Apple preparing to introduce Sandy Bridge iMacs early next week - sources - Page 3

See above.

I'm old and retired now. I still have a bunch of old OSX apps with limited use to me, and I'm sure as he'll that I'm not going to upgrade them at great cost. Like, my old FileMaker Pro houses my ham radio log of over 10,000 contacts, and I no longer have much use for it other than that. So, unless there is some Rosetta-like app available, I may just have bought my last iMac and OS upgrade.

I went through this when OS 9 was killed off, and I really don't want to do it again.

I think FMP went Universal as of version 8.5 back in the Summer of 2006. That means you have a version that is well over 5 years old. I dont think the mad emoticon is apropos when you are using such an old version of the software. They are now on version 11.

Have you tried to find a cheap copy of version 8.5 or 9.x to allow you to make the transition if needed? Do you really expect Apple to support PPC apps when they announced the switch almost 6 years ago and have been using x86-based machine for over 5 years? How long should Apple support legacy tech and what cost?

Right! Five years old! Make that well over! Six versions out of date! Hurry up and die, old timer!

As you say, there are inherent limitations when moving from the screen to the pagelimitations that entail more than the glossy versus matte issue. I wholeheartedly agree that getting accurate color is not necessarily an easy task. My point is that glossy screens add yet another hurdle to an already challenging endeavor. Your own words are "glossy monitors are not ideal for print." Indeed. For you, they "should not be a problem if you know what you are doing," but to say that they "should not be a problem" is not exactly a resounding endorsement. Case in point, have we ever heard of, read about, or talked to a print designer who clamoured for a lovely piece of glass in front of his or her screen? I know I haven't.

This is one of the poorest articles I've ever read on this site. You make is sound as though Apple is competing with itself, while at the same time losing to itself. All the time you seem oblivious to the fact that the numbers of desktops sold has steadily been increasing. Look at the Net Income from each source. Sure... you're going to sell more iPads than $3K+ desktops on a unit basis....

Both have INCREASED IN NUMBERS.

BTW... BOTH GOOD FOR APPLE....

Someone just got their 5yo account banned.

My iPad is now my presentation tool of choice - much easier than lugging the MBP around. So I will be moving to an iMac to supplement the iPad very soon as the MBP is almost entirely desk-based these days.

I can understand the issues around the expense. Sometimes the software is just way to expensive to justify even using. However you can always roll your own software with SQLite and the programming language of your choosing.

On the otherhand Apple has been very aggressive in driving down the cost of software. This will eventually impact other vendors, so maybe a suitable database will pop up that is inexpensive.

Cool! But as you can see once you have only one use for an app it becomes hard to justify the expense. This is where writing your own can help.

Frankly this bothered me a lot as I see this as a terrible attitude to have. You are really punishing yourself.

This really isn't the same thing. At least not in my mind

Upload speeds will have to get much faster for this to happen (it would take over 5 days straight to upload 60GB on a 1Mbps upload) and I don't think after the recent security breaches in online services that people would be too keen to commit their entire content collections to any company.

I think Apple's cloud services will be closer to what Google offer e.g Pages, Keynote etc online, personal storage, personal web space. Mostly what they've been doing but this time done properly and more tightly integrated into the iOS devices. Essentially becoming the default filesystem so you'd save a Pages document there and access it on your Mac without the sync headache.


Looking back at what has happened until now shows a lot of interesting things.

In 1999, Apple introduced the 450MHz G4 tower with 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD and 16MB Rage 128 graphics, 100Mbps ethernet, 802.11b wifi.

All for $2500.

In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone with 400MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 8-16GB storage, 802.11g wifi, 24MB PowerVR GPU.

All for $500 with maybe 10% of the device being the computer and the rest a giant battery.

That was just 8 years of progress. So if we assume that the graphics and CPU power of today's entry Mac Pro will make it into the iPhone in 8 years, that's going to make for some very interesting changes.

It will have the equivalent of a quad 3GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, 512GB-1TB solid state storage, a GPU faster than the 6750M in the higher-end MBPs, all using passive cooling.

