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New iMac rumours - thinner.... really?
- Thread starter theSeb
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It boils down to data density. A 1TB 2,5" drive squeeze the same amount of data in a much smaller surface area compared to a 1TB 3,5" drive.
This means that the read/write heads can read more data with a smaller motion & lower rotation speed.
Now if you compare a 1TB 2,5" disk to a 3TB 3,5" disk it's another question.
Here's a great article explaining most aspects of harddrive performance.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/understanding-hard-drive-performance,1557.html
iTunes Match. No storage requirements, your entire music library available to you on any of your iOS devices and streamed on the Mac. I would never sacrifice 1TB of internal disk space for Music. I have iTunes Match now, but used a NAS drive prior or that.
As the iMac is still actively cooled by fans, air is actually a coolant in there. Removing more airspace would thus be contra-productive! Perhaps if Apple directly connects the hot parts with the outer shell for passive cooling (like in the iDevices), but i can't really see that happening with current TDP's in desktop machines. Perhaps some more years down the road, when Intel reaches significantly lower TDP's or the Mac has switched to ARM architecture.
Quote from this Anandtech article: "Intel also claims that future Haswell revisions may push even lower down the TDP chain. At or below 10W it should be possible to cram Haswell into something the thickness of a 3rd gen iPad. The move to 14nm in the following year will make that an even more desirable reality."
Check out the Asus Padfone and remember the patent Apple got some years ago about putting some tablet-like device into a port behind/in a monitor-like device to get an idea of where the journey goes to for consumer computing...
5-10 years from now the iPhone will be the heart of consumer computing and the iMac and perhaps even the Macbook merely a glorified docking station.
They'd better actually _have_ a tower machine by then that really justifies the term "Pro". The current big boys with their price frame are faded images of a really bad joke.
...unless Jony Ive found a nifty way to add two hidden Hot-Swap bays to the housing, with flaps you can open to have the harddrives sitting on the back of the machine like leeches on human skin...
Imagine that the white top part of an apple on the left is the contour of the iMac being looked at from the side - and the leaf is the connection to the foot. At least that's what the poster wants to imply. Personally i doubt it.
The trouble is if you want to use Mac OS Apple don't make anything else, unless you want to remortgage your house and buy an outdated Mac Pro.
I was happy with my G4 Power Mac. What I really want now is another mid-range, mid-priced tower, but I have to settle for the iMac and its flaws and limitations.
Last-gen CPUs and GPUs produce less heat, so with a better thermal design a thinner machine does not necessary mean less performance (as we can plainly see it with the rMBP). What interests me most is the kind of GPU they will be packing in there
I beg to differ - people fully know what they want, but most consumers are incapable of differentiating their desires from their needs, and that these two are often at complete odds with one another. Similar to how many women want a man that is successful and has lots of time for them - the former requires lots of hours at work, which precludes the ability to spend countless hours listening to them moan about not being able to fit in their "skinny jeans".
I've used iTunes match. It's not very good in terms of basics like uploading all of the album art. Having to re-sign in every couple of days and resync all of the music for no apparent reason wasn't fun either. It also won't help with my lossless collection of music so I still need to keep that somewhere. If I let it match the lossless rips, then delete them, then all I get back is the compressed version. Kind of pointless when I've a lossless collection of music for a reason. So I tried to use it just for my iPad/MBA/iPhone when I am out of the house. The bugs are unacceptable and prefer to just sync the old fashioned way through iTunes and the automatic conversion to AAC 256.
I've a 12 TB NAS and a Pegasus R4. I have plenty of external storage that is used. As I said, it's not as convenient as internal storage and more noisy.
Of you think looks is irrelevant and only want a machine that does the job. Being a apple fan isn't a good match. Apple likes to mix both things. Good design, groundbreaking formfactor with decent hardware. If this doesn't float your boat then learning windows and start using that is a financially smart choice and you can also make the machine as you like... Or hackintosh of course.
Maybe apple is much fashion statement, but so what. It's like with cars. If you feel the only reason you buy a car is to get from a to b, buying an Audi is stupid, since volkswagen does the same job and is as reliable for a cheaper price. Funny how this becomes a topic over and over. Apple has been focusing on design for decades now, so most people using macs should know this all ready and embraced that fact or chosen a different way of computing.
Maybe apple is much fashion statement, but so what. It's like with cars. If you feel the only reason you buy a car is to get from a to b, buying an Audi is stupid, since volkswagen does the same job and is as reliable for a cheaper price. Funny how this becomes a topic over and over. Apple has been focusing on design for decades now, so most people using macs should know this all ready and embraced that fact or chosen a different way of computing.
