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$499 Headless iMac?
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Sir_Giggles said:
Please use emoticons when being completely sarcastic like that and pointing out the blatantly obvious, otherwise people will think you're actually being serious. If you you were actually being serious, then
I have some land in Florida to sell ya... Since I just finished reading this entire thread I think I should make a post. I know Godwin's law is in effect but with so much time invested, I must post at least one post.
I think this is a good move by Apple. Will I buy one of these Macs, not unless it can do something my PB can't already do. If Apple were to introduce a line of consumer displays along with this, I would buy one or two depending on the price (I would like a dual display setup with my PB and a display to replace the display on my Linux box which runs at 640X480 max). I would really like a 12" LCD for the PB, but that is not going to happen. Of course I could always use a KVM if I had to.
Doesn't the average computer consumer buy a new display with their new computer? That is what many of my colleges tend to do. I have old CRTs laying around but they are worthless on a modern machine.
This system will not be horribly under powered either. Will Tiger make it run like a dog? I doubt it, considering Mac OS X ran better with each iteration on my G3 iMac, which handles most everyday tasks just fine itself.
I apologize if I ramble here and make little sense but it is late (3:18 am here) and I've been reading for 7 + hours. In total I think it took me over 24 hours reading time to read this thread. I have been trying to get through for three maybe four days now, It has all blurred together. Good thing I haven't had to really work lately.
Off topic, but this thread did convince me to donate to a couple tsunami relief funds. So this thread has made the world a better place in its own small way.
I think this is a good move by Apple. Will I buy one of these Macs, not unless it can do something my PB can't already do. If Apple were to introduce a line of consumer displays along with this, I would buy one or two depending on the price (I would like a dual display setup with my PB and a display to replace the display on my Linux box which runs at 640X480 max). I would really like a 12" LCD for the PB, but that is not going to happen. Of course I could always use a KVM if I had to.
Doesn't the average computer consumer buy a new display with their new computer? That is what many of my colleges tend to do. I have old CRTs laying around but they are worthless on a modern machine.
This system will not be horribly under powered either. Will Tiger make it run like a dog? I doubt it, considering Mac OS X ran better with each iteration on my G3 iMac, which handles most everyday tasks just fine itself.
I apologize if I ramble here and make little sense but it is late (3:18 am here) and I've been reading for 7 + hours. In total I think it took me over 24 hours reading time to read this thread. I have been trying to get through for three maybe four days now, It has all blurred together. Good thing I haven't had to really work lately.
Off topic, but this thread did convince me to donate to a couple tsunami relief funds. So this thread has made the world a better place in its own small way.
Rootman said:
I just made an Israeli Arab a Mac person. He got a 14" iBook G4. He writes in Hebrew and Arabic, so I bought him Mellel.
~Shard~ said:If you you were actually being serious, then
1. Is it swampland? 2. Can I get a bridge to go with it?
Jsmit: Excellent comments. Yours should be the last post in the thread. (Oops!)
Well considering this thread has discussed everything and the kitchen sink I will bring up one final topic.
I like strawberries. Yes. There I said it. I mean peaches are good. Apples are OK if it wasn't for that dang skin. But strawberries rock. Well strawberries and watermelon but there is the whole seed thing that somewhat ruins the watermelon going experience. Yah strawberries are where its at.
I like strawberries. Yes. There I said it. I mean peaches are good. Apples are OK if it wasn't for that dang skin. But strawberries rock. Well strawberries and watermelon but there is the whole seed thing that somewhat ruins the watermelon going experience. Yah strawberries are where its at.
Jsmit said:
Nope. I'm sitting here with a 2 year old, bordering on 3, 20" Dell CRT. Its as good as the day I purchased it. Why would I want to throw it out when its almost as good as any other CRT out there?
m a y a said:~One of the longest threads in MR history~ :: crazy ::
indeed
in less than two weeks MWSF 2005 will be goin off like a frog in a really tight sock 
GFLPraxis said:Freescale (division of Motorola that does the G4 processor) is working on new G4's.
They've already announced that the new G4's go up to 2 GHz and can be single or dual core. A dual core 2 GHz G4 only takes 25w at MAX. That's AWESOME. A dual core 2 GHz G4! A single chip that can outrun a low end PowerMac and keep up with a 1.8 dual processor one....
And the single core one can be scaled back a bit for 10w power consumption.
