland earlier this year.
I read through it. There are some "let's copy the iPhone" things, but so much of it clearly shows that Samsung just didn't care about the software. Decisions that, even in a vacuum, make no sense. Here are some that I can remember:
Icons (such as notes) don't look like the application that gets launched.
Requiring you to use multiple applications to sync your data with the computer (one for calendar, one for contacts, one for music, one for...)
Multiple places where the keyboard covers up part of the dialog box the user is supposed to be using.
Requiring multiple steps to return to your call in progress.
Opening email doesn't check for email. You have to open a menu and hit the sync button.
You're allowed to put multiple copies of a program on the same launcher screen.
There are quite a few places in the document that boil down to "The iPhone does this neat little visual trick, we need a neat little visual trick". There are a couple of places (I can't remember them off the top of my head) where it looks like they actually removed something useful to be more iPhone like. Without some of the slides, it would have read like a "what the hell were you thinking" memo.
It's going to be a tough thing for Samsung to argue against.
This is a smart move on Google's part. The device was very strange.
While the hardware was better, it was $300. An Apple TV is $100 and you can get a Roku for $50-$60.
It had no remote, you had to own an Android phone. The Apple TV's remote isn't very good, but at least it exists.
The stereo amplifier was an odd decision. Peopler either already have an amp, or they don't have speakers. What's the point of having an amp that connects to my TV to play video if I can't direct the TV's sound through the amp?
Google doesn't have much content right now. They can show other people's content (Hulu, Amazon, Netflix), but a Roku does that at 1/5th the price.
It would be possible to play games on it... but it has no remote/controller. I guess you could buy a bluetooth one.
They could make a pretty interesting device out of it. AirPlay is a fantastic feature, I'd love to see Google come up with features like that to extend your Android device. But as announced, it seemed like final hardware designed for a vision that was still in the alpha stage, with no real software ("Let's just stick Android on it!"). I think it says a lot that since that was announced the Ouya was announced at $100, can do most everything the Q can, costs 1/3rd as much, and has had a ton of interest. Google missed the mark, and they're smart to fix it instead of launching it to die in the market.
Note that this ruling applies to Verizon ONLY. It's a result of the rules they agreed to during the 700MHz auction a few years ago. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and everyone else are free to continue to charge you extra for what you already paid for.
That's kind of what I was wondering, unless the app is simply a searchable catalog of the apps they have previously studied.
I'm curious how apps get your location without your knowledge? The first time an app asks you're supposed to get the location services popup, and whenever your location is being accessed you're supposed to get the little location arrow in the status bar at the top of the phone.
As much as I love my iPhone, I'm glad to get Apple get embarrassed by some of this stuff. The fact that many games were taking your phonebook simply because they could and sending it to the developer's servers was insane.
That's the current legal state. It wouldn't surprise me if someone died in a big box store and sued because their friend couldn't get a signal to call 911 and it suddenly became the law (or at least what you had to do to avoid negligence liability) to make sure phones worked in your building.
That's not always true. When iPhone first came out most people were very worried about how well the keyboard would work, and if you were used to going a mile a minutes on a BB it didn't work great at first. Based on that it could have been a big mistake.
But we now know it wasn't. Some people have a preference, but for most people the software keyboard works great, or at least well enough, to trade it for the other improvements like the larger screen.
I'd reserve judgement on 48fps until people have seen two or three movies in it. This may be the initial hump before people realize that it's much better.
According to Ars Techinica, it's probably because Mountain Lion is full a fully 64 bit kernel and those machines only had 32 bit graphics drivers. By doing this, Apple doesn't have to re-write new graphics drivers for those older machines. Seems like a fair enough engineering decision.
It's not really noticeable, but in benchmarks the iPad 3 is slightly slower than the iPad 2. This is definitely true on 3D graphics. It's past the margin of error, but it's not a 20% drop or anything like that... it's quite slight.
Because I'm sure that when Windows Vista and Windows 7 were released, Microsoft only said they changed 6 things. I hear in Windows 8 they only changed three things.
In fact, I'm so sure I'm right I'm not going to waste my time looking it up.
It's marketing. If they changed anything, they claim it's an enhancement. We did the work, we might as well claim it, even if no one would every buy an OS because it now supports GRB pixel alignment as well as RGB and BGR.
