iMac Touch

I don't think it's aesthetically great (base could possibly be shorter and designed to look less like a grumpy face) but the concept is the main thing. The current iMac design is limited in a number of ways:

- The IO and power ports on the back means you can't move the screen a lot while peripherals are plugged in, certainly not flat for touch
- With the parts being in the screen, it makes the screen very heavy so it's not easy to move around quickly

The above concept has a number of benefits:

- It means Apple can build Mac Minis in that style and this means if you wanted to upgrade to an iMac, you buy the touch display and attach it.
- If you need to replace a damaged screen, you just detach it and ship just the screen back.
- If you need to get the base fixed, just detach it - in both cases, no more lugging heavy parts back to the Apple store.
- They can more easily offer anti-glare options.
- The packaging is smaller (top right)
- The ports would be at the back of the base so won't interfere with the movement.
- The screen would be much lighter and could be pulled down to touch-mode very quickly and also swivelled into portrait - size of the display would be 22-24" @ 1080p.
- The bezel is uniform so it works in any orientation.
- Given that it's just a Mini on the bottom, the price should be lower - the base dimension would be like drawing a circle round the current Mini and 2-3x the height. Double the height is probably enough and would allow more drives for storage in the Mini Server for extra RAID options.
- Because the display doesn't need to be opened to allow servicing computer parts, they can laminate the glass onto the panel meaning lower refraction, better touch input, less glare and lighter as they can use thinner glass.

There are a few drawbacks, which include:

- Small base means slower parts but right now, 65W parts are as fast as the current high-end i7 iMac and even the quad MBP parts are. Technology moves on so the next i7s will be even faster but direct touch input is going to be very important.
- It means some assembly when you get it but not much - ideally, the arm would lock into place with a simple mechanism.
- display movement might have to be restricted to prevent damaging the display by banging it off the desk

I changed the base to be more visually appealing and not a cone shape. This would be shaped a lot closer to the current Mini so no fancy circular motherboard and it doesn't look as much like a weird face.

It would have some flat edges so you don't see the optical slot from the side and probably not the Apple logo either.

It's flat on the top so that these can be stacked like current Minis and the cooling vents go out the back.

The arm connection point at the top can double as the wifi antenna so that it isn't blocking access to the storage from the bottom. There would be up to 4 x 2.5" drives (12.5mm support) inside so up to 4TB of space

It would use the MBP quad-core i7 and either the 6490 or 6750 GPU so same performance as the current iMac i7 but with much lower power usage (1/3 or so).

The current laptop processors match the current high-end iMacs, which I think is decent enough. The people buying the 27" i7 iMac likely want a Mac Pro but can't afford it. By moving to a consumer screen size and fast mobile chips, it can mean reduced prices for the Mac Pro line again.


The screen could be very thin/light OLED:

http://gizmodo.com/#!5063527/lg-show...nch-oled-panel

and the heavier PSU in the base needed to drive the screen and extra drives can help weigh it down. You're right that there will be challenges with the screen weight though, especially when moving it around and they'd need to go back to the soft rubber in the old Mini to stop it sliding.


Keeping the mass centered is probably the best solution but for touch, I'd say it still needs to lay down very flat. The following design would allow that flexibility while keeping the screen mass directly above the base:




That would allow even the Mac Pro to get the touch features as you pointed out but they will still have to adopt some unique display design to maintain flexibility and stability. I guess the could compromise the flexibility a bit if they went back to 16:10 displays or even 4:3.

The iMac would likely get the 95W i7 2600K, which scores 15,000 in Geekbench vs the MBP quad i7, which gets 11,000 so it's about 35% improvement. Even the 130W i7-970 is getting 17,000 (54% improvement).

I'd say that 35-55% improvement is not enough when the alternative could be a full touch-enabled Mac running at under 45W. Give it another couple of generations and nobody is going to mind if they get 4 cores, 8 cores or whatever. It will always come back to the user experience so Apple needs to bring some of the great touch functionality from the iPad back to the Mac system.

It seems like it might be a gimmick at first but a lot of things are so much more enjoyable and fast to do with direct input - it can be summed up in one question: can you play a virtual piano on a current iMac in any reasonable way? As soon as you reach a point where you can't do something important like make music, the design is wrong.

All that an extra 50% CPU bump will do is make raw encoding go slightly faster. If it takes 15 minutes to encode on the MBP, then 100% speedup would take 7.5 minutes so 50% speedup takes just over 11 minutes. You're not even going to notice that difference because that's in the best case.

GPUs you might notice but the 6750 is playing most games tested on maximum quality at 30FPS+. The higher resolution would slow things down a bit if you play at native resolution but 720p is fine.


I agree with you, I much prefer wide screens but that's why I feel a collapsible display won't be enough because you can't view portrait images properly on a widescreen. Even on the biggest displays, viewing portrait on a widescreen doesn't look right. Something as simple as the iPad where you flip it round to see the picture fill the display is needed and a 1080p in portrait is quite a bit higher vertical resolution than the 27" displays.

The main thing I'd say is pictures. The interface for manipulating and sorting pictures on a touch screen is so much better than normal input. Pinch-zoom, pan, rotate, slide to the next image, switch portrait/landscape, being able to make natural strokes vs mouse movement when photoshopping.