They're also working on adding 64-bit extensions.
I see the future with 64-bit dual core 2 GHz G4's in the low end (eMac?), and dual core 3 GHz G5's in middle (iMac?) and dual dual core 3.5 or 4 GHz G5's in the top (PowerMac?). iBooks with single and PowerBooks with dual cores, running at 2 GHz.
Sweet
Just my guess.
Sweet
But do you think that the comming headless imac has any of these capabilities or will it just be a 2 year old iMac G4 (flower) becasue if it comes like that then none of these facts are good???
sunilraman said:indeed
Fixed that for you.
SiliconAddict said:
dude, what the other poster said about dual-core
dualcore!!!!!! yeahhhhhhh
ps thanks for the iSock bit
[sidethought]
hmm.. so there could be down the line a dual dual core g5 running a dual dual link nvidia card with dual displays? im confused
[sidethought#2]
i am going to be an a** here and suggest that given the average gullibility and IQ of a windows user when they market a 2ghz dualcore g4, they will have to call it 4GHZ because that's where intel is/almost is at....
Are switcher's really the target market?
I my most humble opinion I would say that switcher's play a small part for this type of machine. Clearly this is a low-end mac and apple has traditionally targeted this type of computer to educational institutions. I'm sure that emac's have been successful more in schools than everyday use. This is a general purpose machine and has everything a school would want in a machine. Personally I would want one of these machines. My purposes would be to do general purpose computing including graphics here and there although don't know how well it would work in that sense. If there are other people like me we are looking for a low-cost machine and something that you wouldn't have to think twice before buying. Purchasing a 'regular' mac makes my stomach turn because of the price. I think that the time has come for apple to introduce such a machine that would appeal to the masses, grow their market share and hopefully get more windows developers working on the mac (I hope autodesk is reading this). I think that if apple really does produce a machine like this it could really offset windows market share. Everyone of my friends stay away from mac's because of price and if apple really wants to survive a long an prosperous life this is the right time for it. Keep your fingers crossed that this rumour could turn out to be true.
I my most humble opinion I would say that switcher's play a small part for this type of machine. Clearly this is a low-end mac and apple has traditionally targeted this type of computer to educational institutions. I'm sure that emac's have been successful more in schools than everyday use. This is a general purpose machine and has everything a school would want in a machine. Personally I would want one of these machines. My purposes would be to do general purpose computing including graphics here and there although don't know how well it would work in that sense. If there are other people like me we are looking for a low-cost machine and something that you wouldn't have to think twice before buying. Purchasing a 'regular' mac makes my stomach turn because of the price. I think that the time has come for apple to introduce such a machine that would appeal to the masses, grow their market share and hopefully get more windows developers working on the mac (I hope autodesk is reading this). I think that if apple really does produce a machine like this it could really offset windows market share. Everyone of my friends stay away from mac's because of price and if apple really wants to survive a long an prosperous life this is the right time for it. Keep your fingers crossed that this rumour could turn out to be true.
Give us some credit...
Emoticons, schmoticons... Give the Macrumors readers some credit. Of course that was sarcasm! Subtlety works hand in hand with sarcasm. I bet only one person couldn't detect that -- that's the person to whom you and I can partner to sell some of that hot Florida land.
Emoticons, schmoticons... Give the Macrumors readers some credit. Of course that was sarcasm! Subtlety works hand in hand with sarcasm. I bet only one person couldn't detect that -- that's the person to whom you and I can partner to sell some of that hot Florida land.
~Shard~ said:Please use emoticons when being completely sarcastic like that and pointing out the blatantly obvious, otherwise people will think you're actually being serious. If you you were actually being serious, then
After trawling through the mountain of posts that this rumour has generated I'd like to make my first post on macrumors.com
Currently I'm running XP and I'm not exactly happy - aside from gaming I don't feel that there is anything enticing me to remain a windows user. I'm coming from a RISC OS background so I'm used to have an OS/GUI that is pleasant to use and actually gives you a computing experience you can enjoy. I'm looking to sell off all my PC hardware and give Mac OS X a try; indeed I would have already if it wasn't for the fact that the eMac is long overdue an update. As you can guess from my previous sentence I am not in the market for a PowerMac nor am I able to shell out at least £919 on an iMac.
