As I am contemplating moving to the 21 century next year and replacing my 10 yr. old iMac with a newer generation, will probably wait for a new model and then buy this generation off Apple refurb store and thought this thread will let me know what is lacking in the current model and find some of your thoughts are a little far out. But that just MHO.
I bought my first new Mac in 1995 a Performa 6220CD, it had a PowerPC 603 processor and the speed was 75 MHz, came with 16MB ram that you could upgrade to 64MB, which by the way was what Bill Gates once said was all the ram any home computer would ever need.
Now as for restyling I can't see why or for that matter why would anyone want it any thinner, check out any high end audio or video equipment and you will see they are always much thicker than any consumer units so they can keep cool. I think the old pizza box cases of the 80's that you could take apart by removing 6 or 8 screws where great, just pop of the top and change boards, memory or HD without too much trouble, but I keep my machine in a basement office and no one sees it so who cares what it looks like.
As for a keyboard with a numeral pad on it if you buy new you can order one no charge and it you have one now without you can buy an aftermarket one for around $30. But I agree, why don't they just supply one with the number pad, that is the one thing that stops me from getting any notebook, the lack of a keyboard with a number pad.
As far and Blu Ray goes I don't see why anyone would want to watch a Blu Ray movie on a 20 or 24 inch display. I have a $600 Blu Ray player and a $3500 large screen TV for that.
Now as far as a larger display, the iMac is for home use and is competing with lower priced PC market all the larger screen would do is raise the price.
Now as far as price goes I paid $2500 for my 6220 and had to buy a monitor
for it, my 2000 iMac cost me a $1000 and I had to put in more memory right away. So if you figure those $ in 2009 $ the current price is not that bad, it's just that PC price have dropped a lot faster than Apples.
I was just thinking if any of the staff a Macworld remember that Bill Gates told Steve and his partner that they had a great OS and should market it and franchise it out to other companies and they told him that they sold hardware and were not in the business of selling software. We all know where it went from there, talk about shooting yourself it the foot.
emac G4 1.42 ,1gb ram, 64 mb vram 