Has apple ever talked about a mid level non-imac?

[Santabean2000]

Apple may be moved from being 'just' a computer company, but they are selling more computers now (last quarter) than they have every sold before. It is still a huge part of their business.

I'd go further and say that computers are still an essential part of their business. One of the (many) reasons that so many people buy iDevices is that they work so well with their Macs. Take those Macs away, and that reason to buy an iDevice goes away. Not for everyone, perhaps. but for a sizeable portion. By the same token, Apple is using the adoption of iPhones and iPads by some enterprise customers to leverage Macs into those formerly Mac-less markets. Which will, incidentally, sell more iDevices.

It's complete package that Apple offers. So they need all the parts to be there.

This

 

[kingtj]

re: G4 Cube?

Realistically, no.... I don't consider the PowerMac G4 Cube to have been equivalent at ALL to what people are asking for here.

If anything, the Cube was more equivalent to the Mac Mini.

Although the Cube did have an actual removable video card in it, the size constraints made it impossible to use most of the better video boards that came out. (The cards were simply too long to fit in the Cube's case!)

The Cube saw poor sales mainly because it was still a high-priced machine, and most people couldn't justify the cost. When Apple did the Mac Mini, they addressed that issue, selling the Mini as the inexpensive, entry-level Mac, so sales soared by comparison.

The idea of Apple offering some sort of mini-tower Mac with separate display basically assumes the user wants something priced about $300-500 lower than a similarly configured iMac (since there's no display included), and it would accept standard desktop SATA hard drives in easy-to-access drive bays inside the case. It would have an upgradable video card just like a Mac Pro (but realistically, probably no other expansion card slots - to help keep it differentiated from the Mac Pro towers), and likely would take the same type of memory upgrades as the current Mac Mini.

And as popular a machine as that would probably be? I also see immediate reasons why Apple wouldn't have much interest.... (For one thing, the idea of it being basically a 20" iMac minus the display would mean it'd have to be priced at around $999. That price point puts it on a collision course with the Mac Mini, while causing some erosion of sales from people who would otherwise spend a lot more for a Mac Pro to get the swappable video cards and multiple internal hard drives.)

It was called the Powermac G4 Cube, and was sold for about a year in 2000 before being discontinued due to poor sales.

My guess is that Apple just doesn't want to bother with it again.

 

[xheathen]

Ok so now I'm actually looking at building a real hackintosh and seeing if it's realistic. From I can tell, the components of the core i3 may be the best to go with are well priced and somewhat easy to obtain.

What I'm really wondering (and my research has yet to uncover) is what does one lose by custom building a mac? I mean, if I use the same components they do, and load Snow Leopard on one using iBoot and Multibeast, am I literally going to get a 1 to 1 representation? Or am I going to have issues with a myriad of things? Like for instance can one use the Apple wireless keyboard?

If I'll lose functionality, I'm not sure it's worth it to bother.

 

[007bond]

They had one, the G4 Cube. It was a commercial failure, and they never did such a product again.(The Mini is it's spiritual successor, but it is not as powerful as the iMac)

 

[snberk103]

Ok so now I'm actually looking at building a real hackintosh and seeing if it's realistic. From I can tell, the components of the core i3 may be the best to go with are well priced and somewhat easy to obtain.

What I'm really wondering (and my research has yet to uncover) is what does one lose by custom building a mac? I mean, if I use the same components they do, and load Snow Leopard on one using iBoot and Multibeast, am I literally going to get a 1 to 1 representation? Or am I going to have issues with a myriad of things? Like for instance can one use the Apple wireless keyboard?

If I'll lose functionality, I'm not sure it's worth it to bother.

For sure you are going to have a diminished warranty. Yes, each part may be covered by their manufacturer - sometimes for longer than an Apple warranty .... but if there is problem you will need to determine who to call, and then prove to them that is was their part that failed and not something else. Or the OS. You will have no official support on the OS of course.

It is, in theory, possible to build something that is 100% like a Mac. In practice I believe that there is always something that doesn't quite work right. I base this on reading many posts on these boards from people who say they have built hackintoshes that work "just like a real Mac - - except...." There usually seems to be something that doesn't quite work. Quite often it is something that the user can live with. Other times, not.

You gotta know.... Apple goes to a great deal of trouble to tune the OS for the small range of hardware that it is expecting to work with. And for the combinations that Apple uses. If a brand/type of widget is not used by Apple in any of it's computers, or not used with another bits-n-bob you have decided to use, then the OS will have issues.

While people have had, they say, good experiences with OS X updates, others have not. At anytime Apple may decide to change a bit of the OS that will make it incompatible with your HW choices, or just the combination that you have chosen to use.

Make sure you have good backups. Make sure you can revert to a previous level. Don't rely on the machine for production if you are on tight deadlines, or least don't update anything just before a deadline. (To be fair, I never update my stock Mac if I'm working on deadline either... that is just asking for trouble, regardless. )

We know that the motherboards at least are custom. You can't just go into a store and buy one.

All of that said, I am sure that there are people who are having a wonderful experience running OS X on generic HW. If you enjoy fiddling with the guts of a computer, then please buy a retail copy of OS X and fiddle away and have fun. If you enjoy fiddling then you will have an experience over and above what the average Mac user has. If you want to just turn it on and use it then a hackintosh may not be for you.

 

[Cougarcat]

They had one, the G4 Cube. It was a commercial failure, and they never did such a product again.(The Mini is it's spiritual successor, but it is not as powerful as the iMac)

The Cube was not a mini tower.

The reason it was a flop was because you could actually buy a consumer tower (PowerMac G4) for 1599, complete with PCI slots. The Cube, with much more limited expansion options, started at the same price.

Apple has actually sold consumer towers most of its life, with the Performa, PowerMac, and PM G3-G5. It's really only recently with the Mac Pro that Apple has relegated expansion options for machines costing well over $2000.

 

[MacHamster68]

a mid level between the mini and the Macpro would not really compete with pc makers, it would compete with the mini and the Macpro ,thats why apple is ignoring the idea they make more profit selling the people minis who would need a bit more flexibility in adding harddrive or pci cards ..., and selling Macpros to people who would in reality need less processing power ,but just need that flexibility of pci cards
thats also one reason why people now look more and more towards the PowerMac G5's as the top spec ones can be bought for less then the mini and can take more harddrives and are more flexible as you can add more ports or even 2 graphics cards or just any other pci card and are still very capable Mac's