And now that this headless Mac has been unofficially announced I'll be waiting to see what ends up being best suited to my needs - an updated eMac or this new headless mac. So I'm yet another person impatiently waiting the 10 days till SJ puts us out of our misery
Currently I'm running XP and I'm not exactly happy - aside from gaming I don't feel that there is anything enticing me to remain a windows user. I'm coming from a RISC OS background so I'm used to have an OS/GUI that is pleasant to use and actually gives you a computing experience you can enjoy. I'm looking to sell off all my PC hardware and give Mac OS X a try; indeed I would have already if it wasn't for the fact that the eMac is long overdue an update. As you can guess from my previous sentence I am not in the market for a PowerMac nor am I able to shell out at least £919 on an iMac.
And now that this headless Mac has been unofficially announced I'll be waiting to see what ends up being best suited to my needs - an updated eMac or this new headless mac. So I'm yet another person impatiently waiting the 10 days till SJ puts us out of our misery
$99 iMac Article Analysis
After a thorough review of the specifications stated in that $99 iMac story, I've come to the conclusion that there's no way it could cost $99 and allow Apple to still maintain their industry leading profit margins. Let's break it down:
At first I thought it had to be a fake with the mention of G6 processors. However, I remembered the ads on TV that Pontiac was selling the first-ever G6. If that's the case, Apple can simply buy processors of their line and save a ton on R&D costs. Brilliant Steve!
USB 3.0 is already on the market too, so there's no problem integrating this into the new iMac. It's cheap too so that can fit in the manufacturing budget.
Superdrives are still pretty pricey but in the quantities they can expect to sell (I predict >50 million worldwide) my numbers show they can get the cost of these down to less than $1 a piece.
As for 1024MB of RAM, Firewire, built-in Ethernet, and the modem, I've seen plenty of computers on eBay with these items sell for a song so it's possible they can squeeze them into the new iMac.
Software compatibility with all of those platforms! I'll bet Steve Jobs subcontracted to the guys at CherryOS to make this happen. They're doing some amazing stuff over there.
I'm pretty sure they're taking all those substandard 23" Cinema displays with bad color problems and giving those away. With all the postings on the net about the problems with those displays, there must be at least 10 million of them out there.
The photo is definitely authentic. I did a thorough analysis with Preview and confirmed the shadows, colors, transparencies, bitmaps, alpha channels, gamma channels, pixels, and vectors are all within spec.
Pro keyboard and mouse with six buttons, scroll wheel and mind reader? This is where you can tell that the article is a fake. There's no way Steve Jobs would allow a mouse with more than one button. A multi-button mouse would cost way too much and never permit a $99 price-point. Education prices maybe.
Conclusion: Fake
After a thorough review of the specifications stated in that $99 iMac story, I've come to the conclusion that there's no way it could cost $99 and allow Apple to still maintain their industry leading profit margins. Let's break it down:
At first I thought it had to be a fake with the mention of G6 processors. However, I remembered the ads on TV that Pontiac was selling the first-ever G6. If that's the case, Apple can simply buy processors of their line and save a ton on R&D costs. Brilliant Steve!
USB 3.0 is already on the market too, so there's no problem integrating this into the new iMac. It's cheap too so that can fit in the manufacturing budget.
Superdrives are still pretty pricey but in the quantities they can expect to sell (I predict >50 million worldwide) my numbers show they can get the cost of these down to less than $1 a piece.
As for 1024MB of RAM, Firewire, built-in Ethernet, and the modem, I've seen plenty of computers on eBay with these items sell for a song so it's possible they can squeeze them into the new iMac.
Software compatibility with all of those platforms! I'll bet Steve Jobs subcontracted to the guys at CherryOS to make this happen. They're doing some amazing stuff over there.
I'm pretty sure they're taking all those substandard 23" Cinema displays with bad color problems and giving those away. With all the postings on the net about the problems with those displays, there must be at least 10 million of them out there.
The photo is definitely authentic. I did a thorough analysis with Preview and confirmed the shadows, colors, transparencies, bitmaps, alpha channels, gamma channels, pixels, and vectors are all within spec.
Pro keyboard and mouse with six buttons, scroll wheel and mind reader? This is where you can tell that the article is a fake. There's no way Steve Jobs would allow a mouse with more than one button. A multi-button mouse would cost way too much and never permit a $99 price-point. Education prices maybe.
