Intel iMac Sales Sluggish?

[aegisdesign]

What features is the iMac lacking other then FireWire 800 and a method of heating your house?

The iMac has never had FW800.

 

[hayesk]

"Just check the little check box" was obviously an overstatement of the porting ease. Even Apple aren't ready yet with their major apps, and they knew about the change before anyone -- and some of it was up and running on Intel before they bought it!

It depends. If you have a relatively single purpose app and don't have compatibility back to 10.2 and 10.1.5, then it could be. If your app uses dozens of plugins, frameworks, etc., G4 and G5 optimizations, and has to be backward compatible back several OS versions, then there is more work involved. Adobe and Microsoft are in this camp.

Notice many smaller vendors have Intel compatibility. For them, it may have been as easy as checking a checkbox.

 

[gunm]

And now this news from AppleInsider. Ouch to ThinkSecret...

 

[zv470]

...Meanwhile, major vendors such as Adobe and Microsoft have been silent about the timeframe that their applications will be transitioned to the new architecture. The work required to transition Carbon applications such as Photoshop and Office is reportedly substantial.

Good... it's about time they rewrote Photoshop and Office.

 

[Doctor Q]

And now this news from AppleInsider. Ouch to ThinkSecret...

And AppleInsider threw in a barb too: "Contrary to recent and unsubstantiated rumors..."

 

[hayesk]

You can't tell me Adobe, Microsoft and any other developer that matters didn't either:
A. Have inside info from Apple about it (we know MS did since they were on stage at the keynote)
B. Read the same rumor sites that the "mac geeks" read and know it was a strong possibility.

You mean the rumors that said the first Intel Macs would be a mac mini media centre and an iBook? Well, if I were Adobe, I wouldn't put the rush on for that.

Besides, it's not like adding twice the people to a project makes it take half the time. Think about what you are expecting here.

 

[hyperpasta]

I've come to trust AppleInsider much more than ThinkSecret... although in this case, AI is just regurgitating an analyst report.

 

[Peace]

I would not believe anything thinksecret says anymore.Their mole was found and now their ticked off and will be starting an anti-Apple campaign..
As are other "sites".

 

[traviswalters]

I don't know, I bought one.

I bought a 20 inch Duo with 2 gigs of ram and a graphics update. I love the machine it flys.

 

[plinden]

Does anyone remember an article (probably on AI) that said iPod nano sails weren't as high as expected a month after it's release.

14 Million iPods later (I know...video iPods included), we all found out that the worries about slow sales were a bit premature. I'm not worried at all about how fast they're selling. I don't think that massive hoards of people are "holding off" because of slow performance or pro apps not there yet. If I had 1500 to drop right now, I'd get one...period.

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1270

 

[nagromme]

I would not believe anything thinksecret says anymore.Their mole was found and now their ticked off and will be starting an anti-Apple campaign..
As are other "sites".

I agree that they're probably being fed misinformation, and AppleI's record has been far better recently.

But I wouldn't write TS off totally. Every site has its up and down periods. I'll certainly be keeping a close eye on TS still. Then again, I take ALL rumors as just that, not anything to bet on.

 

[boombashi]

I would not believe anything thinksecret says anymore.Their mole was found and now their ticked off and will be starting an anti-Apple campaign..
As are other "sites".

Quick all the ThinkSecret fans = SELL! SELL! SELL! the Apple ship is sinking

quietly = everyone else, buy buy buy

It's funny ThinkSecret seems to be getting a boat load of bogus info and all the various Analysts seem to follow that site since they have been in the news so much, and it has been affecting the stock prices. Word to the unwise - don't buy and sell to rumors, unless they are truly substantiated.

 

[Fukui]

Another thing I don't quite understand: Why is Carbon so much harder to translate than Cocoa? I though the Carbon APIs were available for Intel just like they are on the PPC. Isn't the real problem the endianess, which applies to both Carbon and Cocoa?

I'm guessing it more applies to old crusty carbon apps, that use older endian-dependant api. If one used the modern carbon, it would be less of an issue IIRC. If using the cocoa api exclusively, you'll probably not run into the issue, but yea its probably endian.