And his 6 year old computer could run both the OS it came with (would that be 10.4?) and the version of Mac OS X available when Windows 7 was released in 2009 (10.6, Snow Leopard).
Isn't it interesting that a phone company doesn't see the telephone line as the closest equivalent. Then they would be arguing their common carrier status (which they don't want).
Of course a newspaper controls all content published, where as a telephone company has no controll.
Don't you think the content creator/consumer thing is a false dichotomy? I keep seeing it repeated, but I'm not sure how much water it holds. Even on the iPad, it's quite possible to create content. Most users aren't creating dissertations of 30 page Excel spreadsheets, but they are creating something. Emails, Facebook posts, sharing photos & videos... they're creating kinds of content.
Windows 8 is a hell of a gamble. It wouldn't surprise me if it ended up like OS X 10.0: shows promise, is ultimately too flawed to use. But when Windows 8 OSR 2 (or whatever) comes out with a few tweaks, it might work quite well. People have clearly shown a certain preference for removing peripheral distractions to focus on the current task.
My parents have a Magic Mouse, and it's kind of nice. Most of the features are turned off, so it's hard to say how great it is.
But when I got a new iMac at work last year I asked for a Magic Trackpad, and I think it's amazing. I don't think it would work well for running Photoshop, but for non-image work it's great. Over the last few years I've gotten so used to using the gestures on my MacBook Pro to go forward/back in Safari, trigger Expose, and show the desktop. I use the forward/back gesture constantly.
Being able to do that on my desktop has been such an improvement. When I'm surfing I don't need to reposition the mouse to click on the back button, I can just swipe. When I want to change programs I can just swipe and then click on the window I want. It really is nice.
That was actually one of the reasons mentioned in the podcast (besides simple yield) that the screens don't exist yet. Display port (which is what the video is carried through for thunderbolt) has maybe half the bandwidth necessary to drive a retina display that size. Apple would need to use a newer faster version.
That's not unprecedented. They were about the only people using dual link DVI at first to drive their 30" cinema displays.
The people I know who use external drives tend to use them for specific programs. They'll setup their iTunes/iPhoto/Aperature/Lightroom/whatever libraries on the external drive, and leave smaller things (like general documents) on the main disk.
That may be due to the difficulty to setting up the home folder in an alternate location though.
They can be replaced, Apple just doesn't make it nearly as easy as most PCs. It's a concession to form, and it doesn't bother me too much. I tend to have to change the drive in a computer maybe once in its lifetime on average.
I agree with you about the root partition though. Keeping that on an external drive seems like asking for serious trouble. I know I wouldn't do that. It would be far too easy for the cable to jiggle loose and cause the computer to crash.
My family has had an iMac for years, and I really like the one I have at work. You can get better graphics cards at the higher end, but none of them are blow-your-socks-off. I can't wait to see a 27" retina display model, but I'm sure it will at least a year, probably two, to get one.
I agree the external storage thing is a little odd, my point was more that in this day and age it's not that bad, you're not sacrificing performance. The hard drives in the current iMacs may be big enough for most users for their entire life, although that's clearly no the case if you go SSD. Having the drive internal is cheaper (since you don't have to pay for the enclosure) and prettier (since you don't have an external box sitting around), but then you have to make the computer more accessible to get the drive in and out and that's a compromise that Apple has shown they're not willing to make. I can tell you from upgrading my MBP's RAM and HD that I would have preferred the old days when there was a little panel you could take off instead of removing the entire bottom of the case.
I'd imagine Thunderbolt cables will get cheaper as they become more ubiquitous. Thanks to Intel's new chipset PCs are starting to ship with Thunderbolt ports, and that should help. I remember USB being expensive despite every motherboard having a couple of ports. It was only after the iMac kick-started demand for USB peripherals that the prices became reasonable.
As for eSATA... that's one I'll give you. On the laptops it's not too odd since it takes up space, but on an iMac there is plenty of room. It's not a special port that needs a separate controller chip, and there is no way an iMac is using up all the internal SATA ports on the chipset. My guess is that one was pure "We use Firewire, we don't need that."
