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Washac

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jul 2, 2006
2,511
128
Why cant Apple give us a decent desktop instead of these iMac things and laptop on top of laptop, Apples products are squareley aimed at a certain eschalon of the buying public which is the upwardly mobile traveling around business person, the ordinary person on the street who has some money to spend has been left behind.

Apple please stop making gadgety iphones and watches and ever thinner laptops and ever thinner horrid iMacs etc and return to your roots and make some decent desktops.

I for one know I am on my last Apple laptop and my 2009 Mac Pro will be my last Apple desktop :(
 
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Pakaku

macrumors 68040
Aug 29, 2009
3,120
4,359
The iMac is already a decent desktop, except for gaming, which was never the Mac's forte to begin with.

Sounds like you just want a PC, in which case it's more than possible to build a Hackintosh if you insist on one.
 

sunapple

macrumors 68030
Jul 16, 2013
2,715
5,009
The Netherlands
Just buy a PC already! A 2009 Mac Pro is sooo 7 years ago. What can it do a modern iMac can't? Or a modern MacBook Pro hooked up to a monitor? Cheaper replacement parts? Sorry, but that age is just over.
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,419
43,307
[MOD NOTE]
Title was changed to make it more descriptive.

[Putting on my member hat]

OP, what features does the iMac not have that you miss?

In many tasks its as fast as the current Mac Pro, and while its not as expandable as a PC, it was never expandable. In fact, I remember owning a bondi blue iMac and it's expansion options were just about as limited back then as they are now, though I will say its much much harder to replace the storage in the current models.

Plus through out its history, the iMac was positioned as a consumer device, a family computer if you will and that focus allowed it to be very successful. Many professionals use it to be sure, but Apple is a consumer facing company the iMac is evidence of such a philosophy.

Where Apple failed is not making the iMac more powerful/expandable for a segment of users, but rather making the Mac Pro something that fits that need.
 

gnasher729

Suspended
Nov 25, 2005
17,980
5,565
Why cant Apple give us a decent desktop instead of these iMac things and laptop on top of laptop, Apples products are squareley aimed at a certain eschalon of the buying public which is the upwardly mobile traveling around business person, the ordinary person on the street who has some money to spend has been left behind.
iMac is surely not aimed at "travelling around" business persons. Have you ever tried to travel with the 5K iMac?

On the other hand, even with the 21" model you can get a desktop computer with two 4K displays, 3.3 GHz quad core i7, 16 GB RAM, I can attach four 20TB hard drives if I have the money, what else do you want?

And it has a headphone jack.
 
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Malus120

macrumors 6502a
Jun 28, 2002
676
1,401
Why cant Apple give us a decent desktop instead of these iMac things and laptop on top of laptop, Apples products are squareley aimed at a certain eschalon of the buying public which is the upwardly mobile traveling around business person, the ordinary person on the street who has some money to spend has been left behind.

No offense but how long have you been with Apple? Affordability/raw value for the money (vs a Windows PC) has NEVER been Apple's strong suite. Did you buy that Mac Pro in your signature new? Because I can guarantee you that it cost a pretty penny when it was new, more than an "ordinary person on the street who has some money to spend," could generally justify. That said, while the iMac may not be cheap it's still the cheapest way to get a fast desktop computer and a 5K screen, and that's got to count for something.

Apple please stop making gadgety iphones and watches and ever thinner laptops and ever thinner horrid iMacs etc and return to your roots and make some decent desktops.

I for one know I am on my last Apple laptop and my 2009 Mac Pro will be my last Apple desktop :(

I get that you're frustrated, a lot of Mac users with varying needs are for varying reasons.

That said, I would argue that the 2011-2015 iMacs represent the pinnacle of both iMac design and performance (relative to the rest of the market at the time of release). People seem to have this conception that iMacs featuring extremely high end parts like the 2012 iMac with the GTX 680MX, or the 2014/2015 iMacs with 4790K/6700K i7 CPUs are the norm, when historically speaking, they are outliers.

iMacs before around 2009 (for high end models, 2011 for lower end models) were known for being SLOW relative to the competition at the time. Heck I remember the days when any professional user or "Mac gamer" worth his or her salt saved up his or her pennies to get a PowerMac/Mac Pro, and pitied the poor soul who sought to attempt such endeavors on a lowly iMac.

