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$499 Headless iMac?
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If the rumors and pictures are true about the headless mac being iHome Media Centre rather just a normal (but headless mac), it would be a perfect opportunity to release an airport compatible remote control for controlling your iHome as well as all of your airport Express's!
IF this did happen it would be nice to think Apple could integrate the remote control technology into the next iPods!
Well i can hope...
IF this did happen it would be nice to think Apple could integrate the remote control technology into the next iPods!
Well i can hope...
LaMerVipere said:Would probably end up being $469 like the iPod photo w/student discount
My thoughts exactly. This will be a low margin item for Apple. IMO the low EDU discount on the iPod is more reflective that the iPod is an entertainment tool first.
newwavedave said:
Right, but what if we end up without any expensive solution? I agree as long as the flash iPod materialises, stocks won't suffer but if neither the headless Mac nor the flash iPod is announced, then I could see a significant drop.
Media Centres, Why?
I don't get the thinking behind theses Media Centre devices.
Are they supposed to sit under my main TV and be used for recording TV programmes?
Or are they designed to be a web browser, email client, word processor etc?
The two are incompatible.
My wife wants to watch a soap opera that Media Centre recorded earlier. I want to check my email or usenet.
Arguments ensue...
That's the problem.
It can't do both at the *same* time.
I don't get the thinking behind theses Media Centre devices.
Are they supposed to sit under my main TV and be used for recording TV programmes?
Or are they designed to be a web browser, email client, word processor etc?
The two are incompatible.
My wife wants to watch a soap opera that Media Centre recorded earlier. I want to check my email or usenet.
Arguments ensue...
That's the problem.
It can't do both at the *same* time.
garethslee said:
While on the surface that can be a problem, that is not for the manufactures to be concerned about. For in most households compromise is in order. Also there are a great number of single people out there. And if this comes under $500, it would allow you to have more than one TV and Media Center for use.
Zaty said:
Danm right. I can't see a mini on the high street for love nor money. If I was a less Apple-savvy consumer I would be beginning to get annoyed and soon lose interest.
A flash one would be good, but a larger capacity mini would suit me better.
Personally, I can take or leave the headless iMac. I don't particularly have any emotional connection to my current monitor.
this will be good
this is great news for people wanting to buy a mac at a low price. IMO, i do not need the power of the G5 but am not willing to go back to CRT after i bought a peice of TFT heaven, so emac is out.
using this sort of machine, i would connect it up to my existing monitor. great!
mind you, i do hope they dont call it iHome, or Icentre, because all other desktops ended with 'mac'. i hope they call it the xMac.
this is great news for people wanting to buy a mac at a low price. IMO, i do not need the power of the G5 but am not willing to go back to CRT after i bought a peice of TFT heaven, so emac is out.
using this sort of machine, i would connect it up to my existing monitor. great!
mind you, i do hope they dont call it iHome, or Icentre, because all other desktops ended with 'mac'. i hope they call it the xMac.
weldon said:
My point is not that I want to call everything a computermaker makes a computer (or a PC). In fact, it is just to stress that a 21st century computermaker is very likely to make computers that we don't call computers (iPod, headless, Xbox, TiVo, etc.).
And really, "computer" is quite a bad name for a computer, anyway.
gekko513 said:
*sniff* *sniff* Do I smell a troll...?
Well, on to your question. Perhaps for the same reason that I use higher quality power tools in my work or prefer driving a better quality vehicle than the majority of the people. It does the job better, lasts longer and it feeeellllsss soooo goood.
Windows machines wear out faster, crash more often and over the life of the machine cost a lot (3x) more. Studies have been done on this. Macs are less expensive and more productive than Windows machines on both a basis of life time cost and productivity.
One of the things that people forget when quoting the market share numbers is that Windows machines out number Macs but most of the Windows machines are used in drudge applications like process control, cash registers, simple accounting and word processing. There are more Windows PC's out there than Macs, but there are also more cockroaches.
I've used both extensively and the MacOS and Macintosh hardware win hands down.
Just because the rest of the crowd jumps off the bridge doesn't mean you have to. Think for yourself. Oh, I forgot! You're a troll and perhaps jumping off is how you ended up under the bridge in the first place.
pubwvj said:
I work in a process control industry. There is no way we'd trust Windows machines anywhere near the process.
We have dedicated systems for that.
gekko513 said:
As someone else mentionned (who's using SCART cables), SCART hardly is worth the trouble... There's nothing superior to it (besides making the cables more expensive since SCART isn't used everywhere). Even Apple dropped their own ADC to follow the industry-standard DVI.
As for OS X, it is a superior solution, there's no replacement/alternative worth talking about.
My comment should've been "SCART is only used by 5-10% of the planet and doesn't offer a better quality."
Can SCART give you components video signals?
newwavedave said:
Yeah but that's my point exactly... What if there's no inexpensive solution at all? What if there's "only" an update to the eMac, to upgrade it to G5?
With so many rumors floating around, even the analysts and investors must be hyped-up about the basic idea that Apple will release a low-cost something...
Especially since such rumors have been around for at least 1-2 years now (but more "rumors" than "facts").
garethslee said:I work in a process control industry. There is no way we'd trust Windows machines anywhere near the process.
We have dedicated systems for that.
A nuke plant near where I live, for some inexplicable, and scary, reason, actually uses peecees as their core monitor. Rumor has it they're going to some type of Linux box something but for now it's a version of Windows and some crappy programming by geeks with their heads up Gates' arse. I know an engineer there (who bears a resemblance to Homer Simpson BTW, not the yellow part tho) and he was telling me there was about seven machines deep for redudancy in case not one, not two, but six of the machines go down to keep from going to manual. They could just as easily buy two or three max Macs and save themselves some money.