In the old days, I'm guessing devs always counted the mac would be big-endian, so they always assumed to "swap" into big endian for opening files etc, so once the apps are running on intel, then all the swapping does "the wrong thing" and bugs come up.

That and they may have a lot of ppc assembly,
And Xcode may be tripping them up too.

 

[Doctor Q]

Some of these analysts remind me of "expert witnesses" in a trial. They are represented as people who know more than the rest of us, but then two of them contradict each other in their conclusions because they are looking at a different collection of facts, make different or even biased assumptions, or are just voicing opinions based on guesswork.

 

[Ghibli]

the core duo iMacs/MBPs are at/near the top of Amazon's "top sellers" lists and have been since they were announced

In this very moment, the top 5 (computer sales) is:

1. Apple iBook Notebook 12.1"
2. Apple iMac Desktop with 17" Display - 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
3. Apple iMac Desktop with 20" Display - 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo
4. Apple MacBook Pro 15.4" Notebook - 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
5. Apple MacBook Pro Notebook 15.4" - 1.67 GHz Intel Core Duo

and we have other 4 macs in the places from 7 to 10 (ibook 14", 2 powerbooks and a 20" G5 iMac). The first PC is a sony vaio at position 11 (ahem... a 17" iMAc G5 in position 12... Cough Cough....).

I think Think Secret is a bit off-track in these days....

 

[danielwsmithee]

Umm yah then Microsoft kills all support for Apple. Including any video support. Office gone. End result being that there would be a large number of users who would say F-Apple. At this point might I suggest the following:

The only thing that microsoft hasn't killed allready is office! Video is already gone. VPC will take so long to move to the new macs that competitors will have allready stolen their market. If it were not for 1) Excel and 2) Outlook there would be no need for office on the MAC.

 

[budugu]

My point is that Adobe and Microsoft aren't small companies. We aren't talking a development house of 5 people. If Adobe\Microsoft wanted to they could have at least beta versions of UB's out right now. Yes I'm aware that as a Carbon app a transition wouldn't be easy by any stretch of the imagination. But again with the resources available at such large companies it should be doable.

Do you know amdal's law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

 

[~Shard~]

I wouldn't find it overly suprirsing if the Intel iMac sales were indeed a bit sluggish. Forgive me if this has been mentioned already, but many apps, Pro or otherwise, simply do not work with Intel yet, and will not for several more months. So, I could see many people saying, "Why should I buy a Rev A Intel iMac now, which won't run some of my apps, when, by the time it will run some of my apps a few months down the line, a revised iMac will no doubt be out!"

I feel sorry for FCP users and the like who are in the market for a new Mac. They know the Intel Macs will not run FCP yet, so they can't buy a new Intel system, but if they need a new machine, they are essentially forced then to buy a PPC machine which they know is going to be replaced later in the year! I know I personally wouldn't feel too comfortable making an investment in a Quad PPC G5 right now knowing a Conroe or Woodcrest-based PowerMac will be out by year end which will run FCP and the like just fine, natively, on Intel, while PPC slowly goes by the wayside... I know PPC Macs will still be able to run these apps into the future, but still...

 

[i think G4 imac]

This is the major pitfall of Apple's complete nondisclosure policy of leaving both consumer and developer in the dark about upcoming products. You leave Joe Imac buyer in the dark and he buys an imac for christmas, then is completely pissed that his new toy is obsolete within days.

But much more importantly, you leave software developers in the dark as well in order to keep this veil of secrecy and keep current stock moving. The result is that absolutely no native apps are availible at the Intel Imac launch. Rosetta emulation of Adobe apps is pitiful, and no Apple pro apps are emulated at all.

The secrecy really bit apple in the butt this time.

You are wrong. The "Joe iMac buyer" does not care that his iMac has a G5 or intel. He wants a Mac, because they work great, have a cool GUI, and go well with the iPod (amongst other reasons). Apple wants to sell this "Joe" a G5 - to keep him a generation behind. At the next intel update, his resolve to upgrade will be that much stronger. The is the case because the intel mac's were released so soon after the big buying season.

