Actually, yes, but not when it comes to the Mac Pro. The iMac is a disappointed customer waiting to happen. How many buyers do you think find themselves 2 years down the road with a perfectly good 24-inch monitor, but an inadequate graphics card or some other bundled part?
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Why is there a Mac truck sized hole in the Apple desktop product line?
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Actually, yes, but not when it comes to the Mac Pro. The iMac is a disappointed customer waiting to happen. How many buyers do you think find themselves 2 years down the road with a perfectly good 24-inch monitor, but an inadequate graphics card or some other bundled part?
Do you really believe that? Do people HAVE to have the latest thing in order to be satisfied? No. Sure, it's nice to have expandability, it's nice to be able to change the bells and whistles, but that hardly means the iMac is a disappointment. My parents have had two iMacs in seven years, and they only got the one they have now two years ago. For plenty of folks the iMac is a perfectly decent computer.
Given the success of the iMac over the last eight years, I'd say most customers are not disappointed. Your theory may work fine for you and others like you, but most iMac buyers are not like you.
(in reply to both) My statement was phrased as a question. I didn't claim that every buyer will eventually be disappointed, only that there are those who will, and that disappointment will come well after the initial, even satisfying, purchase.
As far as the upgradability argument goes..heres my .02 cents
If they did have a tower mac, they would only have a few compatible cards, consider this, the mac pro's can only use the 3 video cards that are available, so if I had an older powermac I can't upgrade to the X1900 (assuming x1900 was AGP) , I would have to stick to the 3 cards that where available at launch (from what I understand). So even if you could upgrade your card you would most likely be limited, and if GPU performance is a need, then you would buy the best card when purchasing your machine.
Somewhere on apple's site I was reading about video card compatibility and they where saying you had to match the powermac card up to that series of powermac or it won't work
Radeon 9800 Pro cards are going for $100 on ebay, I can't give away my pc's 9800 pro because it's sub standard, a $30 nvidia yields higher frame rates. I wouldn't want to upgrade anyway.
If you want to upgrade your imac's hard drive, then take it to apple and spend a few bucks to install it...thats a small drawback to having such a compact system. External drives are another option, you can have Terrabytes of storage with a single plug.
Ram is easy to install on all of my macs (never used a newer imac) and shouldn't be a problem.
CPU upgrades are pretty much un-affordable now...with the resale of macs you can ebay it and upgrade to a new system cheaper.
I don't really see the need to have a mid grade tower, I can't imagine the new imacs not having enough processing power to do consumer level things
If they did make a tower I would imagine it would have specs close to this Dell XPS Machine $1589 as configured:
Intel Core™2 Duo Processor E6750 (4MB L2 Cache,2.66GHz,1333 FSB)
256MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS
320GB - Seagate 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD
2 GB DDR2 Ram
Cheapest 2.1 speakers (stock option is LCD speakers)
Stock keyboard + mouse
Seems to me that at $1600 your real close to a Mac-Pro , the refreshed line is supposed to wield an octo 2.66ghz...seems like the extra $600 would be well worth it if you need it. Not to mention those specs are very close to the Imac, I couldn't imagine what that could do that the imac couldn't (besides games)
Not worth it for apple, as has been said before.
*Edit*
Why doesn't Apple put a 2.4 or 2.6ghz duo in the Mac mini? that would be a nice compromise.
If they did have a tower mac, they would only have a few compatible cards, consider this, the mac pro's can only use the 3 video cards that are available, so if I had an older powermac I can't upgrade to the X1900 (assuming x1900 was AGP) , I would have to stick to the 3 cards that where available at launch (from what I understand). So even if you could upgrade your card you would most likely be limited, and if GPU performance is a need, then you would buy the best card when purchasing your machine.
Somewhere on apple's site I was reading about video card compatibility and they where saying you had to match the powermac card up to that series of powermac or it won't work
Radeon 9800 Pro cards are going for $100 on ebay, I can't give away my pc's 9800 pro because it's sub standard, a $30 nvidia yields higher frame rates. I wouldn't want to upgrade anyway.
If you want to upgrade your imac's hard drive, then take it to apple and spend a few bucks to install it...thats a small drawback to having such a compact system. External drives are another option, you can have Terrabytes of storage with a single plug.
Ram is easy to install on all of my macs (never used a newer imac) and shouldn't be a problem.
CPU upgrades are pretty much un-affordable now...with the resale of macs you can ebay it and upgrade to a new system cheaper.
I don't really see the need to have a mid grade tower, I can't imagine the new imacs not having enough processing power to do consumer level things
If they did make a tower I would imagine it would have specs close to this Dell XPS Machine $1589 as configured:
Intel Core™2 Duo Processor E6750 (4MB L2 Cache,2.66GHz,1333 FSB)
256MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS
320GB - Seagate 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD
2 GB DDR2 Ram
Cheapest 2.1 speakers (stock option is LCD speakers)
Stock keyboard + mouse
Seems to me that at $1600 your real close to a Mac-Pro , the refreshed line is supposed to wield an octo 2.66ghz...seems like the extra $600 would be well worth it if you need it. Not to mention those specs are very close to the Imac, I couldn't imagine what that could do that the imac couldn't (besides games)
Not worth it for apple, as has been said before.
