Analyst: iMac and MacBook Updates Coming Within Weeks?

[LagunaSol]

I agree with a lot of what you wrote and it does apply for serious gamers, you will get more for your money with a special-purposed PC. However, I think you go too far with your point. I have the high end iMac (3.06 + ATI card) from this spring and it is quite a good and fast machine. I play Doom 3 and it is plays VERY well in Win 7 RC with Boot Camp, noticeably faster than my 2 year old HP with a good gaming card.

I agree completely, and my 2.93 + ATI 4850 does gaming very well too. But after years of frustrating Mac gaming and a few years of custom-built PC gaming, I've decided to jump to a console (PS3) instead (the $299 price helped). Macs will always lag behind PCs on the consumer hardware front, particularly with GPUs. Sad but true. Apple really needs to put the "premium" into its processors (including GPU) if it wants to maintain the premium pricing scheme. It baffles me that they're always 2 steps behind the Windows world with their video processors. And Mac gaming, software wise, seems to be going nowhere fast. I thought this would change with the recent popularity of Apple, but alas it appears not to be. (What the heck ever happened to Unreal Tournament 3 for Mac? It just vanished into thin air!)

And while yes, you can build a great gaming PC at a reasonable cost, you're still faced with a couple of major problems: 1) you're gaming against guys who are spending 3x (or much more) than you on their rigs, plus doing major overclocking and tweaking (i.e. gaming is their life). Good luck fragging that guy who is running a top-of-the-line dual (or quad) SLI setup with 16 gigs of RAM and an overclocked-out-the-wazoo processor that requires liquid nitrogen for cooling. And 2) you're gaming against a bunch of lamer punks who use hacks and dirty tricks, wrecking every game they join.

Console gaming seems to minimize these two problems. Equal hardware for all and difficult to hack.

So I'm officially going PS3 for gaming and using my iMac for everything else. Bummer there's no video in on the iMac so I can connect a PS3. Guess I'll be fighting the wife for the big TV.

Now I wish I hadn't sprung for the 4850...

 

[charlituna]

Quad core seems to be a definite possibility, considering Intel's expected announcement today.

i wouldn't expect it across the board. it is something appealing to the Pro market sure. perhaps also in the highest end of the 24" imac (and maybe if they did a 28"/30") but for the rest of the desktop line I don't see it happening. on the laptops I'm thinking 17" and top 15" only not the low end 15" or the 13". at least not right away

 

[TerrorOFdeath]

Sweet

So maybe there is hope?

The first Mobile Core i7 Test is up.
Its German, but here are some benchmarks:

http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/calpella-plattform--core-i7-q820m-997/5

http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/inspection/calpella-plattform--core-i7-q820m-997

The whole Test can be found here:
http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/calpella-plattform--core-i7-q820m-997/1

It looks pretty nice. And the sweetest thing is, that 2 of the 3 new mobile CPU have an TPD of 45.

Tod

 

[Buzz Bumble]

... 99% of the market would not notice or care about the performance extremes that serious gamers want. ...

For about 90% of users, a G3 iMac is more than enough for their needs and the computer spends 99.9999% of it's life waiting for user input. The exception is the advancing of technology which means things like websites using fancy new features (usually just unnecessary twiddly toys) start to fail on older machines, but then that's mostly due to the lack of support by the software companies not making their new versions work on older hardware or dropping the software completely. The hardware and software companies simply chop their customers off after "X" number of years, and that "X" is often far too early.

 

[Maserati7200]

For about 90% of users, a G3 iMac is more than enough for their needs

Not really. PowerPC Macs cannot play flash videos on the web very well. My iMac G5 and iMac G4 are miserable when it comes to flash. The thing is 2 years ago it was fine, i guess the new flash player does not supoirt PPC very well.

So buying a PPC now would be a BAD idea.

Jai Ho

 

[twolfe81]

Serious gamers vs power users

I agree with all that posted about serious gamers, custom rigs, etc. But when I said I was a power user, I meant that I don't just do email, web browsing, and word processing. And I do a little gaming on the side as well as graphically busy work tasks. As well, I'm not afraid to experiment with things like virtual machines, boot camp, etc to get done what I want.

My quandry is to pay $3000 plus for a machine with a 4850 graphics card and a core 2 in it seems a bit too much even with the style factored in.

If I was getting integrated graphics only, then the iMac markup is not so bad. But for such simple hardware such a premium? I just can't justify it on the budget for my business no matter how much I'd like to try Apple. They may be going for the high end consumer only, but they are missing out on such a potential following with their current model that seems so anti-business and anti-consumer that isn't toting around all that spare cash.

 

[Bonsai71]

I agree with a lot of what you wrote and it does apply for serious gamers, you will get more for your money with a special-purposed PC. However, I think you go too far with your point.

For general computing, you are right, the iMac is not lacking anything, but from the point of view of a gaming enthusiast, I think there is some substance lost for the amazing style, the person I was originally replying to wanted a 'top of the line' graphics card - whose heat output, transistor count, and cost exceed the main CPU's. They are shipping with 2Gb of Video RAM these days

I have the high end iMac (3.06 + ATI card) from this spring and it is quite a good and fast machine. I play Doom 3 and it is plays VERY well in Win 7 RC with Boot Camp, noticeably faster than my 2 year old HP with a good gaming card. I am not a serious gamer......

