mhouse said:
Here is where I get into an argument with people but I assure you that I know of which I speak: consumers have PLENTY of power ALREADY in their home PCs. Processor speed no longer drives the majority of PC sales and even a tinier fraction of Mac sales.
This, at least, we agree on. Most people have far more computing power than they can really use effectively at this point, and anything beyond what we've reached will largely be to counteract the creep of bloat. With Microsoft, the specifications needed for Longhorn are ridiculous, but it's even a little bit bad on OS X at this point. I fully expect Tiger to leave older systems in the dust, but that's progress for you.
I compute daily on a 700mhz G4 and a 600mhz G3, and neither really has any problems with doing what I need them to do.
A G5 iMac at 1299-2199 is not going to sell any better than the current (absolutely beautiful) G4 iMac. Apple has two choices if they want the iMac to sell in the kind of numbers that the original G3 model did:
Actually, I'm willing to bet that a G5 iMac with nothing but the simplest changes in architecture would sell pretty well. Put a single G5, an SATA HD, and a couple of other revisions in and it would still be a very nice machine. It's going to need some redesign of the form factor, but that's nothing too terribly new, especially when one considers the overall heat budgets of the two architectures, not to mention their power requirements.
1. Lower the price drastically
This scenario is unlikely for several reasons. The most important one being the cannibalization of eMac sales. Also, from a product placement standpoint, the iMac prices have to stay about the same. There is no other place for them in the Apple line up. Go too high-end and you harm power mac sales, go any lower...you get the idea. Finally, this is Apple we're talking about. They've never gone dirt cheap and its unrealistic to think they'll start now.
You left out the most important and likely reason of all: the PowerPC tax. I showed a while back that PowerPCs are just more expensive than comparable systems in general, even when using commodity parts wherever possible. This has to do primarily with chips and motherboards, but those are typically the most expensive parts of the system, at least until lately (seen the prices for graphics cards?). The complete revamp of the Apple implementation of PowerPC means they'll be updating the motherboard, processor, system bus, I/O bus, memory controller, optical drive, HD, and evverything else.... It's not going to be cheaper, short of some kind of miracle.
2. A dramatic design improvement
And I mean dramatic. The current iMac flat panel was about as well designed and elegant a computer as you could ever hope for. It also offered a flat panel display when they were still relatively rare and expensive. Even with those design improvements, the G4 iMac never approached the sales of the G3 bubble-butt. The new iMac will need some design-based improvement in functionality that will really *wow* everyone.
It's a mac, how much more design incentive can you give someone?
That being said, I think there's something Apple could do that would be worthwhile in several senses. There are already production graphics cards that carry waterblocks, and Apple's got a liquid cooling system. Why not liquid cool the major parts of the system? Put the processor, GPU, and SuperDrive all on contact plates and then vent them with low speed fans around the upper section, say three of them pulling air through the radiator and pushing it off in separate directions.
It's not like the traditional iMacs are intended to be gotten inside of to begin with, after all.
I have no idea what the new iMac will be but I do know this: if its just a pretty new enclosure with a G5, they needn't have bothered. Consumers will not care.
The average consumer doesn't think about the fact that Wal-Mart buys more things from China than all but four
nations in the world. They don't care about much other than pretty numbers and cheap stuff, and they won't. It's the nature of the beast to be cheap, ill-informed, ignorant, and careless about their purchases. Apple won't break that, even if they offer a cheaper machine, because there will still be software costs to switching.
oingoboingo said:
OMFG!! teh new G5 p0warb00x0rz!!! No more G4...it is teh sux0r!!
OMFGBBQGRASS!
