solvs said:
Ah, but therein lies the rub. Now don't hurt me for saying this 😛 but Apple does need a lower end machine. The eMac is great for some things, and I doubt Apple is losing money on them, but most people would prefer a headless Mac. Doesn't have to be the latest tech, doesn't have to be low quality either. Just needs to be cheaper. And the G4 Tower is too expensive for what you get. Some of us can't afford to spend a lot on computers, you know.
I'm sorry, but the eMac is already about as low end as things are going to get for a while. I agree with you that the G4 towers are now overpriced, if you consider what's in the G5 towers, but I'm also pretty thoroughly convinced that the eMac is being undersold. The reason for that is that the chip in the eMac is actually a G4 1.33 underclocked to whatever rate they leave it at for heat reason, not to mention the cooling system and the integration that was needed to create it.
See, we'd rather not have to buy a PC. Besides, there was an article on billpalmer.net about how those $499 PCs aren't really that price (rebates, upgrades, etc.), but all I'm asking for is a new, sub-$1,000, Mac. G4, G5, replaceable video card... doesn't matter. All it's got to do is run the current apps at acceptable speeds, and not have an attached monitor.
Well, I'd
rather have a G5 dualie for free... Unfortunately, Apple and I don't see eye to eye on that one, and I don't think they're going to do it. I agree that the bargain PCs are really just traps for the computer illiterate, and I've basically said that for a while. And, on your last point, my eMac rev A does run most things pretty acceptably. I'm currently running five programs at once (iTunes, Firefox, Safari, Photoshop, and Cantrip), with my processor monitor ticking over at 20-30% when I'm not doing things with filters and my RAM showing 336 out of 512MB in use.
Take the monitor off the eMac or iMac. Update it a little, sell it for $700-$1000. It will sell like hotcakes. Just like the original iMac, and the original Mac. The computers for the rest of us.
Except it won't be like either, because it's not an all-in-one, it's not as simple, and it takes more cables. You lose a large portion of the simplicity when you take the monitor out, because that's
at least two more wires to be strung.
But try telling someone they should buy a Mac, they always say they're too expensive. And they're right. At least as of right now. True you get what you pay for, but it wouldn't hurt to have a cheaper box for switchers, etc. Cheaper doesn't have to mean lower quality, just less of the stuff some people don't need. Like a non-removable monitor.
Wait, wait... What? Macs are too expensive, but you get what you pay for? Make up your mind, man!
Actually, it
would hurt to have a cheaper box for switchers, for one reason alone. You pointed out the first thing every PC user "knows" about the mac, which is that it's supposedly too expensive. The second one is that they're "too slow," and a low-end machine won't fix that at all. In fact, it'll make it worse, because Apple can hardly afford to throw top of the line speed into a cheap box.
Oh, and cheaper does mean lower quality, since most of the expense in a G5 sytem is the parts that make it speedy. CRTs are cheap, these days, and not a whole lot more expensive for flat-CRTs like the ones in use in eMacs... You might cut $100, at most, off the price at the OEM level, for a machine that will still have DHM crying in the morning.
