eMac and iMac EOL'd?

[jsw]

I really like the all in one design,less cable clutter,more space on and in your desk. But it has to be current hardware. If Apple were to release a 2.0 G5 Imac that had a 9600 or better video system I would order it today. I kind of doubt this looking at the history of the past few years. They will make sure it dont step on powermac toes in many ways,video,cpu and memory and then we end up with a machine that is lacking. Just because it is a all in one means it starts life handicapped with no upgrades so please dont handicap it more Apple. thats what im saying. STOP HANDICAPPING IMAC!

The system of which you speak is basically a 1.6 G5 with a monitor. By the time the new announcements come (next week or two?) there may very well be a single 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac. Buy that and a monitor, and there's your perfect iMac. But it's gonna cost you.... If you're waiting for an iMac looking all-in-one with a 2.0 GHz G5, you might want to get comfortable. It's going to be a while...

 

[agentmouthwash]

The eMac has to stay the way it is - as far as looks. Kids poke at the LCD screens of the Imac and schools stopped buying them..
that's way the eMac exists.

The real question is: Will apple release a headless imac?

I would love to see the cube again, but it's just going to confuse
the clutter the Apple lineup already.

 

[Mord]

the imac has to have a piece of plastic or glass or whatever to protect the lcd.

most uk schools have lcd's they never get poked at with one exeption when a kid threw a dart at one (RM pc so i dont care)

as much as i like my cube apple wont go that way again

 

[Sun Baked]

They killed (sort of) OS 9 Bootability on the latest eMacs, so there is no reason to stay with the old SDR PowerMac chipset on that machine any longer -- unless it comes down to price, but at some point it's too expensive to keep that chipset in production (it's the only machine using it).

Even the Legacy MDD PowerMac G4 uses a newer chipset.

So there are two old PowerMac chipsets being used when one might have made a bit more sense (keeping both a SDR and DDR PowerMac chipset in production seems pointless).

---

So it's looks like it's time to finally update the old eMac, and it'll be interesting to see if the OS 9 Bootable Legacy MDD PowerMac gets cut.

 

[BillyBunter]

*rolls eyes* How much ram did you have? Why didn't you upgrade the ram?

Roll your eyes as much as you want, but Apple shouldn't sell machines which, out of the box, can barely run the OS, never mind the Apps. I have an iMac to which I recently added half a gig of Ram, and I'm very happy with it, but, nevertheless, the 256 ram it came with was sufficient for my initial purposes. The 128 ram that the emacs come with is just useless.

I don't need to be sold on Macs, but there are plenty of people out there who do. Selling them an emac which crawls along is not a good advert for Apple and then obliging them to spend more money on ram just adds insult to injury.

How are those eyes doing?

 

[fabsgwu]

G5 iMac?

Crap, I'd have to clear some room on my credit cards

 

[Cheap-Chopstix]

You kind of doubt that this will happen? Judging by Apple's history of how they update their computers, this won't happen until none of the PowerMacs have a processor rated at 2.0 GHz or slower and none of them come with the ATI Radeon 9600 or worse graphics card as standard. This probably won't come until the iMacs and PowerMacs have gone through at least 1 more, possibly 2 more revision(s).

Well couldnt they release a 1.4 gigahertz g5...juss underclock a g5 1.6. It would produce less heat and require less power. They've done it before and im sure they wouldnt hesitate to do it again. And at that speed it would not really encrouch on powermac performance.

 

[Dippo]

As nice as it would for Apple to completely move away from the G4...it's not going to happen anytime soon.

If I was Steve Jobs:

I would give the eMac a speed bump, and give the iMac a G5 and a good video card (at least Radeon 9600)

The eMac sales will always eat away at the iMac sales if they have similar speeds and components.

If the Powermacs are made to be all duals, then maybe that would make way for a headless single processor Mac Cube.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Well couldnt they release a 1.4 gigahertz g5...juss underclock a g5 1.6. It would produce less heat and require less power. They've done it before and im sure they wouldnt hesitate to do it again. And at that speed it would not really encrouch on powermac performance.

That would meet the requirements, but would it run cool enough to fit in the existing iMac design? If it doesn't, that may explain why Apple hasn't done this yet.