I wish people would actually read what I've said. Where did I say that looks are irrelevant? Does thinner = better looking? It already looks damn good. Does it need to be thinner to make it look better?
When Apple moves from nVidia 320M to HD3000 IGP on 2011 13" MBP, it wasn't a nice progress or upgrade. In some cases the IGP was slower.
I'm afraid the 2012 iMac is in the same transition phase.
I don't think anyone will disagree with you if they did in fact compromise performance to make it thinner. However, getting upset about it is ill advised until we actually see the specs.
Nobody thought we'd be getting modular components, easy back door access, etc. That's just not what an iMac is. If we get the expected 2012 component updates in a thinner, sexier box, then we have improved both performance and aesthetics over the 2011 model.
Honestly from poking around other sites I think the thinness angle is overblown. Going from 3.5" HDD to 2.5" HDD and chopping the ODD seem to be the only actions taken internally to remove some fat; the rest would be from the space no longer needed for the front glass. And ok, if you get a spinner, this year's 2.5" HDD may not perform as well as this year's 3.5" HDD, but it's still at least as good as last year's 3.5" HDD. And besides which, it's better for the computer's performance to stick an SSD in. If you already have terabytes upon terabytes of external storage, going from 1 TB internal spinner to 512GB internal SSD probably won't mean much to you in the long run.
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Hey you never know, they might move to SSDs for the standard of iMacs with a secondary storage drive, both being 2.5" form factor.
See your point though, looking forward to seeing what Apple has in store for us, they know what they're doing though, so I have trust in them over whatever they do
See your point though, looking forward to seeing what Apple has in store for us, they know what they're doing though, so I have trust in them over whatever they do
If it's not standard SSD, I will BTO SSD. So I really really hope it's standard. ;-)
Not everyone has money to burn on a 1TB SSD storage.
Granted. Also, my my 320GB HDD on my dead iMac was not 50% full. So I'm not worried about capacity.
Last-gen CPUs and GPUs produce less heat, so with a better thermal design a thinner machine does not necessary mean less performance (as we can plainly see it with the rMBP). What interests me most is the kind of GPU they will be packing in there
The rMBP isn't faster. It's SLOWER than the 15" MBP.
Not only the poor GT 650M works hotter in the rMBP, it obviously gives LOWER performance than the same GT 650M in a 15" MBP (without that commercial retina BS).
Google around and you'll see how people "love" to play games with a GT 650M and a monstruous display resolution like the rMBP display.
There are also cases of slowdowns in web pages renderizations.
This.
I keep reading BS on this forum all the day. People saying that "Apple never downgrades when launching a new generation of a product".
Really? I don't think that Intel HD 3000 could be considered an upgrade over the NVIDIA Geforce 320M.
Apple doesn't give a **** about performance. All they want is to push beautiful computers into consumers' mouths, then they just accept it as the "best thing in the world" because it's made of aluminium and has a 4893028490328x4830928409322 resolution display.
Smaller devices, thinner devices and unecessary huge display resolutions are commercial strategies used by Apple to convince people that useless things are above technological quality-of-life things (like, you know, performance).
People say that their rMBP or iMac have great performance because they've never seen a real performance PC with real performance parts (CPU, GPU, SSD, RAM etc.). That's what happens when you're caged inside Apple's little world and keep thinking that "the other side is obsolete and unstable/slow/full of virus".
This is completely true unfortunately. My rMBP is smooth as butter in the UI and games when connected to an external 24" 1920x1200 monitor. It's not quite as nice when using its own screen. It sure looks pretty though.
Yes, that's the point. However, I am running the game in 1440x900. I should not be paying the penalty for the retina display when it should not be having an impact and with no advantages. It should not be doing its normal rescaling thing that it does in quartz in the UI.
I actually happen to own a retina MBP (unless yourself, so it seems) and I have been playing games on it since the day it arrived. This is a very impressive mid-range gaming laptop able to run new games like Borderlands 2 and Guild Wars 2 flawlessly. And the GPU is heavily factory-overclocked btw, so it is actually faster than the non-retina version.
BTW, whoever tries to play AAA games on retina resolution are simply technically challenged (of course no laptop can handle this). I play games on 1920x1200 or 1680x1500 and it works very well on the 15" display. BTW, the new X-COM runs fluently on native resolution with highest settings.