Idea! iMac with a battery!

[burnout8488]

An iMac is basically a glorified laptop with a bigger screen.

If it had a battery, I think it would be able to achieve a lot more than 45 minutes of battery life.

Consider the 17" MacBook Pro, that is rated for at least 5 hours of usage. A 24" "MacBook Pro" aka iMac would certainly be able to do at least a couple of hours on the same battery the 17" uses.... assuming it is using an SSD, and using similar low wattage processors.

Apple has probably considered this in the past, no doubt. It's not ready for the market quite yet, but maybe in a handful of years it will become feasible. Useful? Maybe.

 

[Bear]

An iMac is basically a glorified laptop with a bigger screen.

If it had a battery, I think it would be able to achieve a lot more than 45 minutes of battery life.
...

For starters, the processor in the iMac uses more power. The screen would also use more power being larger. Also, how big do you want the iMac to be and to weigh how much? Oh and how much would this add to the price of an iMac.

It's still a stupid idea.

An external UPS is just fine for an iMac and you can get even get a 2 hour runtime from a UPS if you get one with enough batteries.

 

[aPple nErd]

Won't work..... iMacs require a huge amount of power to run it. even if they have a battery in there for 45min of usage, it would take up tremendous amount of space and the hardware inside would be reduced or eliminated to some extent. the part about power outage: as stated before,



maybe the do take up a lot of power but they meet the energy star gold requirements. at least iMac 21.5 inch does.

 

[iSayuSay]

OMG .. iMac has already cramped as it is, adding big a$$ built in battery on it means inferior hardware. You might wanna see iMac with ULV CPU and iGP which takes place as much as logic board of an MBA and then the rest is filled with battery. Would you like that? I don't,

And for blackout, I use something like this to prevent damage on my desktop, iMac or not:

It's called United Parcel Service ..

 

[Ddyracer]

i'd rather have a true graphics card then a dumb battery that makes no sense.

 

[Thrilhouse]

I don't usually commend trolls, but this is a good one. (The OP can't honestly be serious)

To get that kind of battery life, the iMac would weigh well over 100 pounds.

 

[michaelg53]

Ahead of your time

I think this is a very innovative idea, although it may be ahead of its time. If batteries continue to get smaller and more powerful, someday the benefits will outweigh the downside and this may become a standard feature. As I read the replies, I couldn't help but wonder if the first person to suggest a portable phone got the same reaction.

 

[burnout8488]

For starters, the processor in the iMac uses more power. The screen would also use more power being larger.

and using similar low wattage processors

Just saying, if the internals are nearly identical to those of a MacBook, the screen is the only factor that may decrease battery life over it's laptop counterpart.

Solely using a bigger screen wouldn't take a 17" MBP from 5 hours, to 45 minutes of battery life, so why would an iMac need some massive battery that makes it weigh 100 pounds? A couple 17" MBP batteries would probably suffice, and provide at least a couple of hours of usage.

I'm not saying a battery powered iMac makes sense at all, or that the market is ready for it, but it certainly wouldn't be as bad as some of you are speculating if it came to market tomorrow.

 

[Bear]

Just saying, if the internals are nearly identical to those of a MacBook, the screen is the only factor that may decrease battery life over it's laptop counterpart.

The internals are not nearly identical. There are more external ports, the hard drive is physically different. You can have an SSD, a hard drive and an optical drive in an iMac. And as I stated, the iMac uses a processor which draws more power.

Solely using a bigger screen wouldn't take a 17" MBP from 5 hours, to 45 minutes of battery life, so why would an iMac need some massive battery that makes it weigh 100 pounds? A couple 17" MBP batteries would probably suffice, and provide at least a couple of hours of usage.

As I just pointed out, it's not just a larger screen. Unfortunately I couldn't find exact numbers for the power draw for MacBooks, so we'll have to use the draw rating for the power brick. A 17" MBP has an 85 watt power supply. A 27" iMac is rated to draw up to 310 watts of electricity. And you would have to also account for the lack of the low power mode in iMacs. So yeah, only 45 minutes is a strong possibility, after all not everyone gets 5 hours from the battery in the MBP.

I'm not saying a battery powered iMac makes sense at all, or that the market is ready for it, but it certainly wouldn't be as bad as some of you are speculating if it came to market tomorrow.

Actually it would be pretty bad. It would be bigger to make room for the battery and would cost more. And then it's something else that could go wrong with the iMac. And you would still need a UPS to cover the external Time Machine drive, possible USB hub, etc. In my case, I do have my DSL modem on the UPS as well. In short with an external UPS most likely needed anyway, the internal battery is redundant.

 

[lotones]

Just add a carrying case and you don't need an iPad

nah, you'd need an iMac Smart Cover. Wouldn't want to hide that Apple logo on the back.

 

[Demosthenes X]

It would work with a small nuclear reactor inside the iMac.

Think Different!

I hear Apple has been working on miniaturized Arc Reactors for their entire line...

 

[bungiefan89]

lol ok, ok. Very good points everyone!