Conclusion: Fake
OS X feels, to me, to be rather closer to Risc OS than any Windows version. You shouldn't have any problems at all switching over - just keep an open mind, and use a third party mouse... Going from three buttns to one will probably come as somewhat of a shock.Sargiel said:
Still I'm sure you'll not be quite so stubborn as a Risc OS using mate of mine who refuses to even consider X simply because it doesn't ship with a multiple button mouse. Insane.
Whither PowerBook and PowerMac updates!?
While all the recent rumours have been interesting and intruiging... there is one thing which has been worrying me.
Two weeks ago, before the headless iMac rumour broke, everyone was adamant that MWSF would bring new PowerBooks, with a slim chance of new PowerMacs too.
Since then... we have heard precisely *nothing* about new PowerBooks or PowerMacs - zero, zip, zilch, nada, niente, NOTHING!
Given ThinkSecret's pretty excellent track record, this is leading me to be concerned because it might suggest that:
a) PowerMac updates are not happening any time soon
b) PowerBook updates are going to be so incremental that they are going to have a 'quiet' Tuesday-style-update rather than a trumpeted rollout.
As someone who has been gearing up to buy a PowerBook and PowerMac and am finally nearly there... after 18 months... I was hoping that MWSF would bring me quality updates in this product lines... but now I am concerned.
So my question is - am I being
a) unreasonably, irrationally paranoid
b) realistic, and preparing myself for the eventual reality of this NOT being 'my' expo!!
Floop
While all the recent rumours have been interesting and intruiging... there is one thing which has been worrying me.
Two weeks ago, before the headless iMac rumour broke, everyone was adamant that MWSF would bring new PowerBooks, with a slim chance of new PowerMacs too.
Since then... we have heard precisely *nothing* about new PowerBooks or PowerMacs - zero, zip, zilch, nada, niente, NOTHING!
Given ThinkSecret's pretty excellent track record, this is leading me to be concerned because it might suggest that:
a) PowerMac updates are not happening any time soon
b) PowerBook updates are going to be so incremental that they are going to have a 'quiet' Tuesday-style-update rather than a trumpeted rollout.
As someone who has been gearing up to buy a PowerBook and PowerMac and am finally nearly there... after 18 months... I was hoping that MWSF would bring me quality updates in this product lines... but now I am concerned.
So my question is - am I being
a) unreasonably, irrationally paranoid
b) realistic, and preparing myself for the eventual reality of this NOT being 'my' expo!!
Floop
mactarkus said:
Dude. Credit to you for your length explanation.
However the fact that Apple charge more than $99 for Panther, or iSight, or a keyboard and mouse, would have been enough for me to conclude that a $99 iMac is a complete fantasy.
Put it this way - if Apple release a $99 iMac, I will publicly eat my shorts, care of said iMac and more expensive iSight camera ;-)
Yep, that's insane for sure.brap said:
Uh, does he know that OS X will support a two button mouse? Might make a difference if he is thinking the reason that it doesn't ship with a two button mouse is that it only supports a one button mouse.
Sushi
Floop said:
1. with regard to the powermacs, i think you are being a bit of (a) and (b)... the price has come down a bit through this year on a nice dual-2ghz g5. this machine is bloody fast
seriously... my dual 1.25 g4 was maxing out on a software synth program (reason), and when i switched to a Single 1.6ghz g5, it hardly broke a sweat. the cpu usage meter was like.... barely off 5% or so 2. powerbooks... i would say you are more of (a) and (b)... although the price premium, included ram, and being stuck at g4 1.33+ghz etc is rather frustrating. so you are not too paranoid i think its a valid unhappiness with the powerbook situation. remember however that now all powerbooks have bluetooth and airport built in ... sweet
3. on a side note, imac g5.. hmmm i don't think people realize that it's quite fast
Analysis continued...
The inclusion of Panther won't bust the $99 pricetag since they can include it with OEM packaging! The keyboard and mouse aren't said to be Bluetooth -- leave it to Apple to skimp on the options. They'll have to in order to get down to that $99 price. No iSight is included. If it were, the price would have to be adjusted up nearly $149. It all comes down to that multi-button mouse luxury item.
The inclusion of Panther won't bust the $99 pricetag since they can include it with OEM packaging! The keyboard and mouse aren't said to be Bluetooth -- leave it to Apple to skimp on the options. They'll have to in order to get down to that $99 price. No iSight is included. If it were, the price would have to be adjusted up nearly $149. It all comes down to that multi-button mouse luxury item.
Floop said:
