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Whatever the new iMac is, I really hope it has HDMI-in, or some way to connect other devices like you could with the 2009/2010 iMacs.

This will determine if I buy one right away or not, hdmi in would be sick but I doubt it will happen. If anything it'll have thunderbolt in
 
I hope that the iMac gets a sizeable update soon. I've been looking to get it for a while, as a home is incomplete without a desktop.
 
The laptops are using the laptop versions of the CPUs (and other chips) that are designed to be smaller and lower power. The desktop chips are different. I don't want Apple to use laptop parts in a desktop just to look 1% cooler and sacrifice performance or increase cost to do so.

Yap, but I'd call the CPUs they use in iMac hybrid. Look at the current I5 2500s. It's max TDP is around 65W instead of >90W of pure desktop CPUs and < 40W of decent notebook ones.

Compare that quite little difference with the enormous gap in thickness. It's way less than an inch (MBP) vs. what's the depth of the screen? Something like 2 or 3" (current iMac)?

The current iMac operates a 3.5" HDD which requires a lot of space. If they swap it for a 2.5" drive they's gather a lot of room to shrink the dimensions. And since nobody is talking about an iMac Air here I wouldn't worry about it too much.
 
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So to make it thinner they are probably removing the 3.5" hdd and the thermals will be even worse than before. Great. This is just what we need in a "desktop" computer. Pity.

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Yap, but I'd call the CPUs they use in iMac hybrid. Look at the current I5 2500s. It's max TDP is around 65W instead of >90W of pure desktop CPUs and < 40W of decent notebook ones.

Compare that quite little difference with the enormous gap in thickness. It's way less than an inch (MBP) vs. what's the depth of the screen? Something like 2 or 3" (current iMac)?

The current iMac operates a 3.5" HDD which requires a lot of space. If they swap it for a 2.5" drive they's gather a lot of room to shrink the dimensions. And since nobody is talking about an iMac Air here I wouldn't worry about it too much.
2.5" HDDs are slower and have a lot less capacity. I fail to see how this is a good thing. They are making the iMac even more of a glorified laptop than it already was.
 
2.5" HDDs are slower and have a lot less capacity. I fail to see how this is a good thing. They are making the iMac even more of a glorified laptop than it already was.

Absolutely, 3.5" drives are cheaper, faster and offer more size per $. But I see several issues with that:
- Rotating magnetic drives is not much state of the art any more. We are advancing to SSDs with great strides where dimensions don't matter.
- In the current iMac the highest stock capacity is 1TB which seems like a joke. Replacing the drive in favor of a bigger one is almost impossible for an average user.

So I'd appreciate Apple replacing the 3.5" for a slower 2.5" drive which can be replaced without having to dismount display and stuff.
 
Absolutely, 3.5" drives are cheaper, faster and offer more size per $. But I see several issues with that:
- Rotating magnetic drives is not much state of the art any more. We are advancing to SSDs with great strides where dimensions don't matter.
- In the current iMac the highest stock capacity is 1TB which seems like a joke. Replacing the drive in favor of a bigger one is almost impossible for an average user.

So I'd appreciate Apple replacing the 3.5" for a slower 2.5" drive which can be replaced without having to dismount display and stuff.

Well, if it was user replaceable, I would welcome it, but I doubt this would be the case. Although one would think that Apple have learned from the iMac hard drive replacement fiasco that parts like mechanical hard drives should be user serviceable and easily removable. If it can be done on a MBP, then there is no excuse to not be able to do this on an iMac.

But what concerns me is that going thinner and with a 2.5" hard drive is not really the direction that was necessary for what was already a thermally constrained "desktop" computer. I am tired of listening to my rMBP's impression of a hair dryer. No matter how amazing and magical the special fans are, apple still has not managed to beat the laws of thermal dynamics. Fact of the matter is that the MBP halts to turtle speed under sustained CPU/GPU load. This is the way the iMac is going now too. I am not normally one of the posters that throws their hands up in the air and predicts doom and gloom, but this form over function obsession that Steve Jobs left behind is now getting stupid. The iMac did not need to be thinner. This is meant to be a bloody desktop and not a glorified laptop with a bigger screen. I can't help but feel disappointed. The 6 core refurbished Mac Pro is looking mighty nice right now, but I can't spend that sort of money for a dinosaur GPU and not have SATA III and USB 3. It's criminal.

I can't help but feel that Apple is running out of ideas. Simply making their products thinner is not always revolutionary, especially when it's not necessary. A well thought out and engineered design that thinks about both form and function would be welcome. Am I a minority in thinking this?
 
I have to see it to believe it. There have been so many false rumors on the iMac refresh that I'm pretty sure we'd be lucky to see one at the end of Romney's 2nd term.
 
2.5" HDDs are slower and have a lot less capacity. I fail to see how this is a good thing. They are making the iMac even more of a glorified laptop than it already was.

They're designing toward a future where you only have SSD's.
 
As awesome as that would be, looking at the picture on the first page of this thread, the hard drive does not appear to be in an accessible position at the edge of the board :(
 
Oh dear. Apple carry on with the laptop components in their desktop fiasco :(. Less power, less efficient but more money. Hands up if you eat 1TB hard drives for breakfast let alone the probable tiny HD size Apple will fit as standard. Pure facepalm. I hope this rumour is untrue and Apple have used desktop components. Who needs thinner in a static desktop computer? Ridiculous.
 
Oh dear. Apple carry on with the laptop components in their desktop fiasco :(. Less power, less efficient but more money. Hands up if you eat 1TB hard drives for breakfast let alone the probable tiny HD size Apple will fit as standard. Pure facepalm. I hope this rumour is untrue and Apple have used desktop components. Who needs thinner in a static desktop computer? Ridiculous.

Yeah we don't thinner desktops. They're thin enough already.

I will pass on thin for the following specs:

Huge IPS display
GTX 680 from the green team
SSD boot drive (user upgradeable)
2xMechanical HDD for storage (hot swappable and Raid ready)
2xTB, 4xUSB3.0, 2xesata, firewire 800 (so that I don't need to buy adapters)
User upgradeable ram

In my dreams only. Or build a hackintosh.
 
Yeah we don't thinner desktops. They're thin enough already.

I will pass on thin for the following specs:

Huge IPS display
GTX 680 from the green team
SSD boot drive (user upgradeable)
2xMechanical HDD for storage (hot swappable and Raid ready)
2xTB, 4xUSB3.0, 2xesata, firewire 800 (so that I don't need to buy adapters)
User upgradeable ram

In my dreams only. Or build a hackintosh.

LOL! This build makes too much sense for Apple to use it. Dumb it down please :rolleyes:
 
LOL! This build makes too much sense for Apple to use it. Dumb it down please :rolleyes:

I think that businesses believe that they need to create built in obsolescence... and also, Apple has a recent tendency to make their products less user upgradable... unibody Macbooks, iphones, Ipods etc...

This has been very profitable for Apple to make a pretty solid product... and have a fairly user-friendly warranty (and a reputation for pretty good customer service)... but then to rely on a 1-5 year upgrade cycle, knowing well that many users will want and act upon upgrading sooner in that cycle, rather than later.
 
Maybe they'll be even thinner in 2013 with Haswell. You can drop the discrete GPU for the Intel HD 5000 IGP and use 45W mobile CPUs instead of the 95W desktop ones to reduce the heat and allow for thinner frames. :p
I think we are focusing to deeply on the mobile side and ignoring the lower 65W TDP 'S' variants on the desktop side. Turbo bins apply more heavily there but they are not as expensive as their mobile counterparts.
 
How I think it should be (for what it's worth):

Laptop/mobile devices: smaller, more efficient components make for thinner and lighter, yet more capable and more efficient devices.

Desktop computers: smaller, more efficient components allow for larger amounts of components to fit in the same footprint, making for faster, more robust, more capable and more efficient computers.

Note that I refer to one group as a device, and the other group as a computer.
 
So a SATA internal DVD drive is slower than a external one? I don't think so.

I have a external DVD drive from samsung and its slow as molasses. I bought that for a .. Ahem.. netbook which is a paperweight at the moment.

No, what I am saying is that the USB is able to keep up with the disk no matter how fast it is. Also the USB superdrive requires extra power with special USB ports so it can probably run at faster speeds than the one you have. However, SATA is capable of reading and writing at faster speeds than USB 2.0, in this case it doesn't really matter. My external superdrive on the Retina MBP I recently got seems just as fast as the superdrive on my old MacBook
 
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