*Edit*
Why doesn't Apple put a 2.4 or 2.6ghz duo in the Mac mini? that would be a nice compromise.
Which is a fine thing to believe. My point was, that after eight years of selling iMacs, Apple has yet to face any measurable disappointment such as you suggest will exist. You don't think there was complaining that the Rage II+ graphics weren't upgradable back in 1998? That nobody then considered that they wouldn't be able to use the monitor on future computers?
None of what you've considered is new thinking.
The only people disappointed are those of us waiting for a Mac Pro update that someday may come. It's the only product in the lineup that has gone virutally untouched since August 2006. Heck, even the poor Mini got its update.
Such is life when you want a product that uses server-class hardware. The upgrade cycles are slower.
I'm waiting on the new models, too. Life will go on until they arrive.
I'm waiting on the new models, too. Life will go on until they arrive.
Therein lies the problem. The best card you can buy in an iMac is junk:
1900 vs 2400HD
Even the MacBook Pros outshine the iMac by more than 2 to 1.
There are only 3 options today, but even limiting yourself to those, you could immediately improve things 5x.
Last time I checked, over 93% of all computers (on the Internet) weren't running on Apple hardware. Despite all of Apple's success, that still seems measurable.
Not to trot out a hackneyed analogy, but 93% of the cars on the road aren't Mercedes, either, yet I bet MB is pretty happy with its place in the automotive hierarchy. Being profitable is the number one goal of a company, not the most adopted.
That has nothing to do with iMac owners feeling disappointed in their purchase.
It may mean that Apple could make a significant dent in the market by releasing a mid-tower (which i don't care if they do cuz i'd never buy one). But Apple's marketshare and the happiness of iMac owners are not dependent on each other.
Wow! The OP is so right! I hate Apple for this very reason. They're trying force upon us an all-in-one-world, as Steve Jobs put it with the latest iMac release, unless we want to buy an overpriced paper-weight (MacMini), or buy an overpriced workstation (MacPro).
APPLE MUST REMEDY THIS IMMEDIATELY, OR OPEN MAC OS X UP TO ALL x86 HARDWARE! I REFUSE TO BE A VICTIM ANY LONGER JUST SO THEY CAN MAKE THEIR EFFING PROFITS!
APPLE MUST REMEDY THIS IMMEDIATELY, OR OPEN MAC OS X UP TO ALL x86 HARDWARE! I REFUSE TO BE A VICTIM ANY LONGER JUST SO THEY CAN MAKE THEIR EFFING PROFITS!
I read about 4 pages then I got so wound up I decided to skip the last two and go ahead and write something.
As an owner of a Octo core Mac Pro I can say from experience that the most powerful Mac does not fulfill all my needs. As a result I have a PC I use for gaming which I consider to be ridiculous given I have just bought a £xk Mac.
The argument that Macs do not appeal to "gamers" is entirely flawed. I would much rather be able to boot into Windows on my Mac Pro with multiple GPUs in SLi or Crossfire than have to constantly switch between using my Mac and this disgusting piece of hardware Alienware calls their ALX tower.
The argument that Macs aren't built for gaming is also completely preposterous. If Apple wants to continue to expand in the future its going to have to go more mainstream with its products and Apple has shown interest in doing this by introducing boot camp and Safari on Windows.
The problem is not that the Mac Pro is too expensive but that it is unsuitable for prosumer use. Contrary to the belief of many users on this forum, the prosumer market is growing faster than any other with the general populace becoming more and more tech-savvy. The Mac Pro's RAM, multicore CPUs and GPUs are unsuitable for gaming and general home use all together. The enclosure is much to big and games still don't make use of multiple CPUs. Adding additional graphics cards to your Mac Pro won't make a difference as they can only be used to power additional monitors and can't be used together in crossfire or SLi. The FB-DIMMS aren't at all suited for low latency gaming and altogether the performance of the Mac Pro in gaming scenarios can't justify the price.
Up to date GPUs aren't even available for the Mac Pro yet with the 7300GT as standard and the past-generation X1900 as your best option to upgrade to.
This prosumer desktop (which I doubt will ever exist) should consist of the following components.
Enclosure 3/4 the size of Mac Pro chassis.
Intel C2D Conroe/Penryn
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 1066MHz
SLi support for latest Nvidia cards or Crossfire for ATi
People often tend to use the excuse that "500GB is far too much for most users" or that "nobody needs a 3GHz processor". Well maybe people don't need an excess of power however when the competition is priced likewise you want an advantage over your opposition in terms of technical specifications. Bigger = better.
PS. Just to demonstrate how disgusting the ALX is, have a look at the size by side comparison featured on Alienware's website:
Feel lucky that you've got a Mac.
As an owner of a Octo core Mac Pro I can say from experience that the most powerful Mac does not fulfill all my needs. As a result I have a PC I use for gaming which I consider to be ridiculous given I have just bought a £xk Mac.
The argument that Macs do not appeal to "gamers" is entirely flawed. I would much rather be able to boot into Windows on my Mac Pro with multiple GPUs in SLi or Crossfire than have to constantly switch between using my Mac and this disgusting piece of hardware Alienware calls their ALX tower.