It may be that computer parts become so inexpensive that Apple just end up selling a bunch of different monitors with computers inside because ultimately people will always need monitors - when you think about it, the display is the most important part of the machine as it's the part we engage with the most.

What I certainly see happening when it comes to the iMac is a race to the bottom. They can't keep high performance parts out of the low-end forever and when the low-end gets quad cores with Ivy Bridge in Jan 2012, I suspect people will gravitate more and more to the lower-end machines and the Mini is going to look more and more attractive to people the more diverse their display requirements get.

We haven't heard much about a Mini update but it can be updated alongside the iMac. Being so close to WWDC, I wonder if any updates will come before then. After all, they are introducing Lion so why bring out new products now when they have to update to a new OS in 4 weeks? They can just ship the machines with the new OS.

I do wish Apple would kill this constant debate over the reflective properties of the iMac screen and just install non-reflective museum glass on all iMacs.

End of.

Sure, but no one accumulates 60 GB worth of stuff all at once. The necessity to back up things like one's music collection and iMovie projects makes local storage unwieldy.

I can see Apple offering an essentially expanded version of Mobile Me, combined with something that works in the background, like Time Machine. Offline storage can occur incrementally, like Time Machine, at a nominal cost (perhaps about 99¢/GB, annually?) It makes sense to me, and isn't far from what you envisioned either:


Exactly!


In essence, that describes an iMac already. What you gain with an iMac is more power-hungry components, a full size monitor and keyboard. MacBooks and iMacs are little more than single-board computers plus some peripherals anyway.

Basically, the purchase decision for an iMac vs. a MacBook becomes a choice of how big a display one needs. Of course higher performance is easier to achieve in a desktop that can consume 242W all day long. A laptop must be designed to run for most of a business day, all other design elements are secondary concerns.


They've done this routinely. New machines will come with a coupon for a free upgrade to Lion. The timing is right - graduation presents etc.

The graphics found in the iPhone 4 are way beyond those found in a 16MB Rage 128 GPU. GPU and CPU power have both increased in a massive way and while the megahertz numbers are close, I'm willing to bet that the 400MHz arm chip along with its RAM and GPU is getting more done than the 450MHz G4 system was. I think your assumption of mobile phone tech 8 years from now is also woefully undervalued. The next Snapdragon cpu is a dual core 2.5GHz and comes out later this year or early next year. Not saying Snapdragons are the equal of desktop CPUs, but the mobile area has some pretty insane competition and a high level of R&D right now.

Just apply a layer of anti-reflection coating should solve the problem nicely. I think people would willingly spend 50-100 more for it.

Without a mid range monitor-less Mac I'm close to saying goodbye to Apple after 18 years. No amount of portable/mobile products will make me want a glossy screen all in one. Apple needs a new cube with more features than what you get on an iMac or mini.

No one wants a Cube anymore. Consumers want simplicity which is why the All in One shape whether it be laptop or desktop sales in bundles.

Appreciate the 18 years but you are part of an infinitesimal niche in this area. Those that need a headless desktop get the Mac Pro

I know, sometimes it irritates me. For example the other day I needed to get a lot of emails out of the database to send a bulk email (legal kind to some select customers.) I wrote a script to format them the way I wanted with semicolon between the addresses. When I pasted them into Apple Mail.app I realized that Apple had modified my txt and put commas in between each address but didn't remove the semicolons so of course it didn't work and there is no control. So I had to go back to the list and remove the delimiters altogether so Apple could put their own commas in. What a nuisance. Stop helping me. If I want help I'll ask for it.

Eighteen years? So you've held on to your Quadra for that amount of time? Apple hasn't put out a "mid-range" monitor-less computer since Steve came back and axed the old lines.

No. But I sure as hell don't want a computer bigger than my old PowerMac G4. I just want an easy to get into Mac that has room for two hard drives and an optical drive where I can use the monitor I already have. It's crazy that in order to get something that simple you have to spend $2500.