 

[Krevnik]

NSThreads are just a wrapper arround POSIX threads (proabably a wrapper arround some (kernel) thing else in C). THey are clunky and no one uses them as you cannot have decent control on the thread execution. And hence by definition not native. Now you can impliment OpenMP libs, all the flavours of MPIs by writing wrapers arround the actual code, that does not make them native by any streach of imagination. Other examples Java etc have their 'own' threading functionality and there are C/C++/Fortran NATIVE implimentations of parallel/concurrent programming.

Mind clarifying what is and isn't native then? Seemingly your definition of native means I am working directly with the mach thread layer itself, as you hint that any abstraction away from that results in a 'non-native' thread. Or is it because you believe these threads aren't running on an actual OS-controlled thread, and instead managed by the process itself? If that is the case, you are severely mistaken:

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2028.html#MacOSXThreading

Apple's implementation actually builds both Cocoa and Carbon's thread mechanisms on top of pthread, which is on top of the mach thread. Everything eventually runs on a mach thread, the difference is the abstraction to the end-developer.

Ironically, if you want to minimize abstraction, you are better off using pthreads on OS X, or writing your own threading API on top of Mach. Of course, to write a threading system directly on top of Mach, you will have to do it in kernel space, as the lowest-level userland abstraction available is pthreads.

In the case of Java... yeah, its threads (unless you are using an NSThread in Java) are handled by the VM, but on OS X, everything is just an abstraction over mach.

And as for 'nobody uses them', well, that depends on the developer. Some are more comfortable just using pthreads directly in their Obj-C code when coming over from Linux/Unix, or they might be using some sort of OpenMP(I)-like library which usually sits on pthreads because they need the scalability work rather than needing a basic thread. For simpler projects though where you just need to exchange data, sleep, block, etc, NSThread and the synchronization objects also available are your tool for doing the job quickly.

(Edit: I would also like to just say... calling something bad, etc without stating a good reason why doesn't make it true for all developers, it just states an opinion)

 

[freeny]

What amazed me the most about this "rumor" is that alot of people jumped onto it and started bloating out the reasons for this "Intel iMac Sales Sluggish?" story.

Just drop over to the site and read the posts. Reasons like "The new iMac seems too geeky with the nice iLife suite" and "As a person whom makes his living on apple I can't tell you how poorly this transition was executed" and "The reason is because they are NOT good looking machines in my opinion".

I guess it shows you how easily people are swayed and how little the know it alls know. Someone is wrong but who?

 

[bigandy]

IAs far as Rosetta is concerned, it'll only run for HandBrake, Adium X, OneButton FTP and TextWrangler (if they're not already universal binaries). Even if they're not, aside from HandBrake (which doesn't run real-time anyway), I won't see much of a difference.

handbrake is available as a universal, and adium will be next build...

 

[gnasher729]

* Apple DID give developers a LOT of warning--LONG before last year: they told developers to get their apps onto Xcode. They made clear that Xcode--and preferably Cocoa--was the future. Apple wasn't kidding. Xcode is the key to Universal Binaries, and developers that listened to Apple's early warnings were in far better shape to get their apps Intel-native.

No matter whether Apple told developers to move from CodeWarrior to XCode or not: CodeWarrior is dead. Ron has left the building.

Adobe is going to run into serious trouble with Photoshop quite soon, because there is no development system for sale anywhere that lets you build Photoshop plugins anymore.

 

[Yvan256]

I bought a 20 inch Duo with 2 gigs of ram and a graphics update. I love the machine it flys.

Graphics update?

 

[Edge100]

I have a wad of cash and was wanting to purchase the new Macbook and Intel iMac. However I'm not feeling warm & fuzzy about dropping that kind of cash for technology that won't run my pro apps. And I don't feel warm & fuzzy about dropping cash on technology Apple claims is 2-4X slower. Makes it easy for me and other consumers to take a wait & see approach.

This is my EXACT feeling, so I'm the same boat. I wont buy a G5 iMac, because its "2x slower", but I can't buy an Intel iMac, because I can't get Logic, Ableton Live, Reason, and a ton of Audiounits plug-ins to run on it.

Now I'm really forced to wait until the apps start appearing, because I want to get the fastest machine I can at the time of purchase.

I can't really blame Apple. I know they needed to make this change, and I knew it would be difficult. But I didnt know it would affect me so much!