The argument that Macs aren't built for gaming is also completely preposterous. If Apple wants to continue to expand in the future its going to have to go more mainstream with its products and Apple has shown interest in doing this by introducing boot camp and Safari on Windows.
The problem is not that the Mac Pro is too expensive but that it is unsuitable for prosumer use. Contrary to the belief of many users on this forum, the prosumer market is growing faster than any other with the general populace becoming more and more tech-savvy. The Mac Pro's RAM, multicore CPUs and GPUs are unsuitable for gaming and general home use all together. The enclosure is much to big and games still don't make use of multiple CPUs. Adding additional graphics cards to your Mac Pro won't make a difference as they can only be used to power additional monitors and can't be used together in crossfire or SLi. The FB-DIMMS aren't at all suited for low latency gaming and altogether the performance of the Mac Pro in gaming scenarios can't justify the price.
Up to date GPUs aren't even available for the Mac Pro yet with the 7300GT as standard and the past-generation X1900 as your best option to upgrade to.
This prosumer desktop (which I doubt will ever exist) should consist of the following components.
Enclosure 3/4 the size of Mac Pro chassis.
Intel C2D Conroe/Penryn
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 1066MHz
SLi support for latest Nvidia cards or Crossfire for ATi
People often tend to use the excuse that "500GB is far too much for most users" or that "nobody needs a 3GHz processor". Well maybe people don't need an excess of power however when the competition is priced likewise you want an advantage over your opposition in terms of technical specifications. Bigger = better.
PS. Just to demonstrate how disgusting the ALX is, have a look at the size by side comparison featured on Alienware's website:
Feel lucky that you've got a Mac.
The analogy would only hold up if peterbilt made something smaller than a minivan. If apple only made machines on the high end, or only on the low end, it wouldn't make sense to expect them to make something in the middle. But apple does make products on both extremes, but nothing in the middle. It is a completely valid thing to expect them to make.
How exactly does that help all the people who already have a monitor BEFORE they buy a computer? Or those who just want a different monitor option than the ones built in?
I'd love to buy an affordable tower if apple sold one. I have to admit, now that leopard has been hacked to run on any x86 hardware, that option is very tempting. Obviously, I'd much prefer to run apple hardware, but they simply aren't offering the machine I need.
Now you're just grasping at straws.
You dislike that you can't get other graphics options on an iMac. I get that. We get that. Everyone gets that. You, then, aren't a person for whom an iMac is well-suited. That doesn't mean, in any sense what so ever, that all iMac buyers are like you.
It's rather absurd to think that not having upgradeable graphics on the iMac is holding Apple's marketshare at your 7% figure. You don't want to argue from absurdity, do you?
PS. Just to demonstrate how disgusting the ALX is, have a look at the size by side comparison featured on Alienware's website:
Feel lucky that you've got a Mac.
Sorry but no matter how "cool" aliens are, i would never get Alienware's desktop. It's just so Xfiles and mid 90s.
I greatly appreciate your argument for a gamer friendly mac pro variant ojwk, however I must ask why would you get a mac pro for gaming in the first place?
No. I am serious.
There are few if any good mac version of PC games. And with PS3 and the 360, they both blow the mac gaming community away. (I am ignoring the Wii because its just too unique and different from PC gaming).
With that said, the Mac Pro is designed for "pros" in mind. Video editors, Musicians, people that need a high power mac that runs Final Cut and After Effects on a decent level.
Not to say that Apple shouldn't diversify its consumer lineup.
Sorry perhaps I wasn't clear, I didn't get a Mac Pro for gaming but I would have liked to in order to replace my Alienware that runs side by side with the Mac.
Well, you specifically chose an absurd sounding case.
I don't think it's absurd at all to argue that not having upgradable graphics in any mac under $2200 or so is limiting marketshare, and that adding a cheaper model with expandability would help increase marketshare.
You really don't think adding such a model wouldn't have any positive effect on marketshare? THAT seems absurd.
um.. that's because they're made for professional print/video/audio work. apple doesn't make the mac pro so that people that dabble with imovie can also check their email and surf the web. that's what the mini and imac are for.
edit: you already clarified... sure it'd be nice to have better gaming performance, but i'd never take it at the expense of slowing down pro apps or making them less stable.
Exactly my point. Thus proving there is a gap in the Apple's product lineup. Oh and FYI, I think I no why I bought an Mac Pro.
Hmm.
I willing to pay you 100$ (virtual dollares,mind you..) if you could take time and explain how on earth a decent (8800series?) graphics card would slow down pro-apps? Say, Shake,Maya or Lightroom? Or make them less stable?
Ok,you can skip the less stable,because as far as I know,the quadra4500 (the third card) is really buggy/doesnt work in some enviroments it was designed for. Was it that said Maya or what?
Way to go,apple.
I didn't say anything about the GPU. I was talking about the RAM. FB-DIMM aren't good for gaming. ojwk complained about that. I said I'd welcome improved gaming (better GPUs) but not without sacrificing performance and stability of pro apps (FB vs non-FB RAM).