 

[Foxer]

Would they EOL these products for speedbumps or does this (if true) clearly indicate a whole new prodcut revision? We've had enough speedbumps in the past, you'd think we would have noticed.

 

[Flowbee]

How are those eyes doing?

 

[noel4r]

i hope this is true, coz if they release a G5 iMac sometime soon, i just might buy one.

 

[chasingapple]

Roll your eyes as much as you want, but Apple shouldn't sell machines which, out of the box, can barely run the OS, never mind the Apps. I have an iMac to which I recently added half a gig of Ram, and I'm very happy with it, but, nevertheless, the 256 ram it came with was sufficient for my initial purposes. The 128 ram that the emacs come with is just useless.

I don't need to be sold on Macs, but there are plenty of people out there who do. Selling them an emac which crawls along is not a good advert for Apple and then obliging them to spend more money on ram just adds insult to injury.

How are those eyes doing?

You could have just tossed a single 128MB stick of memory into that thing for $40 (crucial.com) and been fine. Matter of fact when I bought my 2 new macs the other week my daughter was sitting with my wife on an eMac playing the demo games they have and it was quite zippy, even though it had only 128MB of ram. I think your exaggerating just a bit

 

[edenwaith]

Speak of the devil

I was just contemplating about getting an eMac relatively soon, and so I decided to check the Buyer's Guide to see how current the eMac was. Not only do I get to this site, but see this new rumor. Glad I checked, so now if I get an eMac, I can get a higher quality machine for my money. I'm hoping for a larger hard drive for the base configuration. USB 2 would also be a welcome addition.

 

[macnews]

I want an all in one

I want an all in one, and for those who don't want one, then buy a power line model. The all in one is good for two reasons: One the education market needs something simple and easy. Both the emac and imac are great for that market - I run a small lab so I speak from experience. To keep yearly IT costs down we rotate out machines every 3-4 years. Each year buying a few newer computers. By doing so we spend about ten grand a year which is much easier to budget for compared to 40-50 grand every three of four years. Back before the imac this meant we would keep old monitors around for ever, which might have saved some money but often resulted in poor color after 6 years and was much harder to sell needing to buy 20 new monitors. I would always run into the question "well the ones we have work don't they? Does it really matter if you have some color issues? Ok, but you can only buy x (much less than what I asked for) new monitors." I don't have to worry about that headache with all in ones.

The second good thing an all in one is good for is home use. I just looks so much better not to have wires all over the place! For those who do gaming, graphics, what ever - get a powermac. The low end power mac sans a monitor is about the same price, or less, than some imacs! For those of us who surf the internet, use email, and the iapps from time to time an imac works fine. Sure, I know imovie, iphoto would/could be faster on a powermac but to be honest they run fine on my home imac.

Of course on ALL mac lines you need to upgrade the ram. Then again, I think you need to upgrade the ram on ANY computer (mac or pc) you buy. They all stick in the bare min. and say "see how price competative we are?" And yes, you even need to upgrade the top end machines 99% of the time. Work bought me a 17" powerbook and I upgraded the ram to 1G. Sure the 512 was nice but I do run photoshop, illustrator and manage the server from time to time so the extra ram will help extend the life of this machine.

If the macs go to an all G5 line up, great. I do hope they keep some all in one form factor - although the imac design is going to be tough to beat. It is the ONLY computer I happily display in my living room (good for kids to keep an eye on), not tucked back in some room with tie wraps hiding and organizing all the cables.

 

[kryten2000]

Remember the e in eMac stands for education. Schools are spending money right now for next year. An upgraded eMac would make a lot of schools happy. By the way....In a school environment the eMac rocks.

My first and only mac is a emac 700 with the geforce 2 and in a home enviroment its a great machine as well. I hope they keep the emac line in some way (low cost all in 1 mac).It handles everthing i throw at it well.Of coures its no g5 but its a great entry level mac.

 

[neon]

so i was going to purchase an emac in two weeks - should i wait?

i was going to get an emac not because its the machine i WANT but as my first mac it'll do what i'd use it for and it's affordable - adding some more ram and a larger hard drive really takes it up to my budget (£800, i qualify for educational discount)

help?