However leaving Apple because you don't like the screen is just screwy.

I realize Apples line up of desktops is stale and no longer a land of innovation The problem is I also realize that Apple has to offer up products that sell. Like it or not the very few voices in this forum looking for a matte screen iMac do not make a viable market.

My mind has been open since I chatted with Kuato in Total Recall! Classic flick.

I own a MacBook Pro (13in, so no matte option) and use a 27in glossy iMac as a QA machine a few times a week. I'm well aware of the differences between matte and glossy and use both. I just want a matte option since I find that much easier on my eyes.

I may end up just going with a mini in the future and using my Dell UltraSharps as my main desktop. Or some new plaything Apple comes out with.

I just know I'll be clicking buy the second a matte option appears for the iMac.

I haven't got that wired yet. I still need my MBP with the VGA dongle and the PCI card slot to show up totally prepared without asking for IT help.

I haven't played with it really at all, but he may want to give Bento a try. I believe it is relatively cheap and may provide some of the ease of use experience that FMP has...

What I found interesting at the last big conference I attended (1,400 geeks in NY) was how many people were using iPads instead of Mac laptops. I took my 13" MBP and my Wifi iPad and quickly found it was much simpler to use the iPad with the bluetooth keyboard to take notes, track Twitter feeds, and so on. Better battery life, much lighter to haul around.

Next conference, I'm leaving the MBP at home. Oh, and I don't care about the screen reflections - I just align it right so I don't see them.

Two comments: (1) after the Amazon cloud meltdown, a lot of users will be wary about trusting their data to the cloud. (2) a lot of users have limited bandwidth. I'm running on a 100Mbps fibre connection here; in my office the connection is not much better than 3Mbps with a lot of "stuttering" which would not work well for audio or video streaming.


No question the IOS devices are driving sales and revenues for Apple, but the laptops and desktops are doing pretty darn well too, with a significant growth in market share over the past few years. I've seen a lot of people start with an iPad, then add a MacBook in the past year.


I think in the first group the only growth is happening for iPads. Other tablets have so far quite miserable sales; low end Windows machines are recording steep declines in sales.

Yes re. the second and third groups. iPad and MacBook Pro/Air sales are definitely leading to greater interest in Mac Minis and iMacs, both of which are fairly price competitive versus Windows machines.

Yes on the last group - gamers mostly - who don't buy "stock" hardware and so don't help the bottom line of the big Windows desktop makers.


I doubt very much that Apple would be happy with a decrease in desktop sales units. Actually, I think the opposite is possible: an increase driven by corporate purchasing. The iPad and iPhone have forced the conservative dinosaurs running corporate IT departments to "facilitate" their use. When the bosses start demanding their new iPhone4s and iPad2s be able to connect to corporate email and other services, it is no longer just Joe-the-geek in the art department wanting to connect an Apple device. Once that gate is open, there's no closing it. I was in the IT dept of a company (NYSE listed) with nearly 7,000 mostly white collar employees a few weeks back; the manager told me he had to open the network to iPhones a while back, then iPads last year, and now he has a fast-growing number of users with MacBooks. They're "testing" a half-dozen iMacs and he thinks they will make them an option for users by this summer. He agreed, "the bosses are pushing this."

Won't take too many large corporations going that way to make a significant difference to Apple's desktop sales,

My girlfriend works for a major finance corporation. She has been advised that they are going to phase out the Blackberry/IBM laptop combi for iPads/iPhones.



And the Apple Store is down for updates.....what could it be???

Guess what:

Not just the screen. The complete lack of a mid sized, mid range desktop computer that does not have a built in screen. I do not like all in ones. Period. I'll never buy one. I do not want to lose features that I believe are very basic. Two internal hard drives and an optical drive.
The only computer Apple makes that offers these very basic features is the $2499 Mac Pro.
That's a high price to pay for basics.
I don't want a computer bigger than my PowerMac G4. The Mac Pro is bigger. I could chunk down the money for the Pro but honestly that would be wasteful. I don't need that much computer.

