Trekkie said:
I've never heard of Alex Salkever and I hope you didn't intend to insinuate that I was an idiot because I stumbled across it. I found it interesting for the idea and thought I'd share it with the rumor-loving community.
Whatever your intentions, the Salkever article is useless and misinformed,and spreading it as being useful is basically the same as telling people to go read Paul Thurott for unbiased information. It was recently brought here as a MacBytes link, but the so-called "content" of the article was incredibly easy to eviscerate and there really isn't any reason to look at it as more than a passing curiosity.
Obviously you're a very bitter person or perhaps it was very early in the morning where you lived and you didn't get your wheaties and/or coffee yet.
I'm a very
practical person, and I'm tired of seeing half the people around here throwing around terms and concepts that they don't understand. If that doesn't include you, then there's no reason to be offended.
Are you published? Why should I take your comments towards his ability to report as bible? I'm always amazed at the people that trash someone who's written an article that is published professionally, especially when they haven't. Not knowing your name other than your alias here it is hard to give any credibility to what you say, though you seem to think you speak with it with several of your comments below.
I'm not published in the IT sector, but there's no reason at all to just accept the word of someone because they have some kind of masthead over their post. I've seen people here who could make the average columnist cry like a baby for their factual errors, and it doesn't take a genius to refute Mr. Salkever. As I said before - his "points" are either so elementary that there's no way Apple would have reasonably skipped them, or they're so massively unworkable that it shows how little he knows about costs in the PowerPC architecture.
As for my credibility... Math doesn't lie, though the way it's presented can. Everything I say is easily checkable, at least as far as technical issues go.
Crappy? It is expensive for a company to have multiple displays that are unique to a device, and harder to plan for.
It's expensive for any computer company to try to plan for what consumers will buy, and that's one reason that I think the people screaming for colored iMacs don't get it. Apple had serious issues with inventory control right before Steve came back, and the debacles over the previous generations of machines made it pretty clear that offering five separate colors was a good way to end up with an awful lot of whatever the consumers decide that they don't want.
I know, I do this for my employer and let me tell you know amount of science in the world can help you guess what a consumer trend will be towards a display size, it's very difficult. If they made it a too piece product they wouldn't have to support a 15, 17, 20, 23, and 30 display form factor. They could do 20/23/30 (I still think they'd need an Al 17" here) and maybe lower the cost (not sure about price, they need to make thier margins) and change the attach rate to both the iMac and PowerMac line.
This is merely a shift in the burden of prediction, though, and it doesn't solve the baseline issue - guessing where consumers will go. Even if you separate the display, you still need to keep enough in stock to feed the demand, and it doesn't get rid of certain engineering issues. Apple has already shown that they don't like external cords and clutter on their machines, even if they do offer expansion ports so that people have the choice to do things with them. Separating the display from the iMac kills a portion of its coolness, not to mention adding a place that's going to offer a challenge to either have some kind of structural
and functional arm-connector that plugs in or to just let cords start building up again.
Also, the cost of an iMac with one of the new screens would start at $1,299 for the display and then whatever the computer costs. Of course, that's if the screen is external rather than built in, and assuming that they're using the same panels as they do in the cinema displays in order to help control that inventory problem you were first trying to lecture me about.
your point being? There are things like the MHz myth and whatnot, but the 'display ram myth' is not something that I think Apple wants to start. Showing how '32MB is enough for anyone' would be silly. Also most chipsets they might want to use in this device would want at least 64MB (ATI Radeon Mobility, or even a built in ATI/nVidia card)
I think you
massively misunderstood my point.
What I was getting at is the idea that,
although the operating system requires something like 16MB of VRAM, it would be a good idea to use a card of larger size just to offer a better machine. This is in direct opposition of what many, many PC OEMs do with their consumer grade machines in order to cut costs, where you get Intel Extreme 2 built-in and have to share your system memory with the GPU. Even 32MB of dedicated RAM and a decent 3D engine is an improvement over that, but it would be far better to have something like the Radeon 9600 Pro with at least 64MB as the bottom line card.
Why? What gives you the authority to be the destroyer? Because you obviously don't get it, let me show you where.
What gives me authority? The fact that I went out and researched these full-sized wireless displays that people are constantly crowing over and wanting as a built-in part of some magically cheap G5 machine.
I've own many PDA type 'pad' devices since the early 90s (one of the dumbasses that bought the original Newton, thank you very much). None of them have been this size. That would be huge, unweildy, and obtrusive. An iPad device could easily be the size of a Palm or WinCE device and could *easily* cost sub $500. These aren't monster devices that would change the way you do computer input.
Actually, if you'd bother to even remotely pay attention to what I've been saying all along, the only thing I'm arguing against is the idea that a full monitor replacement will be seen in the wireless space. Philips and ViewSonic both have products in this market that are roughly the size I'm talking about and which don't even begin to get close to the display of video, which many people who don't understand the technology seem to think is easy to do.
In each case, the machines are actually neutered tablet PCs, with their own processor, RAM, ROM, a wireless link, and one of them even has a low-end GPU to help in screen redraws. They cost at least $1000 for a screen that's 15 inches, and they very much are "monster devices that would change the way you do computer input." However, most of what they're good for at the moment is data entry, email, and light web browsing.
These are remote controll type devices that you could surf the web from at the most, like the article said. It didn't say 'completely replace the need to use the iMac itself' Supporting multiple accounts is one of Mac OS X's forte.
No, supporting multiple accounts is a recently added feature of OS X that may or may not prove to be as useful in the circumstances as what you're talking about. Do you know how the OS handles the accounts that aren't currently displayed? I just did a little experiment to test it out by logging in the two other accounts on this machine. With no applications running for them, just existing actively on the system, my CPU usage has jumped 20-30% on average and I'm now chewing an extra 120MB of RAM on baseline tasks for adding two more users. If you add memory-protected instances of any programs that the other users are on... Well, I think we see where this is going.
Having multiple users
all on the the same machine at once would vastly increase the overhead.
If you could do Rendezvous wireless networking with smaller handy devices for some, and then bluetooth on the new HDTV or Plasma TVs you have the headless Mac in your stack of theater/stereo gear would make sense.
Please, please, please tell me that you meant that Bluetooth would be used to control the TV, and not for some kind of networking purpose.