 

[0 and A ai]

I think they were prepping the imac line in terms of price for the g5 intro. i think at least the 20 inch will get a g5. 1.4 1.6 1.8 g4 g4 g5 respectively mabye? or maybe cost too much to have different mobos for the machines. If not i guess a redesigned imac g5 across the board. i think apple will have all machines with g5 bye end summer of 05 yes even the ibook and emac. powermacs might even have 980 by then or what apple might call the g6

 

[LoonyPandora]

Well, I certainly haven't received any notification that they have been EOL'd :-/ - While I think they will be updated soon, they have not been EOL'd - I work in the channel, so I would have heard about this if it were true. - last I heard stock levels were OK to meet demand (although I only get monthly updates)

 

[Postal]

If the iMac starts using the G5, it won't be until the PowerMacs have had their update - and I think that means April at the earliest.

What they really need to do is, as Fred Anderson pointed out in a recent conference call, to hit the $999 sweet spot. Even if they have to use a 15" LCD to do it, there should be a flat-panel iMac at $999. Believe it or not, I don't think that using a G5 at that price point is impossible (the G5 is supposedly cheaper to manufacture than the G4 as a general rule). The main thing Apple needs to have for this to happen is a stripped-down mainboard and system controller. Single-channel memory only, no accomodation for dual processors, a single SATA channel, and so on. With the 970FX, it should be no challenge to have a 1.6 GHz (or maybe even as high as 2 GHz) G5 in the existing enclosure.

 

[applekid]

Just update them and don't kill them off. Simple.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Buy Ram

I just bought an emac for the wife and after less than a day we decided to return it. Slower than a slow dog in Slowsville, it seemed to me to be deliberately handicapped by the lack of ram. Bring on the new models!

Buy more ram. You can get a 2 512 Mb yourself for under $150. If Apple included it, the cost of the eMac would have been too expensive. I found the eMac to be very fast with 1 GB of ram. Except for my G5, I always installed the maximum ram. My 4 year old iMac has d 1 GB, it was a 450 ghz G3 but it had more memory than any Mac sold day in it's standard configuration. My iBook has 640 Mb of ram and it also screams even though it is a G3 at 600mhz. Windows laptop users are actually impressed with the performance of this iBook and can't believe it's only 600 mhz.

I only wish I could afford 8 GB for my G5 but it would cost as much as the 23 inch monitor that I am saving up for.

 

[jade]

Buy more ram.

Sure that is the logical response, but typically if you buy a similar price range PC you will get 256 or 512 RAM, not a ton but enough to feel comfortable opening your web browser and send email. So it will feel speedier. If I buy a new computer, the last thing I want to thing about is having to open it up and put more RAM in for me to feel ok turinging the thing on. It should feel fast enough fot minimal tasks. Not to come from the perspective of a new computer buyer, who had been looking at Dells of HPs or emachines, getting this new computer home and having it feel half as fast as the cheaper celeron computers. Well you would probably trade it in for the cheaper computer: os and ilife becoming irrelevant. And that, to me is a huge problem.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Solution for the Ram problem

Sure that is the logical response, but typically if you buy a similar price range PC you will get 256 or 512 RAM,

Apple should provide a healthy dose of Ram as a standard option. But still provide the option for people like me so that I can buy a eMac with ZERO ram. This would cut the price of the eMac to probably $600 bucks. Then I can install a Sh*t load of ram for a fraction of the price that Apple would charge me. Everyone would be happy.

 

[aswitcher]

Apple should provide a healthy dose of Ram as a standard option. But still provide the option for people like me so that I can buy a eMac with ZERO ram. This would cut the price of the eMac to probably $600 bucks. Then I can install a Sh*t load of ram for a fraction of the price that Apple would charge me. Everyone would be happy.

Then again if they just dropped 128 sticks all together I wonder if they could reduce the price of the 256 and 512s because they would be buying more of them... Personally I would like them to just focus in on 512s...a G5 would therefore have 2 for a minimum of a gig. Buying a majority of 512s should bring the price down. They could still sell 256s but the price difference would be far better for the 512s... This will eventually happen I suggest, I just wish Apple would do it now to bring prices down and base performance up.