What it can do is let me add features down the road I may or may not know I'll need at the time. I'll give two examples. Keep in mind recently I upgraded a PowerMac and bought a new PC in November, which I did assemble myself using what I wanted to put in it. I'm not saying other people have to put their own computers together, but it's nice to be able to get a computer with the features you actually WANT as opposed to one with features someone else has decided they want to sell you.
I had a dual 533 G4 Digital Audio PowerMac. I was looking for 6+ month at buying a new Intel Mac. The problem was that no iMac at the time had a decent video card (they were all laptop cards) and so that meant I had to look at MacPros. Already, I went from the $1200-1800 range to the $2400-$3000+ range JUST because I needed a better video card than what the iMac offered. Now you can view this as an expansion need or simply a case of the iMac not offering WHAT I needed at a REASONABLE price. Keep in mind I was willing to pay more for a Mac than a PC because I prefer the OS. What do I use/need them for? First of all, I've had it with Microsoft and I do not want to go to Vista. I do not like Vista. XP is "OK" but MacOSX is better. So part of it is not so much a need for Mac software but a desire to get away from Microsoft. But that does not change WHAT I do on a computer.
On the Mac side, I was planning to use a Mac to power a whole house audio system in the background (basically have iTunes serve to AppleTV and Airport Express units around the house as needed). At some point, I also plant to get Logic Pro to start using with my Roland synth and Fender guitar rigs to record music, but that will probably wait for a laptop purchase. Other applications are available for the Mac that I use all the time regardless (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, Messengers, Photoshop, etc.) so that is/was a matter of getting the Mac versions at whatever point along the way for that new purchase.
On the PC side of things (again, I was planning on using BootCamp and either Parallels or Fusion to integrate whatever I needed), I make pinball games as a side hobby and thing (The Ultrapin commercial platform uses several of my table conversions) so I need XP for some time to come as a development platform (the sofware is only available for Windows). I also do occasionally play PC games and hence I need a quality graphics card. I do occasional word processing, etc. and I do have the software for XP, so clearly it would save me money in the short term to be able to continue to use legacy Windows software and slowly replace it with Mac equivalents over time.
What I WANTED to do was buy ONE Mac that woud fit all my needs and ween off Windows software. What I was forced to do was buy a PC because no Mac out there including the MacPro at the time fit my needs (it was pretty darn sad that a $2400+ computer had an out-of-date poor graphics card at the time). For $800, I was able to put together a PC that met my needs on the PC side of things (AMD 5600+, 2Gigs of 800MHz low latency ram, NVidia 7900GS, Sata 500Gig drives, 6.1 sound, Gigabit Ethernet, 20x DVD-RW drive, etc.) My PowerMac was more than a little long in the tooth, but I still needed a solution for my whole house audio system (true, iTunes does run on Windows, but it sucks compared to the Mac version in some respects and Windows is not a stable environment to leave running 24/7). So instead of buying a new Mac, I upgraded the old one to a 1.8GHz 7448, 1.5 Gigs of ram, USB 2.0 PCI card, Sata PCI card with two 500 Gig drives, an 18x DVD-RW 'super' drive and an internal USB 2.0/Firewire hub replacing the old Jaz drive, all for less than the cheapest iMac out there. It works great for my whole house audio system (which has been up and running for some time now) and as an Internet browsing and secure banking system. And I didn't have to clutter up my desk with all kinds of external hard drives, etc. that would have been required with an iMac to achieve the same results. Is the CPU as fast? No. Does it need to be? No.
So as you can see, an iMac would not have met my PC needs (slow graphics card) and even the new $2200 one with a good graphics card is well...$2200! There should be something comparable on the Mac side in hte $800-1400 range and there isn't, which is why some of us that WANT tower/expansion capability (be it for neatness on desk or upgradeable graphics in a market where Apple is slow to come up with the latest GPUs), we have no options but a $2400+ Mac Pro, which is well, ridiculously overpriced and in some respects overpowered for consumer use. Apple isn't getting a cannibalized sale situation with me, it's getting a LOST SALE because some of us aren't willing to pay $2400 these days for a desktop tower. And we all do NOT go running to the iMac line because for some of us, it's not a good fit. I've got multiple large monitors already. I prefer CRT for pinball, for example because even the newest LCDs are slow to draw really fast moving objects (i.e. you get ball blur). An iMac gives me a monitor I don't want and makes me buy other features on a monitor-size basis and has NO storage expansion internally, which means that beautiful looking clean desk you get with a stock model disappears when you start stacking up external boxes on top and power bricks underneath. That is not acceptable to me.
