You're totally right, and so is Clive At Five. Its not to do with demand at all. People can argue about demand til the cows come home, but apple has more access to what little data there is on that than anyone and no xMac appears forthcoming.
Does the miniscule number of mac fanatics posting on the net about how the lack of an xMac has driven them to look into hackintoshes suggest iMac sales will suffer?
Of course not. Who in their right mind would suggest that's gonna put a visible dent in the halo effect and the marketshare growth apple's seeing atm?
Does it reflect a wider dissatisfaction in the mac community with apple's product line that may be costing them sales from their loyal fanbase?
Obviously. Shikimo you attack Cave Man's numbers because they come from a site called Geekbench. Granted the 5000 posts suggests 5000 hackintoshers math is ridiculous if I'm reading it right, but surely the miniscule proportion of the mac community such ubergeeks make up suggests the unhelpful 20x number is, if anything, very conservative as he himself points out. I know tons of ppl with 5 year old ibooks waiting for their next windfall before they'll upgrade them. Both Clive and I have said that we will hang on to our imacs with all their planned obsolence until apple provides us with something better suited to our needs worth dropping £2000 on. It's naive to assume we're alone just cos most of the visitors to this site are members of the mac community who are coming here precisely because they intend to upgrade their mac soon.
Is the lack of an xMac costing Apple switchers?
No doubt. Whilst us xMaccers will undoubtedly end up buying another mac begrudgingly once we've given up waiting for what we want, this is the number one attack levelled at macs by friends of mine who are otherwise open to the idea of switching. Whilst the hackintosh crowd may be small, the percentage of computer buyers who use a midrange desktop as their primary computer and don't want an all-in-one is probably well in excess of 50%. So if the current trend is to continue, you'd expect apple would have to bring out an xMac at some point, or else their marketshare will probably peak at around 10-15%.
But my guess is, they'll resist for as long as possible, for the reasons Clive and saltyzoo have already stated. It's partly greed for higher profit margins, but also because apple is too conservative to gamble with their high margin product lines that are working better for them now than they ever did when they had too many computers. On the one hand, apple isn't as focused on computers as it used to be, and on the other hand a headless imac with a small footprint would be taking apple's fight for the living room in entirely the wrong direction as they see it. If you could upscale dvds to 1080p on the fly, plug in an eyetv usb dongle to make it a pvr and have a $1500 htpc that ran osx with an external bluray drive next to it, you probably wouldn't rent many movies off itunes...
But the demand is there. Between the gamers, the semi-pros, the potential switchers deterred by a myriad of objections to the imac line-up, the demand for the xMac is probably greater than that for any other mac product line, even the macbook. It's just that catering for it doesn't fit in with apple's agenda at the moment.
