I think you've just managed to throw everything I fight against on these boards into one post. Hooray.
macumus said:
I think not...if you notice the number of posts to this thread compared to any of the stories of late (ie: Tiger screenshots & feature annocemnents, 3-4 days old now) this thread has the most (302 at last check (5 hours old)) and growing by the minute compared to only 250something for the 4 day old tiger screenshots. This is huge news and the saying goes: any press is good press
The discussion of Dashboard, Tiger, and other features are likely to involved more technical knowledge than the one-line posts about how someone wants an iMac. The post-count of a thread means absolutely nothing, other than the fact that X number of posts have been made.
Third, some say that headless is unlikely. I disagree, this is a market they need to get into. which leads me to/
Let me introduce you to a headless Macintosh
forth, wireless displays are impossible due to bandwidth limitations. as any good macrumors reader knows, apple developed firewire, and more intriguingly Wireless Firewire.Wireless Firewire yes wireless firewire. there were recent statements that the wireless firewire standard was approved by the IEEE.
You obviously have no understanding what FireWire actually
is. The name applied to a transmission protocol, no the medium over which it is sent, and so what you and any number of other people are trying to imply is patently false. The "Wireless FireWire" you're talking about is 55Mbit/s 802.15.3, which isn't going to debut until some time between Q3 2004 and Q3 2005. For reference, Airport Extreme is 54Mbit/s, wired 6-pin powered FireWire 400 is 400Mbit/s, and the gigabit ethernet on modern macs is 1000Mbit/s.
There is no badnwidth there to power a monitor. The only products to even try this so far can manage text and web browsing, but no moving video. That's hardly useful.
Wi-Fi networking (2001?), hard drive mp3 player (2002), wi-fi/bluetooth standard in notebooks, first at getting bluetooth rolling too I think
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. If you're going to give Apple credit for something, at least be right about it, please.
fifth, combine wireless firewire with a detachable monitor/tablet on a dual G5 iMac (Cube?). before you say "no way", ponder this...
one G5 in the iMac base where you have massive mass storage (500GB-1TB) (you'll need this for the H.264 movies they'll be selling at iTunes Movie Store soon...the name needs some work maybe iFlix Movie Store) stereo in/out, MIDI? that would rock, video out, video in would be awesome, 8x superdrive w/ laser labeling 16x? we can hope, iPod dock built in, all the usual I/O DVI/1394a/b/USB 1&2/Ethernet/Modem all for lets say $1000-$1200 (to all the 1TB+ nay sayers out there, look at the paradigm shift Apple has manifested in the pricing of supercomputing with the Virginia Tech and ARMY systems and the cost of massive storage in the xServe RAID... they are order of magnitude less from apple).
You. are. absolutely. out. of. your. mind.
For one, the iMac isn't going to out-spec the PowerMac in features, and at least two or three things you've just said completely hammer it into the ground. The G5 is too hot to even go in a laptop at this point, so there's no way it would fit into a tablet design, and
none of the smart display manufacturers use more than a 500-600mhz embedded processor for their panels. Apple doesn't offer 1TB in the PowerMacs, so there's not a chance in hell it will come to the iMac first. Above all, though... You think that Apple could build a machine like that for a
grand? That's the cost of a 15" smart display that doesn't even show video when wireless!
Next you put the other G5 in the wireless firewire 17"+ tablet with less mass storage 100G+ and all the same I/O but just a DVD player (superdrive upgrade BTO) for $800 or so. also includes the wireless keyboard and mouse.
A laptop drive that's merely 80GB costs over $200, the LCD panel is a good $300-500, the G5 is probably $300, the wireless about $50 for current tech (so more like $100-150 for 802.15.3 when it comes out)... Yeah, right. The display alone costs more than the price point you're talking about.
you don't even need all the bandwidth of wireless firewire to stream H.264 video (@ 4X times DVD quality) to the monitor because the monitor has the graphics and processing available onboard to render the screen, even independent of the base unit.
Actually, you need all the bandwidth that's offered and then some. You obviously haven't looked into this at all, and while your ideas are an even more futuristic and dreamer's paradise version of things I've talked about before, this is... stupid. There's no other word for it. Clustering requires high-speed interconnects, and there's not a single wireless standard in the consumer space that could keep up to even a single wired 10/100 Ethernet channel, let along the gigabit channel in PowerMacs and Powerbooks.
Also... I think you've misunderstood the meaning of the encoding on h.264 and the associated technology. It means that video can be compressed, so that HD fits in the space of regular DVD content. That's still enough to swap current wireless tech, and
possibly make DVD viewable on wireless, though it wouldn't help the rest of the system
at all.
an Apple wireless firewire (wi-fw) all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier
wi-fw scanning...wi-fw printing...now that would be speedy.
Just stop, please. Read up on the 802 standards before you keep going liek this.
one of the WWDC poster photos states, "Mac OS X Tiger: now on Intel" what's with this and how might that play into what's going on with the iMac. How come no one else has mentioned this? That's seems like big news to me.
It's a photoshopped image, and there's about zero chance of it happening any time soon. Not only would Apple lose marketshare to any cloner out there with an x86 production line, they'd also lose developers when they found out that all the work for the older PowerPC mac APIs is now nearly useless.
Bad, bad news.