Doom 3 is a five year old PC game, so I'm not surprised it runs okay on this years iMac, it certainly didn't run well on the first Intel iMac of the time (Early 2006, one and half years after Doom 3) how well does Crysis, Far Cry 2 and newer games fare?

I had the Mac Pro for gaming and video editing, the choice of apple supported video cards sucked. Whats worse, I got the Late 2006 Mac Pro, which had PCIe 1.1 slots, this was replaced in Early 2008 with a Mac Pro with PCIe 2.0, and I was then, in under 2 years, s**t out of luck with any newer graphics cards from Apple. The ATI 1900XT that shipped with the machine died (just after the warranty), and I had to wait for ATI to release the Mac compatible 3870 512Mb before I could even run 3D again. NONE of the NVidia GTX cards were PCIe 1.1 compatible, and some of them would not even run on the 2008 Mac Pro, and only work on the early 2009 model. Moreover, the PC drivers for the Mac Compatible 3870 would cause graphics corruption on Far Cry 2 and other games - but would work fine on a PC 3870 running in a Dell - both (Mac and Dell) under Windows XP.

My experience with the Pro shows me that even if Apple made the mythical 'real desktop' with a Core i7 and an upgradeable GPU slot, for a magical $1500, it would still suck as a gaming machine, because you can't just stick any new card in there. And I think this is the reason they don't bother, it just isn't worth supporting all those graphics card configurations.

In the end, I just really wished I'd bought a much cheaper mac for video editing and I'd bought a dedicated PC for gaming on (with the change left over from not buying the Mac Pro). So, I've sold the Pro, bought a 2009 17" MacBook Pro for video, and, come windows 7, I will buy a real gaming PC. I am not, for one minute abandoning Apple for Video, email, coding, itunes, iWork, iLife etc.etc. - I'm still a happy mac owner. And the wife's iMac is due for replacement this year too, so I hope the updates are good, along with everyone else.

I also own all the consoles. I am a serious gamer. I would love to quit PC gaming, and just be Mac + Consoles, but there are just too many unique and satisfying experiences to be had there, Half Life and the Orange Box in particular (bought over Steam), make the pain worthy of the pleasure.

 

[Bonsai71]

...graphically busy work tasks... they are missing out on such a potential following with their current model that seems so anti-business and anti-consumer that isn't toting around all that spare cash.

You've mentioned business twice now, what business is it, and what, exactly do you mean by 'graphically busy work tasks' ? And what business computer do you need that can also play high end 3D games? And what company allows you to potentially compromise business critical assets by installing games on them?

My quandry is to pay $3000 plus for a machine with a 4850 graphics card and a core 2 in it seems a bit too much even with the style factored in.

The value of OS X just in IT savings alone, is more than worth the sticker price to small companies. The latest 3D card, however, is not so useful.

 

[Buzz Bumble]

Not really. PowerPC Macs cannot play flash videos on the web very well. My iMac G5 and iMac G4 are miserable when it comes to flash. The thing is 2 years ago it was fine, i guess the new flash player does not supoirt PPC very well.

So buying a PPC now would be a BAD idea.

I didn't say people should buy one now. For most people, using the computer is mainly simple tasks like word processing, email, visit a few standard websites, etc. ... nothing highly difficult and nothing a G3 iMac running Mac OS 9 couldn't handle with power to spare.

The problem is that it's the people outside living in fantasy worlds (does an airline booking system REALLY need Flash 92.5.4 for the fancy animated images and forms which take far too long to download on dial-up anway??) who are largely pushing technology forward and "forcing" people to keep upgrading. As I said and you said, websites add fancy bits, that often aren't really necessary, which cause older web browser to fail, but the software company often simply can't be bothered upgrading the old browser, so people are "forced" into needing the new one, which needs a new computer, which then needs a new printer because the old one is no longer supported, and ... so on and so on. A nasty vicious circle that would be unnecessary for most people's actual needs.

Most people upgrading every year or two don't actually need to, they want to, which is an entirely different (and personal) choice.



Yet another sale this weekend here in New Zealand at Bond 'n' Bond stores which includes (a rather miserly) 5% discount off all Apple computers. There's definitely something coming soon, but it's unclear if it's just Snow Leopard pre-installed machines or something actually updated.

 

[Eric S.]

The problem is that it's the people outside living in fantasy worlds (does an airline booking system REALLY need Flash 92.5.4 for the fancy animated images and forms which take far too long to download on dial-up anway??) who are largely pushing technology forward and "forcing" people to keep upgrading. As I said and you said, websites add fancy bits, that often aren't really necessary, which cause older web browser to fail, but the software company often simply can't be bothered upgrading the old browser, so people are "forced" into needing the new one, which needs a new computer, which then needs a new printer because the old one is no longer supported, and ... so on and so on. A nasty vicious circle that would be unnecessary for most people's actual needs.

You could also make an argument that people didn't really need to move away from paper and pencil, or slide rules, or abaci, or papyrus and reed pens – that all of those things got the job done. But people do find reasons to change the way they do things and that's the way technology advances.

Most people upgrading every year or two don't actually need to, they want to, which is an entirely different (and personal) choice.

Yes, but you know that there's a larger force driving this, and it's called the capitalist system. Companies look to maximize profits and that means selling products and that requires a turnover of consumer goods.

 

[thatdarnfish]

Here we go...

new iMacs as early as next week: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/09/24/apple_ready_and_waiting_with_redesigned_imac_line.html