When's the refresh...

The answer to the question is to go back and look at some of the threads on here from mid last year (or even earlier). There were a number of very frustrated people who had decided to hold on for the new model and lot of them could have saved themselves a lot of grief and wasted mental energy by simply buying the 2011 Mac. Moral as always, buy now if you need it now.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that there will be no new imac bump this year. January 2014.

Dyn-tec said:

5g wifi seems worth waiting for.

"Apple Insider" wrote this in January 2013:

"People familiar with the deal indicated to The Next Web that the forthcoming industry standard for Wi-Fi will appear in Apple's lineup this year. The so-called "5G Wi-Fi" offers up to 1.3Gbps data with a three-antenna design.


That's the dream I am holding on to anyway...lol

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One word: ethernet.

In addition to causing security nightmares wifi uses a great deal of its bandwidth on resending packets because of the noise when practically anything is nearby (especially if that thing uses power). I only rely on it for temporary connections and ones where speed is not as critical as placement (like my TiVO). If I am going to be tied to a desk (which is what happens with a desktop) I run some ethernet to that desk. The actual speed you get with fast cables (cat5e or cat6) is MUCH faster than the actual speed of 5G WiFi, no matter what the guy at Best Buy says.

Been there, done that. Buy it now and be happy. Haswel will not play a major role in desktop performance so you will still be getting one hell of a machine. I waited a year for my current iMac, worth the wait in some ways due to the new design but that won't be happening this year so put yourself out of your misery and pull the trigger

Dyn-tec said:

Good point. I was thinking of how great super fast wifi would be...didn't stop to think that I hard wire the "major" things (desktop, ps3, ATV).

I guess it will be a bigger deal for the MacBook users

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Exactly, for desktop computers running ethernet to it is usually the best option. In fact there is a good chance the computer desk is near the router already. Wifi is good for some things but whenever there is a choice between wifi and ethernet I go with the cables.

Sure it is another cord. It is one that you can run along the baseboard most of its distance though and then right to the back of your machine.

KaraH said:

Exactly, for desktop computers running ethernet to it is usually the best option. In fact there is a good chance the computer desk is near the router already. Wifi is good for some things but whenever there is a choice between wifi and ethernet I go with the cables.

Sure it is another cord. It is one that you can run along the baseboard most of its distance though and then right to the back of your machine.

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My router is on the opposite side of the house so if i ran a Ethernet wire it would be 50 feet long.

Acorn said:

My router is on the opposite side of the house so if i ran a Ethernet wire it would be 50 feet long.

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I have ran long cables too. Have you ever noticed that most companies (note: I said most, everything has an exception) use physical cables for their desktops even though they often have wifi in the building?

Acorn said:

My router is on the opposite side of the house so if i ran a Ethernet wire it would be 50 feet long.

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At my parent's house, I had to run about 75' of cable from the basement FIOS box to the upstairs FIOS router (near the bedrooms and thus most of the PCs). And THEN another 30' of cable back downstairs from that router to my bedroom on the main floor.

It's do-able, but it can be annoying.

Depend on the layout of the house and what floor it's on, a lot of people I know like to either:

• Go down one floor into the basement, run the cable along there
• Go up one floor into the attic, run the cable along there

Then either

• Pull the cable up/down using the phone wire if there's a plug nearly, and get a double-plug from Home Depot (phone + ethernet) so it all looks nice.
• Or go back up/down into the main floor into a closet or something.

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KaraH said:

I have ran long cables too. Have you ever noticed that most companies (note: I said most, everything has an exception) use physical cables for their desktops even though they often have wifi in the building?

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Yup. Better speed, better security, and more reliable.

Though, in many companies' defense... their floor construction is OFTEN easier to handle than your typical house / condo.

They have conduits under the floor-boards and/or dropped ceilings. Also their dry-wall is often fairly hollow so it's easy to snake stuff through there. Just various infrastructure stuff to make it easy to run a cord into a middle of a room for a cubicle or something without wires being visible.

But even with a house, there are (often) ways to do similar things using the attic / basement / garage / etc.