I haven't used a mini in years, so I'll take your word for it. I'd imagine that (like many of the laptops) it can get quite warm when pushed. Come to think of it, my image of a Mini is still the older white models, I keep forgetting them made them even smaller and aluminum.
As for the Pro... I'm sure they'll fix it next year. That one has been driving a ton of speculation on the Mac blogs. I like the theory they didn't want to update until they could support a retina display, but that's pure conjecture.
now apple needs a real desktop or at the very lest least a imac with a EASY TO GET TO HDD SLOTs. NO other AIO makes you take the screen off to change the HDD and most of them have at least 2 hdd slots.
These days, are HDD slots really necessary? Most users don't upgrade their hard drives. USB 2 works pretty well, FireWire 800 is fantastic, and Thuderbolt is supposed to wipe with the floor with FW800. I'm sure the next iMac will have USB 3.
External drives work fine for a desktop. It's not like years ago when if you didn't have SCSI the performance was terrible.
And don't replace the hdd with a SDD on a card.
I seriously doubt Apple would do that for the iMac. On the laptops you do it for space reasons, but on a 23" or 27" computer you have plenty of space to spare.
The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.
The point of the mini is that it's a tiny quite computer on the cheap (compared to full sized Apple models, not low end PCs). Why does it need to be bigger? And you're not supposed to need to open the case. What percentage of normal computer buyers do you think ever open their computer? At this point, laptops sell the best and can't be opened. They just have a slot or two that can be accessed through a panel. I'll agree that upgrading the older minis was terrible (I don't know if it's improved, I doubt it), but Apple markets and treats their computers like sealed appliances, and most people don't seem to care.
But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays.
For $1200 the base iMac is a great computer. The graphics are fine for 95% of users. You can easily expand the storage with all the ports mentioned above. A fair number of people upgrade the RAM or hard drive in their computers, but almost no one buys expansion cards. The most common reason seems to be to get some new port (like USB 2 when that came out, or USB 3 now) and you can do that with Thunderbolt.
Apple has all the large market bases covered, and then some. The DIY Mac may appeal to/.ers, but I seriously doubt they'd sell. I can tell you users love the integrated easy to use appliance like setup of the current iMacs. I use one for development every day at work, and it's fantastic. Most people (both for person or work reasons) buy laptops anyway.
What kind of user would switch to the Mac for that? People who want to play games? Because the game selection on OS X isn't that great, and usually runs months behind Windows, if the games every come. When the latest graphics card comes out, there wouldn't even be drivers. No one is going to use it as a server, Apple clearly isn't interested in that (and I don't blame them, it's not a big market, and you can just use a Mac Pro if you really want one).
So your market is DIY people, who aren't hardcore gamers, who don't want a server, but do want a desktop. That's a tiny fraction of people. The Mac Pro is probably a rounding error in Apple's computer sales, and it has a decently sized market of professionals. But with Thunderbolt, some of the reasons for using a Pro (such as high speed interconnect to a RAID for video editing) can now be covered by the iMac.
Face it, the Mac Pro is what you want, you just don't want to pay the price. I don't blame you, it's not targeted at individuals and the price reflects that (by a good margin). But really, Apple has been ignoring the requests for the Mac Pro Mini for most of a decade, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their business at all. It's clearly not necessary.
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Thanks to ongoing lawsuit, we know that Apple's iPad outsold the Galaxy tablets by a margin of 20 to 1 when the Galaxy tablets launched. In the most recent quarter (which may not be complete), Samsung only sold 37k Galaxy tablets. For reference, during it's slowest quarter the iPad sold 63k units per day.
Much like the iPod market, Apple is absolutely crushing people in tablets. The Kindle Fire has been be the best competitor, and it seems to have lost it's sales. The Nexus 7 is a much more compelling device, so we'll see what happens there. Apple doesn't have the lead in phones (only 16% of the market), but they have 71% of smartphone profits. Android may be moving more units, but that's not a good trend.
My understanding of Wayland says that it wouldn't bother Valve at all.
If you use a toolkit that has been ported to Wayland, you use the toolkit and nothing changes.
If you use a toolkit that hasn't been ported, you'd just run the X server that runs as a Wayland client, so things keep working.
But the important thing is running OpenGL, which works just fine in Wayland (which is built on OpenGL).
Unless Valve is writing their own rendering directly against X (which seems like it would be an idiotic thing to do in general, especially considering Wayland has been coming for over 2 years), I wouldn't think this would really effect them. In fact, they could decide to go Wayland only (assuming it's done enough at that point) and avoid whatever hassle X might have given them.
That's my understanding as well. It would work like OS X where the X server is just another application you can launch that then handles the X clients.
Wayland supports X11 in the same way OS X does. There is an X server running as a Wayland client. It would work like a normal X server, doing all it's own compositing, etc., and then send the output to Wayland to be composited with all the other programs/windows.
If you launch the X client, normal X programs should continue to work.
I believe they specifically decided not to even try to make Wayland network transparent. I think you'd either have to run the program on the remote host and transfer everything VNC style, or implement your own GUI/processing separation and handle the networking between the two yourself.
There are people who use X forwarding, you're obviously one. I believe Wayland was designed from the ground up to make things easier for the client.
Wayland is designed to fix a lot of the problems that X has. X, for historical reasons, does a TON of things. It has network transparency, it's responsible for input, for setting up the graphics card's memory and registers, drawing various primitive shapes, font rendering, etc.
But today 99% of the time people don't use the network transparency stuff in X, they run locally. But all sorts of memory has to be shuffled around. X mandates all sorts of bitmap formats that must be supported. Today the kernel, through KMS, can setup the graphics card. We have libraries like Cairo to draw basic shapes. Then there are all sorts of weird things that have been hacked into/onto X to support common features like resizing and rotating your desktop.
Wayland basically started with a blank slate. The kernel can setup the video card, so it won't do that. Most people don't use network transparency, so it doesn't do that (you can run an X client on Wayland, for when you still need the feature). The GUI toolkits and OpenGL libraries already draw everything, so it doesn't do that stuff.
LWN had an article from two years ago about what Wayland set out to accomplish. Things may have changed since there, here are two updates from LWN describing Wayland earlier this year.
I read through it. There are some "let's copy the iPhone" things, but so much of it clearly shows that Samsung just didn't care about the software. Decisions that, even in a vacuum, make no sense. Here are some that I can remember:
There are quite a few places in the document that boil down to "The iPhone does this neat little visual trick, we need a neat little visual trick". There are a couple of places (I can't remember them off the top of my head) where it looks like they actually removed something useful to be more iPhone like. Without some of the slides, it would have read like a "what the hell were you thinking" memo.
It's going to be a tough thing for Samsung to argue against.
Where has Apple said anything about the Nexus Q?
This is a smart move on Google's part. The device was very strange.
They could make a pretty interesting device out of it. AirPlay is a fantastic feature, I'd love to see Google come up with features like that to extend your Android device. But as announced, it seemed like final hardware designed for a vision that was still in the alpha stage, with no real software ("Let's just stick Android on it!"). I think it says a lot that since that was announced the Ouya was announced at $100, can do most everything the Q can, costs 1/3rd as much, and has had a ton of interest. Google missed the mark, and they're smart to fix it instead of launching it to die in the market.
Note that this ruling applies to Verizon ONLY. It's a result of the rules they agreed to during the 700MHz auction a few years ago. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and everyone else are free to continue to charge you extra for what you already paid for.
That's kind of what I was wondering, unless the app is simply a searchable catalog of the apps they have previously studied.
I'm curious how apps get your location without your knowledge? The first time an app asks you're supposed to get the location services popup, and whenever your location is being accessed you're supposed to get the little location arrow in the status bar at the top of the phone.
As much as I love my iPhone, I'm glad to get Apple get embarrassed by some of this stuff. The fact that many games were taking your phonebook simply because they could and sending it to the developer's servers was insane.
That's the current legal state. It wouldn't surprise me if someone died in a big box store and sued because their friend couldn't get a signal to call 911 and it suddenly became the law (or at least what you had to do to avoid negligence liability) to make sure phones worked in your building.
That's not always true. When iPhone first came out most people were very worried about how well the keyboard would work, and if you were used to going a mile a minutes on a BB it didn't work great at first. Based on that it could have been a big mistake.
But we now know it wasn't. Some people have a preference, but for most people the software keyboard works great, or at least well enough, to trade it for the other improvements like the larger screen.
I'd reserve judgement on 48fps until people have seen two or three movies in it. This may be the initial hump before people realize that it's much better.
According to Ars Techinica, it's probably because Mountain Lion is full a fully 64 bit kernel and those machines only had 32 bit graphics drivers. By doing this, Apple doesn't have to re-write new graphics drivers for those older machines. Seems like a fair enough engineering decision.
It's not really noticeable, but in benchmarks the iPad 3 is slightly slower than the iPad 2. This is definitely true on 3D graphics. It's past the margin of error, but it's not a 20% drop or anything like that... it's quite slight.
Because I'm sure that when Windows Vista and Windows 7 were released, Microsoft only said they changed 6 things. I hear in Windows 8 they only changed three things.
In fact, I'm so sure I'm right I'm not going to waste my time looking it up.
It's marketing. If they changed anything, they claim it's an enhancement. We did the work, we might as well claim it, even if no one would every buy an OS because it now supports GRB pixel alignment as well as RGB and BGR.
And his 6 year old computer could run both the OS it came with (would that be 10.4?) and the version of Mac OS X available when Windows 7 was released in 2009 (10.6, Snow Leopard).
Plus, it runs last year's OS X, 10.7, Lion.
In other words, it's roughly the same.
Yeah, when I want to play a game like that, I plug a real mouse in.
Isn't it interesting that a phone company doesn't see the telephone line as the closest equivalent. Then they would be arguing their common carrier status (which they don't want).
Of course a newspaper controls all content published, where as a telephone company has no controll.
Careful, someone's worldview is showing.
Don't you think the content creator/consumer thing is a false dichotomy? I keep seeing it repeated, but I'm not sure how much water it holds. Even on the iPad, it's quite possible to create content. Most users aren't creating dissertations of 30 page Excel spreadsheets, but they are creating something. Emails, Facebook posts, sharing photos & videos... they're creating kinds of content.
Windows 8 is a hell of a gamble. It wouldn't surprise me if it ended up like OS X 10.0: shows promise, is ultimately too flawed to use. But when Windows 8 OSR 2 (or whatever) comes out with a few tweaks, it might work quite well. People have clearly shown a certain preference for removing peripheral distractions to focus on the current task.
My parents have a Magic Mouse, and it's kind of nice. Most of the features are turned off, so it's hard to say how great it is.
But when I got a new iMac at work last year I asked for a Magic Trackpad, and I think it's amazing. I don't think it would work well for running Photoshop, but for non-image work it's great. Over the last few years I've gotten so used to using the gestures on my MacBook Pro to go forward/back in Safari, trigger Expose, and show the desktop. I use the forward/back gesture constantly.
Being able to do that on my desktop has been such an improvement. When I'm surfing I don't need to reposition the mouse to click on the back button, I can just swipe. When I want to change programs I can just swipe and then click on the window I want. It really is nice.
That was actually one of the reasons mentioned in the podcast (besides simple yield) that the screens don't exist yet. Display port (which is what the video is carried through for thunderbolt) has maybe half the bandwidth necessary to drive a retina display that size. Apple would need to use a newer faster version.
That's not unprecedented. They were about the only people using dual link DVI at first to drive their 30" cinema displays.
The people I know who use external drives tend to use them for specific programs. They'll setup their iTunes/iPhoto/Aperature/Lightroom/whatever libraries on the external drive, and leave smaller things (like general documents) on the main disk.
That may be due to the difficulty to setting up the home folder in an alternate location though.
They can be replaced, Apple just doesn't make it nearly as easy as most PCs. It's a concession to form, and it doesn't bother me too much. I tend to have to change the drive in a computer maybe once in its lifetime on average.
I agree with you about the root partition though. Keeping that on an external drive seems like asking for serious trouble. I know I wouldn't do that. It would be far too easy for the cable to jiggle loose and cause the computer to crash.
My family has had an iMac for years, and I really like the one I have at work. You can get better graphics cards at the higher end, but none of them are blow-your-socks-off. I can't wait to see a 27" retina display model, but I'm sure it will at least a year, probably two, to get one.
I agree the external storage thing is a little odd, my point was more that in this day and age it's not that bad, you're not sacrificing performance. The hard drives in the current iMacs may be big enough for most users for their entire life, although that's clearly no the case if you go SSD. Having the drive internal is cheaper (since you don't have to pay for the enclosure) and prettier (since you don't have an external box sitting around), but then you have to make the computer more accessible to get the drive in and out and that's a compromise that Apple has shown they're not willing to make. I can tell you from upgrading my MBP's RAM and HD that I would have preferred the old days when there was a little panel you could take off instead of removing the entire bottom of the case.
I'd imagine Thunderbolt cables will get cheaper as they become more ubiquitous. Thanks to Intel's new chipset PCs are starting to ship with Thunderbolt ports, and that should help. I remember USB being expensive despite every motherboard having a couple of ports. It was only after the iMac kick-started demand for USB peripherals that the prices became reasonable.
As for eSATA... that's one I'll give you. On the laptops it's not too odd since it takes up space, but on an iMac there is plenty of room. It's not a special port that needs a separate controller chip, and there is no way an iMac is using up all the internal SATA ports on the chipset. My guess is that one was pure "We use Firewire, we don't need that."
I haven't used a mini in years, so I'll take your word for it. I'd imagine that (like many of the laptops) it can get quite warm when pushed. Come to think of it, my image of a Mini is still the older white models, I keep forgetting them made them even smaller and aluminum.
As for the Pro... I'm sure they'll fix it next year. That one has been driving a ton of speculation on the Mac blogs. I like the theory they didn't want to update until they could support a retina display, but that's pure conjecture.
These days, are HDD slots really necessary? Most users don't upgrade their hard drives. USB 2 works pretty well, FireWire 800 is fantastic, and Thuderbolt is supposed to wipe with the floor with FW800. I'm sure the next iMac will have USB 3.
External drives work fine for a desktop. It's not like years ago when if you didn't have SCSI the performance was terrible.
I seriously doubt Apple would do that for the iMac. On the laptops you do it for space reasons, but on a 23" or 27" computer you have plenty of space to spare.
The point of the mini is that it's a tiny quite computer on the cheap (compared to full sized Apple models, not low end PCs). Why does it need to be bigger? And you're not supposed to need to open the case. What percentage of normal computer buyers do you think ever open their computer? At this point, laptops sell the best and can't be opened. They just have a slot or two that can be accessed through a panel. I'll agree that upgrading the older minis was terrible (I don't know if it's improved, I doubt it), but Apple markets and treats their computers like sealed appliances, and most people don't seem to care.
For $1200 the base iMac is a great computer. The graphics are fine for 95% of users. You can easily expand the storage with all the ports mentioned above. A fair number of people upgrade the RAM or hard drive in their computers, but almost no one buys expansion cards. The most common reason seems to be to get some new port (like USB 2 when that came out, or USB 3 now) and you can do that with Thunderbolt.
Apple has all the large market bases covered, and then some. The DIY Mac may appeal to /.ers, but I seriously doubt they'd sell. I can tell you users love the integrated easy to use appliance like setup of the current iMacs. I use one for development every day at work, and it's fantastic. Most people (both for person or work reasons) buy laptops anyway.
What kind of user would switch to the Mac for that? People who want to play games? Because the game selection on OS X isn't that great, and usually runs months behind Windows, if the games every come. When the latest graphics card comes out, there wouldn't even be drivers. No one is going to use it as a server, Apple clearly isn't interested in that (and I don't blame them, it's not a big market, and you can just use a Mac Pro if you really want one).
So your market is DIY people, who aren't hardcore gamers, who don't want a server, but do want a desktop. That's a tiny fraction of people. The Mac Pro is probably a rounding error in Apple's computer sales, and it has a decently sized market of professionals. But with Thunderbolt, some of the reasons for using a Pro (such as high speed interconnect to a RAID for video editing) can now be covered by the iMac.
Face it, the Mac Pro is what you want, you just don't want to pay the price. I don't blame you, it's not targeted at individuals and the price reflects that (by a good margin). But really, Apple has been ignoring the requests for the Mac Pro Mini for most of a decade, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their business at all. It's clearly not necessary.
There are quite a few typos in the article, it seems to have been created by OCR. My guess is the OCR got the 3 and 8 mixed up.
It was quite interesting to read, but a simple pass by an editor would have fixed most of the little errors (usually extra spaces in words).