This is what I think it should be like
I think the iBox will basically be a stripped down iBook, no keyboard, no screen, 3.5 drive, no battery. This would give a $500 price point. If it must double as a HD based video recorder, there will be hardware MPEG2 compression. Or even likelier: I could imagine a closed solution, nothing like record-and-burn-a-DVD, more, like, record in some beefy QT format that is not DVD quality, but maybe TV broadcast quality, and play back on your TV in S-Video quality. And if you absolutely must, you can burn a CD or do a network/firewire backup. Wouldn't 1hr of MPEG4 video in S-Video quality fit on a CD-R?
I'll definitively get me one, and throw that Buffalo Linkstation (my fileserver, mlnet client, slimserver, iTunes streaming server, webserver) out of the window. Not that I don't like Linux, but BSD is so much better.
Upgradibility: See iBook. You may add an airport extreme card, you may add another memory brick, Bluetooth will be external, and, if you jump through some hoops, you will be able to upgrade the drive to something sensible.
Features: It's a Macintosh, it's a CD player, it's a DVD player, it'll have a remote, it'll have a Combo drive, it'll have TOSlink for digital Dolby 5.1 output. It'll work seamlessly with Airport Express, of course.
Combining a computer, a file/music server, a web browser, and a dvd player. This concept has something in it! Harman Kardon should bundle it with their Dolby Surround Recievers.
I think the iBox will basically be a stripped down iBook, no keyboard, no screen, 3.5 drive, no battery. This would give a $500 price point. If it must double as a HD based video recorder, there will be hardware MPEG2 compression. Or even likelier: I could imagine a closed solution, nothing like record-and-burn-a-DVD, more, like, record in some beefy QT format that is not DVD quality, but maybe TV broadcast quality, and play back on your TV in S-Video quality. And if you absolutely must, you can burn a CD or do a network/firewire backup. Wouldn't 1hr of MPEG4 video in S-Video quality fit on a CD-R?
I'll definitively get me one, and throw that Buffalo Linkstation (my fileserver, mlnet client, slimserver, iTunes streaming server, webserver) out of the window. Not that I don't like Linux, but BSD is so much better.
Upgradibility: See iBook. You may add an airport extreme card, you may add another memory brick, Bluetooth will be external, and, if you jump through some hoops, you will be able to upgrade the drive to something sensible.
Features: It's a Macintosh, it's a CD player, it's a DVD player, it'll have a remote, it'll have a Combo drive, it'll have TOSlink for digital Dolby 5.1 output. It'll work seamlessly with Airport Express, of course.
Combining a computer, a file/music server, a web browser, and a dvd player. This concept has something in it! Harman Kardon should bundle it with their Dolby Surround Recievers.
gekko513 said:
I get it, you are just showing that all good products don't have the dominant market-share. As for SCART, I have never had the pleasure to witness it in all its glory, so no comment.
photorun said:
First off, those machines are probably running NT (maybe 2000) which is actually a pretty good operating system, well compared to other versions of Windows. The programing of the switch/monitoring system by those "Geeks" is not "crappie." If it was, they would have switched already, or would have had significant problems. Of course there is redundancy, there is always redundancy. Did your friend ever say how many ever went down at once? I am willing to bet that they never had more than two or three down at once. They would need just as many Macs to run as redundancy, because Macs also have their share of software and hardware errors too.
The Q88 is just a cheap headless Mac. Have you ever seen OS X on a VGA monitor? It looks hideous and is almost unusable. An average television screen has worse resolution and will look worse. I would not try to do anything sort of computing on with a TV as a monitor. Maybe if the box is hooked up to the TV for media center purposes and you have a dumb terminal connected via airport for computing purposes. You can ad as many dumb terminals as you want (you just have to share the system resources). Now that would be cool because the whole family could use the same computer at once. Of course the dumb terminals could not cost more 250 USD. I know, keep dreaming.
Is this iHome thing the headless mac? or is it something different?
http://dms.tecknohost.com/macrumors/i/ihome/
*disregard, i found where this is being discussed*
allison.
http://dms.tecknohost.com/macrumors/i/ihome/
*disregard, i found where this is being discussed*
allison.
Platform said:Simply because it is the best OS in the world
OSX may be the best os in the world, but if this machine is underpower i.e. not enough RAM, the computer will feel slow. I think this is one of the most annoying thing with the current Apple computers. Take for example the iBook (possibly the most popular (volume) Apple model), it comes with 256 MB of RAM hardly sufficient to run OSX. See the application avatar bounce up and down in the dock drive me bonkers! I think Apple is trying to sell you a car without the wheel. You are force to add extra memory in the iBook otherwise it is totally unusable. Ever try to open iPhoto (god help us all)!
Don't get me wrong, I like OSX, but it seems as though you need a 1gig of RAM to run this darn thing (w/o the beachball effect). I'm running Panther at work on an CRT iMac w/ 512 MB. The beachball sh*t happens all the time, and quite frankly, I'm tire of it.
For me and I'm sure most will feel the same, the biggest problem with Apple computer now is it OSX sluggishness. I'm sorry, but it's a major turn off.
-Chomo
Chomolungma said:
Although I wear Apple-tinted glasses to the point that my pupils are actually shaped liked the logo, I hear what your saying and agree.
But I still would exchange the sluggishness of the Mac for the overall reliability, which Redmond fails on every level. Fast ... sure .... but the only time I ever want to rapidly swing a fire-axe into the desk monitor is when I'm using Windows. Never happens with OSX ... and I'm borderline psychotic ...