Please note, I'm not trying to make excuses for Apple not doing better, I'd like to see a more capable iMac, an xMac, or some Nvidia graphics options as much as the next guy, I just want to help put things into historical context.

But really, if you want to make an impact, don't make posts that just complain. Telling Apple to "stop making gadgety iphones and watches" when that makes up the majority of their revenue is just silly. Telling Apple to stop making "ever thinner laptops and ever thinner horrid iMacs," when Macs have until very recently been doing better than ever also doesn't make a lot of sense. Be clear about what you want, what you feel is lacking and what would excite you.

While it's true that sometimes "the customer can't know what they want until you show them," it's also true that Apple can't always know what the customer's really want if they never speak up (or if Apple never listens)
 
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nss_gabriele

macrumors newbie
Oct 12, 2016
29
24
I'd just appreciate if Apple considers the niche of hc users which don't mind their desktops being a bit thicker in order to get a proper current desktop gpu.
Maybe as a "pro" version*, 'cause I see why the general audience doesn't mind the gpu at all.

* especially because their desktop "pro" line is so overpriced and outdated.
 

theitsage

Suspended
Aug 28, 2005
795
862
Just buy a PC already! A 2009 Mac Pro is sooo 7 years ago. What can it do a modern iMac can't? Or a modern MacBook Pro hooked up to a monitor? Cheaper replacement parts? Sorry, but that age is just over.

This.

14258312_10157380759315304_8708643649105459187_o.jpg
 

Icaras

macrumors 603
Mar 18, 2008
6,343
3,380
Speak for yourself OP. I'm incredibly excited to see the new iMac and will most likely be upgrading whenever they decide to release it. And by the way, I have never traveled with my iMac before. Mind you, we are also having this discussion on the eve of Microsoft getting into the same all-in-one business.

All-in-ones are the future of desktop computers, as pointed out by Steve Jobs years ago. Modular computers are a thing of the past.
 

BorderingOn

macrumors 6502
Jun 12, 2016
495
474
BaseCamp Pro
Speak for yourself OP. I'm incredibly excited to see the new iMac and will most likely be upgrading whenever they decide to release it. And by the way, I have never traveled with my iMac before. Mind you, we are also having this discussion on the eve of Microsoft getting into the same all-in-one business.

All-in-ones are the future of desktop computers, as pointed out by Steve Jobs years ago. Modular computers are a thing of the past.

And yet, somehow, we've gone from having all components in one box to modularity. From the MacBook, to the Mac Pro, to the iPhone. You need cables, adapters, external boxes to make things work. It's like deconstructed oneness.

Edit...I have an iMac and really like it but I think I'd still prefer a not so pro Mac Pro so I can have multiple identical external monitors of my choice instead of being stuck with the not so flexible option you go with now if you need something more than a mini.
 
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iMcLovin

macrumors 68000
Feb 11, 2009
1,963
898
I agree that the iMac is decent for most kind of work. But saying the times for heavy machinery is over is not true.
THere will always be computer work that will always need the most powerful machinery you can get, and apple should support that one way or another. Also, for a desktop, having a subtle box hidden away connected to a monitor is just a good looking as an iMac, you are not gonna carry it around anyway. Stuff like Games, 3d Rendering, heavy processor work, game development, 3d texturing, sculpting...all needs either a lot of processors or a great GPU to go smoothly.
After I replaced my iMac, finally I can 3d render on my machine without waiting and the machine going insanely hot, I can play the top of the line games, I can do 3d sculpting and 3d painting with PBR programs without the machine making whiff about it. So unless the iMac can open these doors for you, Apple should not leave it as their most powerful machine. THeres 3 lines of popular processors from Intel, the consumer processors of max 4 core, which the iMac has. No mac delivers the ProSumer Broadwell-E CPUs and the Mac Pro only have a small selection of completely outdated Xeon Processors. And NO mac has proper GPU...even if many programs also need GPUs to work properly.
 

BayouTiger

macrumors 6502a
Jul 24, 2008
536
297
New Orleans
And yet, somehow, we've gone from having all components in one box to modularity. From the MacBook, to the Mac Pro, to the iPhone. You need cables, adapters, external boxes to make things work. It's like deconstructed oneness.

Edit...I have an iMac and really like it but I think I'd still prefer a not so pro Mac Pro so I can have multiple identical external monitors of my choice instead of being stuck with the not so flexible option you go with now if you need something more than a mini.

Actually, for the majority of folks the self contained machine is bliss. My wife has never once connected a dongle of any type into her Retina MacBook and I doubt she ever will.

I think the Mini is a great option as the basis for an expandable desktop. I've had iMacs, but I can say that once you use one of the 34" 3440x1440 displays, you won't care about a 16x9 display again. What they need is a TB3 based Mini and the expansion chassis that never developed. So many users underutilize the tremendous capability the Thunderbolt brings to the table. Once you do and then have to use a PC (MS has NEVER got Thunderbolt right!) you will miss it a lot.
 

doobydoooby

macrumors regular
Oct 17, 2011
206
251
Genève, Switzerland
I agree with the poster even if I'm more shades of grey than black and white. I know there aren't that many of us that want a desktop anymore and that we pale into insignificance when compared to iphone sales but I'm just not ready to sacrifice the expandability and repairability of a desktop for a piece of tin with glued-on ram that we use a couple of years and then throw away. I can't bring myself to buy an imac: I already have two gorgeous screens, multiple SSDs, pci-e USB 3, high end graphics card etc. so to buy all that stuff again in an all-in-one happy meal is a huge waste for me. But I have a mac pro from 2008 and its starting to creak. The motherboard is old, the ram is relatively slow and generally it could do with an upgrade. The sheer fact that is still going strong is amazing, I've stretched it as far as I can by fixing and upgrading as and when it becomes useful or necessary.

But there simply isnt a replacement for it in Apples' line up, otherwise I would have bought one two or three years ago, and that can't be good. Hackintosh I've tried and frankly it isnt stable enough, things can go wrong and each OS incremental upgrade is approached with a healthy dose of concern and a bit of naive faith. The new/old mac pro trash can is about as upgradeable as... well it's just not, is it? And its just absurbly poor value these days on a cost basis so definitely doesnt make the grade. It's quite extraordinary that apple have abandoned the desktop so savagely when it was those early evangelists with their silver boxes that drove the viruous circle into iphones and ipads. The corporate belly has burped out all that made it great and replaced it with quarterly-earnings-driven emoticons and rose gold. It's lost what made it great as far as i can see. Wahhhh.
 
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jasnw

macrumors 65816
Nov 15, 2013
1,012
1,048
Seattle Area (NOT! Microsoft)
If Apple really wanted to provide a computer for those who want an upgradable system but don't need (can't afford) something like the Mac Pro, the Mac Mini would be perfect. Use the iMac as their appliance-for-the-masses and make it as thin as The Ive wants, and make the Mini into the macOS box for the computer user. To do this, they'd simply need to open the design back up (ignore The Ive's thinness dogma) so memory and internal storage can be upgraded by the user, and done! I have a 2012 Mini which I use for my home server, and I really like it. I really don't know what Apple's goal is with the Mini these days, is it going to morph into a super-ATV appliance?
 

Moonjumper

macrumors 68030
Jun 20, 2009
2,740
2,908
Lincoln, UK
That said, I would argue that the 2011-2015 iMacs represent the pinnacle of both iMac design and performance (relative to the rest of the market at the time of release).

I think you are probably right on the performance front, but I disagree on the design side. The G4 iMac was much further ahead relative to the market, and is far better than all the iMacs that followed regarding ergonomics. It was a joy design-wise.
 
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