Apple either needs to offer a tall mini that has internal room for expansion or redesign the mini with Thunderbolt on the top and bottom of the case that allows direct plug in of stack-able expansion cases.

What you are describing at the end there for that Mini would be an extraordinarily niche product and there is no way Apple will do that. Redesign the Mini w/Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt definitely. Why exactly must you have 2 internal drives and an optical? External drives and enclosures for internal drives are very cheap these days and it's dead easy to go w/home server options for extra storage.

Get an updated Mini when it is released. Either go w/the Server model for the 2 HDs and pick up the MBA Superdrive to go along w/it or buy a normal Mini and an external enclosure that matches well. Problem solved and still much smaller than your G4. If you're still running that G4 as your main computer, even the c2d Mini will smoke it.

I wonder what those were, given that they're wrong...

If you consider the BTO options as well, then all of those were given options.

Just ordered the Z70M 27", 3.4 GHz i7, 6970M Radeon. Staring with 8GB RAM which will likely upgrade to 16GB later. Two TB ports is awesome as I've been looking for a fast solution for hooking up 12 terabytes of data; now I just need to track down the right hardware

Perhaps I like the cleanliness and organization of having things internal. Why buy a nice looking Mac computer that Apple has spent lots of time making look nice and then attaching non matching third party drives to it? I like having two drives so I can back up data in case a drive dies. I have CD's and DVD's that are perfectly good to use in the home so why should I spend the time and energy ripping (which I still need a drive for anyway) when I can just use them with an optical drive?

Why have a server if I only have one computer?

Why not something stackable? People already stack Minis in an adhoc manner. You really don't need connectors at the top and bottom either, a patch cord would do the job.

The thing is if you are about to redesign the Mini why not take into account real user needs? Thunderbolt means you will have the ability to connect such options in a effective manner.

The one thing I find funny or painful about this discussions is the above statements from Mac defenders. It is pretty incredible that Apple has gotten so many to believe that a stupid idea is the accepted norm. External drives are one of those things that is just plain stupid.

Why you might ask. For one all Intel chip sets support multiple SATA ports these days. This means that support of internal drives costs very little in the way of hardware. Second internally wired devices are far more reliable than externally wired, plus you don't use up another external AC outlet with a wall wart. Third internal drives allow for multiple solutions to different problems. By this I mean one can RAID a set of drives if one wants to. Or one can put the bulk storage on a slower magnetic drive and run the system off of an SSD. The third point is all about flexibility. Fourth external enclosures are very expensive.

A server is an entirely different solution than adding internal drives and really has no play in this situation.

Smoking the old computer has nothing to do with this discussion either. It is a discussion about the lack of an affordable Mac with internal drive bays that allow people to configure Mac to their needs.

Just bought the upgraded 21.5in iMac, can't wait to see how it holds up! Bootcamp for gaming and the power of OS X for work!

The analysis that the desktop is losing market share tho laptops is true but over simplified.

If you look at the chart from the article, the normal up down wobble desktop sales number are showing an overall increase just not as much as laptops are.

I bet you the people that decided to wait for this update are happy now. It is fairly close to what I had imagined.

This assessment strikes me as unduly pessimistic. The graph clearly shows a net increase in desktop sales, just at a slower rate than increase in portable device sales (which might be what you predict based on product range and pricing). Neither show evidence of saturation or decline. They still ship millions of units every year.

I can't figure out what it's supposed to show... the timeline (x axis) progresses from Q106 (presumably first quarter 2006) followed by Q406, Q307, Q208, Q109, Q409, Q310, Q201... ?



The last entry is probably meant to be Q2 2010 but why invert the quarters? What happened to FY 2008, or quarters 2 and 3 of 2009, or Q1 and 4 of 2010? Is the first entry supposed to be Q1 2006 or 2005?



These data are so screwed up no conclusions can be drawn, yet many respondents here have done exactly that.

Read AAPL's annual reports - it's all there.

Not really..... just got detention for 10 days, and my previous post has obviously been altered. Everyone is so sensitive.