I can see now that the idea of having a battery inside an iMac is far too impractical and costly to outweigh any real usefulness the device would achieve.

In fact, I kind of realized the idea was dead when one of the first few people to reply here mentioned the size and weight a battery would have to be in order to power an iMac even if just for 45 minutes.

I wasn't trolling here. I guess I was just trying to... think different. But thanks for shooting down what was clearly a bad idea. This has been a delightful thread to read through!

 

[ri0ku]

wow this was not a joke ? Seriously ?


We have what you are talking about... their called LAPTOPS. Why would anyone in there right mind carry a HUGE HEAVY iMac to show someone something ?

Maybe you have been carrying your iMac around too much and a blood vessel has popped in your brain ? seriously lol I know I sound rude I don't mean to be but that idea is totally insane....

 

[bungiefan89]

wow this was not a joke ? Seriously ?


We have what you are talking about... their called LAPTOPS. Why would anyone in there right mind carry a HUGE HEAVY iMac to show someone something ?

Maybe you have been carrying your iMac around too much and a blood vessel has popped in your brain ? seriously lol I know I sound rude I don't mean to be but that idea is totally insane....

Well, as you can tell from my signature, I have both a 2011 27" iMac and a late 2009 Macbook. The Macbook is still perfectly functional, but the iMac is where all my horsepower for playing games and sorting photos is... not to mention I'm addicted to the screen size.

And I quite regularly unplug my iMac to move it to another room to play there, so I can...
- More directly interact with my roommates when we play League of Legends together
- Eat a meal while using my iMac as entertainment at a table not quite as cluttered as the one in my dorm room
- use my iMac out in the kitchen at my family's home, because my bed room there gets pretty chilly and the kitchen is where the heater is

I often find myself in situations where my iMac is on, and I'd like to move it, but that requires the inconvenience of shutting the machine down and re-plugging it in and turning it back on when I set it up at a new location. It's much faster with a laptop.

I take my iMac almost everywhere! My mother even made a custom cover for it so the glass front is protected when it's moved around. Yeah, I admit my use of the computer is a little unorthodox in this manner, but I love this machine to death!

 

[eagandale4114]

I had a GREAT idea for new iMacs in the future: a built-in battery!

Imagine this: the iMac with a battery would look just like the iMac today, except instead of connecting to the outlet through the outlet through a conventional thick white cord, it connects to the outlet through a charger cord not unlike the one used by a MBP or MBA: magnetic connection and all. The battery inside the iMac is not a large or particularly powerful battery... it can only power the machine for about 45 minutes on a full charge (longer in sleep mode, you get the picture). That would cut down on the price of the battery itself (hopefully).
]
Now, what can you do with a 45 minute battery? Well, you can much more easily move the computer around. The iMac is an all-in-one design, and I find the machine is relatively easy to pick up and move around. This feature needs to be built upon!

Why call someone over to your machine when you can just pick it up and take it directly to them? I dunno about you guys, but to me, that would be a great convenience.

The battery would also come in use during a blackout. It would give you the time you needed to at least save your data or finish something up before you shut the computer down.

Maybe I'm bonkers, but I think this would be a great innovation in the computing world. It would really make iMacs stand out from other desktops. And for that matter, it would eliminate my need to shut down my computer every time I want to move it more than 5 feet away from the nearest outlet.

What do you think?

OP is this you?

 

[faroZ06]

Pointless. If you want continuity during a blackout buy a UPS.

Then it's not all-in-one, and you're converting DC power to AC back to DC during the outage. It's also unnecessarily expensive. I think a very small internal battery would be great, just enough to keep it up for 5 seconds.

 

[d0nK]

i'd rather have a true graphics card then a dumb battery that makes no sense.

Exactly. I want my desktop to have desktop components!!
OP get a laptop.

 

[Occamsrazr]

what in the heck... the OP must have been high on something?

 

[Chabba]

Aside from humping that thing around, setting it down and finding a good place to put it temporarily is a pain in the ass. If the person is on a couch or bed, they can't set it on their lap. Also, UPSs get warm. That's the last thing (a side from a built in UPS) an iMac needs, heat.

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Well, as you can tell from my signature, I have both a 2011 27" iMac and a late 2009 Macbook. The Macbook is still perfectly functional, but the iMac is where all my horsepower for playing games and sorting photos is... not to mention I'm addicted to the screen size.

And I quite regularly unplug my iMac to move it to another room to play there, so I can...
- More directly interact with my roommates when we play League of Legends together
- Eat a meal while using my iMac as entertainment at a table not quite as cluttered as the one in my dorm room
- use my iMac out in the kitchen at my family's home, because my bed room there gets pretty chilly and the kitchen is where the heater is

I often find myself in situations where my iMac is on, and I'd like to move it, but that requires the inconvenience of shutting the machine down and re-plugging it in and turning it back on when I set it up at a new location. It's much faster with a laptop.

I take my iMac almost everywhere! My mother even made a custom cover for it so the glass front is protected when it's moved around. Yeah, I admit my use of the computer is a little unorthodox in this manner, but I love this machine to death!

In that case, get a better MacBook.