Actually it started with the iMac in 1999... and was a big kicker in sales that lead to Apple's upward trajectory (actually the original Bondi Blue iMac had already started the trend by bringing design & delight back to Apple with SJ's return).
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Apple's Bright New iMacs Come With Color-Matched Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, Power Cord and USB-C Cable
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And they want everything to be wireless which is ok by me. Wifi 6 is capable of 9,6 Gbps so it's absolutely fast enough.
999? 1299 is already a great price. That's cheaper than the LG ultrafine 5K plus you get a computer and keyboard.
Some design decisions that should be visited on the new iMac (N.B. coming from someone that worked for Apple's original product design firm)
1. Get the white bezel harkens back to the original iMac design language... but it's just out of place and "cheapens" the look of a clean design... an alternative would have been to use a bezel with a matching color shade of the unit... making it even cleaner.
2. What's up with the chin? They had a few alt choices here that would have been better. One would be to make the back thicker and put the logic board and fan behind the display (it's sitting on a desk... thin is not the first core issue... what you're looking at and typing on are)... of course that leaves a whole lot of empty volume above it... which could have been used for increasing audio quality... in the end maybe not the best solution... the other would be to put the compute unit in the base bottom... this would make cables, connections, etc much cleaner... yes getting the data/power from the base to the display would have been a challenge, but come on it's been solved by other and "they're Apple". Issue here is you lose the VESA capability.
On the chin I think they went the wrong way, however, it's not a slam dunk fail as one can see.
Actually I'd like to see the iMac display, sans iMac (and chin) as a 4(.5)k display (and maybe 27"... and space gray)... that'd be sweet with a M1 Mac Mini...
1. Get the white bezel harkens back to the original iMac design language... but it's just out of place and "cheapens" the look of a clean design... an alternative would have been to use a bezel with a matching color shade of the unit... making it even cleaner.
2. What's up with the chin? They had a few alt choices here that would have been better. One would be to make the back thicker and put the logic board and fan behind the display (it's sitting on a desk... thin is not the first core issue... what you're looking at and typing on are)... of course that leaves a whole lot of empty volume above it... which could have been used for increasing audio quality... in the end maybe not the best solution... the other would be to put the compute unit in the base bottom... this would make cables, connections, etc much cleaner... yes getting the data/power from the base to the display would have been a challenge, but come on it's been solved by other and "they're Apple". Issue here is you lose the VESA capability.
On the chin I think they went the wrong way, however, it's not a slam dunk fail as one can see.
Actually I'd like to see the iMac display, sans iMac (and chin) as a 4(.5)k display (and maybe 27"... and space gray)... that'd be sweet with a M1 Mac Mini...
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Cranky Old Man = ON
In my day, when Apple launched a new product, you had full colour brochures with multiple pictures - of the actual item, taken with a camera - to show the item off.
Later, they had a website, complete with a gallery of photos to flick through to see those same type photos.
Now?
We get a monstrous page of scroll-induced vomit, non-real images and propaganda.
Ok - the propaganda existed in my day, too.
Cranky Old Man = OFF
All I wanted was to see some "real world" photos of the new iMac, but presumably as today's event was virtual only, there's not even a bunch of journalists with hands-on pics...
Cheers
cosmic
In my day, when Apple launched a new product, you had full colour brochures with multiple pictures - of the actual item, taken with a camera - to show the item off.
Later, they had a website, complete with a gallery of photos to flick through to see those same type photos.
Now?
We get a monstrous page of scroll-induced vomit, non-real images and propaganda.
Ok - the propaganda existed in my day, too.
Cranky Old Man = OFF
All I wanted was to see some "real world" photos of the new iMac, but presumably as today's event was virtual only, there's not even a bunch of journalists with hands-on pics...
Cheers
cosmic
Looks horrible. I need a replacement for my 27” guess I will have to wait longer. This thing looks corney and the screen is too small.
Apple's weird iMac white bezels aren't without precedent:
Can't say I'm a fan though.
Can't say I'm a fan though.
You'd be surprised how many product shots are CGI and not real product photography these days. All those lovely IKEA catalogue photos... completely CGI. It's far cheaper to create a CGI product and then you can put it in any CGI environment without having to contruct expensive real world sets. A large number of cars in car comercials aren't real either.
IIRC with Apple the opposite is usually true: a lot of their promotional pictures look like CGI but are actually real photos.
All iMacs except the Intel model have had white bezels. So there's actually a *lot* of precedent.
Apple are so far ahead of the game - you can choose to have 1 or 2 logos on the front - just use the stickers supplied in the packaging
All iMacs except the Intel model have had white bezels. So there's actually a *lot* of precedent.
It's also the iconic look for the all-in-one Mac going all the way back to the 1984 original to have a screen on top with body below, or the "chin" as it's now called. I'm happy they've kept it.
This. Against a light background (as in the photos - if you painted your room black you may be ok) the white bezel “recedes” coloured chin is “dominant” and, being wider than the screen, makes the whole thing look unbalanced.
Also, if you’re doing graphics/photo work you simply don’t want distracting non-neutral colours so close to the screen...
Yeah - I know - I worked for a company that did the same for 99% of the content it sold.
You can't trust anything unless its in front of your eyes.
Still miss the lampshade iMac. That was practical, beautiful, and all in 2002.
...as if someone held a gun to the heads of the designers and forced them to make a desktop computer that was too thin to accommodate industry standard sockets.
If you are going down that route why not power the whole thing (which is, surely, under 100W) from a Thunderbolt/USB-C port? MagSafe was great on laptops which were continually plugged and unplugged, often with the cable trailing across the floor, but that’s just not an issue with a desktop.
It could ship with a basic USB-C power supply (for the customers who basically don’t use ports) and there are already docks on the market that could provide power and various permutations of Ethernet, USB-A, C and (with M1/USB4) even extra TB3 ports. A colour matched dock that sat neatly under the stand would be a cherry on the top...
Yeah, personally I have little time for USB-C and would prefer a full complement of the dedicated ports I actually need built in to a desktop (including mains power)... but introducing a new, totally proprietary port dedicated to Ethernet and power seems to be the worst of both worlds that goes against the whole “one universal port” idea...
Of course, what it does do is let Apple create an artificial price distinction between the base model and the premium version...
The contrived logical contortions continue...
What ”special cable”? It would just be a slightly longer lightning cable with proper strain relief that is the sort of thing that they should be shipping with the iPhone anyway (plenty of people complain about frayed iPhone cables). Perfectly good for charging your iPhone (although I assume you’re happy getting up in the middle of the night to switch your single charging cable from your mouse to your iPhone...)
It’s not just the white bezel - it’s the white bezel plus the big slab coloured chin underneath.
All of the photos you show had a completely neutral-coloured black/white/grey front face, apart from the Bondai iMac, and that only had a couple of blue highlights, not a big, honking side-to-side slab of dominant colour.
Cute, now go back and read what I actually wrote, including key phrases like “front face” and “apart from the Bondai iMac”.
I was answering to the part were you said that it only had a couple of blue highlights. Even on the front, the strongly colored speaker grilles alone were arguably more distracting than the subtly toned aluminum in the new iMac's chin.
Anyway in my original post I was talking about precedents of iMacs with white bezels, which they are. No, there are not a lot of precedents of white bezels PLUS a colored front, specially if you purposely exclude the iMac G3, the other iMac with white bezels and a colored front.