Screen size makes a difference to how you use touch apps. Even a 10" screen is too small for a piano or an iMovie interface. People can of course get an iPad to supplement the desktop use but I don't see them as being separate input methods.


Sure but those sometimes are very few times and will get fewer as technology progresses until there's just one guy holding onto his tower for dear life with tears in his eyes as the agents come to pry it from his hands and replace it with a 32-core iPad.


They will be one and the same chip though but I do think the integration between them will give the GPU a lot more to do than it does now.


Sometimes fine doesn't cut it :



The 27" isn't too bad though.


Yeah, they're up to somethin' alright. The Lion fullscreen mode is, as Phil would say 'just the beginning'. Of course, it's always just the beginning, I'd like someone to come out and say we're somewhere in the middle for a change just so we know we're making progress.

Each stage of technology, there are dots of information that come out. I think in a few years, we're going to connect those dots and it's going to be very clear what they've done. Right now, it's a bit fuzzy but even at this stage, it's clear they have a very smart strategy in place.

There are a couple of problems with it that lead to the design though. With everything inside the screen, you make the screen very heavy and inflexible to adjustment. You also have IO and power ports at the back, which mean you could never lay it flat.

These two things mean you either abandon the idea of using touch or you change the design. With the above design, the display and computer are not together so you can put the IO and power ports in the base, which stays fixed. The display is much lighter than even a Cinema display as the power supply is in the base, which helps counter-balance the weight.

Concerning the angle, Apple's own iPad stand angles the display up, it's not flat:



but I suspect you'd want to use a hardware keyboard anyway while typing with the iMac. The big feature is that it lets you use iOS-type apps.

In terms of it being a step back for performance, in some way it could be but the current 65W CPUs match the old high-end i7 quads. Obviously the new ones will be faster still but it's not any slower and components will continue to get more powerful with lower power consumption.

In many ways I can see why people consider the current design the best and touch capabilities being added via a supplemental device e.g iPad or trackpad but I think the bigger the screen you can interact with directly the better. When you see some of the demos from Jeff Han (note the angled surface ), you can see how it would be a good way to use certain apps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ

Even like a digital drafting table although the screen would need to be more secured:

http://www.larsi.org/projects/VisionMaperPS/

A better design could well be simply having the 27" iMac collapse down and just move the IO ports e.g combine with the power cable or something.

To some extent but the lower power Sandy Bridge chips perform on the same level as the current high-end iMac so they can still make high performance machines with more flexible designs. I actually think quad-core desktops (especially hyper-threaded) are the big step for desktops to hit before people stop caring about CPU performance and Apple can focus more on storage performance, GPU performance and the user experience.

There always seems to be a switching point where they change the emphasis in their products and it feels like a backward step because compromises have to be made but technology catches up. Sometimes I feel that the changes are made way too early and the compromises too great but technology catches up nonetheless.

The first iMac G3 had so many compromises vs the beige towers. Limited RAM expansion, no easy access to hard drives, slow 233MHz CPU, no GPU upgrades, no PCI, no IO beyond ethernet and USB, no DVD drive. The emphasis was on it being an appliance.

The spec was: 233MHz, 66MHz system bus, 32-384MB RAM, 2MB ATI Rage GPU, 4GB HDD, 24x CD-ROM, 2x USB 1.1, 10/100 ethernet. $1299.

The performance and capability in that machine is outclassed and outpriced by a phone made within a decade of it, which has a motherboard barely bigger than your thumb.

Right now, the iPhone and iPad have opened up a whole new world of touch capability and it's very clear to me that this is how we should be interacting with computers for certain tasks. The trackpad and touch mouse give some movement towards this kind of capability but it's not enough because it can't match the functionality of those devices.

The obvious question is whether or not it needs to but when you see the level of ingenuity in the way information can be presented on the touch devices, there's no reason to hold that back from a more powerful platform. Why should you have to buy a $500 tablet to get interactive magazines on a 10" screen when you just spent $1000+ on a computer with a 20"+ screen that is perfectly capable of doing the same thing?

Ultimately, you resign yourself to one of two options: either you forget direct touch interaction on the iMac or you have to redesign it.


I did like that idea at one point but I don't think it would be popular. If you want to use a different keyboard, you have two keyboard foot-prints on your desk and if your keys break or you spill coffee on it, it could cause big problems. The form factor is also not too good compared to the Mini for server or media centre use. Having a single Mini-DP/TB cable can get round the peripheral issue but it would restrict movement of the keyboard. Plus, you then have two power cables and a connection cable again vs a single power cable.

I like the keyboard idea from the point of view of allowing you to have your own display but again the Mini does this and there would be little incentive to take on a touch display if the display was purely standalone. In much the same way people just wouldn't buy a 27" display unless there was a fast computer in there. Some technology has to be forced on people until they realise why it's better - one of the most important technologies that Apple has done this for is IPS display technology.

Until we had capacitive touch along with intuitive gestures, people were generally content with mobile phone keypads because when you fit yourself into a workflow and accept the constraints, you don't really see why there needs to be a change.