Maybe I'm not a 'typical' Mac user. I do see myself as largely a typical PC user, though, although with perhaps a larger knowledge base than the average user as I'm in engineering work wise and I know Linux, etc. as well and run it as a 2nd OS on the new PC. The question for users like me that WANT to use MacOSX and get away from the MESS that is Vista and Microsoft is why can't I get the hardware I *NEED* with that OS instead of someone like Steve Jobs telling me what hardware he wants to sell me??? The operating system doesn't care what hardware I'm using and yet the whole problem with Apple today for potential PC switchers is finding the right hardware. To some out there, there's no issue. iMacs are great for them. But some of us NEED or WANT towers for the various reasons above (even if you never upgrade them, you STILL get to pick what goes into them initially and that is NOT true with iMacs to a large degree). So to us, there's this GIANT GLARING HOLE in the Mac lineup that is NOT served by the MacPro. I don't need the fastest processor in the world (the 5600+ I got is fine for pinball game development and light office work). I DO need a reasonably fast GPU (even the 7900GS DirectX 9 only GPU I ended up with can run any current game out there, which cannot be said for all the but the $2200 custom option iMac).
So no offense to the countless Mac users out there that 'don't get' why some people would want anything other than an iMac or a MacPro, but quite frankly, I think you guys aren't imagining a very big world out there. Maybe the iMac and MacPro (along with the various Mac laptops) have fit the 6% Mac market share just fine in the past and even the current users are happy because they fit that niche. But 6% isn't even CLOSE to 100% and that means there are a LOT of PC users out there that buy towers and mini-towers and don't pay $2400 for them and are used to being able to pick out what they WANT instead of being told what they can buy. If Apple ever wants to get out of this less than 10% mode, they need to stop thinking about the old style "Let's milk the Mac community for every cent we can get" and start thinking about the bigger overall picture of a market that is currently RIPE for the picking. Microsoft has made a MAJOR blunder with Vista. People hate it. They're looking for alternatives and Microsoft is trying to take XP away as an option in the near future. There is NO BETTER TIME than the present for Apple to stop ignoring the traditional mid-range PC market and start catering to a whole new market share. Those aren't cannibalized sales of Mac Pros! They're BRAND NEW USERS waiting to convert! Some will like iMacs. Most will wonder why they can't get a small tower with what they WANT in it.
To me, the whole concept of the iMac is flawed in the sense that if the default package doesn't fit your needs (and increasingly with things like Time Machine that BEG for a 2nd drive, it seems less and less so), you have to go to EXTERNAL boxes and that completely defeats the point of a neat box-less package in a monitor chassis that the iMac is designed to be. If Steve weren't so obsessed with 'thin' then he could make the thing a little thicker and have room for a 2nd internal drive and that would alleviate one of the two major drawbacks. Similarly, a larger case could allow non-laptop parts to be used and it could be a TRUE desktop, not a laptop-inside-a-monitor(tm).
But what frustrates some of us out here is that when we point these things out, we get labeled as a few renegades or told "Apple knows best" etc. etc. Yet Apple for all its financial success lately, is STILL less than 7% of the market share. If the courts ever took away their "tying" of the OS to ONLY their hardware (and it seems this Psystar thing could eventually be the catalyst), they would HAVE to start looking to larger market share instead of just squeezing the grapevine for all its worth and making their offerings compared to Dell for certain markets look like a joke ($2200+ just to play a modern 3D game for example? Get real. That's $800 on a Dell). But Mac users don't play games!!! Or they have an Xbox or whatever. That's not a REASON. That's an EXCUSE. IF the Mac had reasonable GPU hardware (ironic for a traditionally 'graphic' orientated computer, IMO), it MIGHT then HAVE a gaming market for it. Chicken meet stubborn egg!
Instead of all the fanboy excuses I read every day on here, why can't some of these people see that a BETTER Mac = a better experience for all in the long run? Apple needs to stop artificially trying to push people to higher margin computers, which may work for a small but rabid and loyal computing base that can afford it; the traditional Mac "yuppee" of the '90s, but it doesn't work for the general PC computing population. Apple needs to decide if it wants to be a minor player forever or whether it wants to make a move towards displacing Microsoft. If they want the latter, the time is ripe. If they want the former, I guess I'm better off waiting for Windows7 or whatever to correct Vistas mistakes and hold onto XP in the mean time and leave my Mac for niche uses like the whole house audio server. I want a general computing solution with MacOSX, not just a limited use box that happens to be stable (that sounds more like Linux at the moment than Mac to me anyway).
