Apple's redesigned iMac is 5mm thin with edge-to-edge glass - Page 3

 Yup

 

I totally agree.    What's the difference how thin it is when it sits on top of a desk?  As long as it's thinner than the stand, that's all it needs to be.  Removing the drive is just Apple being obnoxious and forcing us to use iTunes.   But people still want to watch DVDs or move large files around via CD-R or DVD-R and still want the ability to download tunes from a music CD.     It might be old technology, but it's still extremely practical and Apple seems to be on a tear lately to make our lives more difficult just to make things thin or zen.    Design should serve function - function shouldn't serve design.  

Amazon MP3 is still available. Netflix and Hulu are still available.

Life moves on.

So are the top end versions of these new imac going to be adequate for FCP and FCP X?  I run a small post facility and we do fairly typical spot work.  No complex effects or rendering.  Just offline on Final Cut  and then online in Smoke.  With a AJA IO XT on Thunderbolt for video monitoring and a Pegasus (or similar) for a RAID this seems like a decent Mac Pro replacement for our type of work.  Of course with maxed out RAM and CPU speed.

So kids are the entire market for this computer?

 

On what basis are you claiming that optical media is less common today than floppies when the iMac was released?   I don't have the numbers in front of me, but IIRC, DVD movies alone are still a $4 billion business in the U.S.    Blu-ray is another $1 billion.   As per my above post, there are three very valid uses of optical media in a computer:

1.  Watching DVDs (or Blu-rays, but god forbid Apple should support those)

2.  Transporting large files without waiting for a download.

3.  Loading CD tracks into iTunes

 

The lack of the optical drive is about two things:

- Apple's obsession with thinness

- Apple's desire to FORCE everyone to only buy media via iTunes.

 

I work with people who contribute audio files to a website.   These files are very large and the only practical way of delivering them is via optical media - I've found services such as Dropbox to be unreliable.    And while overall music industry sales are half (including downloads) of their 1999 peak, there are still several hundred million CDs sold each year in the U.S. alone.    So while 12-year-olds might have no desire for a CD/DVD drive, people who do real work and have legacy collections still need/want one.    And what's the point of buying an "all-in-one" laptop or a beautiful iMac if I have to clutter my desk with external crap?  It should have remained an option.

 

What excites me is seeing innovation on all fronts.  It looks like Jony Ive's industrial design team is pushing the envelope, now let's see the hardware design team do the same.  Though I guess we may have to wait until Apple switches from relying on Intel's architectural timelines, to charting their own with the A series architecture.  Given how fast iPads and iPhones are iterating and improving that architecture, it likely won't be long.

There may be some people that use the optical drive often.  Me?  I'm not one of them.  I purchased a MBA and an external optical drive to install some software but once that was done, I have to search the house for that thing because I haven't used that optical drive since!

 

People that complain about one more piece to carry around?  It's going to be on your desk!  People who complain about clutter?  Huh?  My external Optical cost me $40.00 bucks and it's size fits on the iMac big silver foot holding up the computer and one cord going to the back to hook it up and power the thing?  Feeble arguments from some,  lying on their bed, looking up to the ceiling to their old, faded poster of iMacs with built in optical drives! </sarcasm>

 

Embrace the future!  How did Obama put it...  the Nineties called and they want their computers with internal optical drives back!

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No kidding.  Samsung has to buy more advanced copiers to start cloning this beauty!

 

I think I'm beginning to understand where Apple and I started taking diverging paths. I base the value of the machine on what I can accomplish with it. Apple is responding to those for whom the primary measure is how it looks.

 

I get it, it really does look nice, but the BENEFIT is lost on me. Whether it's one inch deep or three it still occupies the same amount of workspace area. What does the user gain through a small reduction in depth? The footprint doesn't change. What am I missing?

 

FOR THE RECORD: No offense meant to anyone who really likes the new form. I'm not condemning it, I'm just saying I don't get it, that's all.

Sorry, but when it comes to thermal management, I'll trust Apple's method more than anyone else.  The iMac will still use fans, and due to the fan-blade design, it still makes for a much quieter environment when the heat kicks in.

I have to believe there is someone in their lab to cranks the heat all the way up and watches what it does.  I trust they know that much.

However, I will apply for a trademark for "Fan-gate" and "Heat-gate".  Any other ones?

The chin it's sill got that chin!!! You would have thought after 7 years plus they could have come up with a design without it.

 

Why? They like it.

 

Anyone else notice that you cannot buy an iMac right now, and will not be able to buy an iMac for, at minimum, another week? Apple is no longer selling the iMac. That's a powerful statement.

 

Not even preorders:

 

I'd rather have a PC
-said by no one

 

Apple laptops have good thermal management provided that you don't use them for 100% CPU (on all cores) + 100% GPU tasks for a long time. If you do, CPU heat rises up to 90ºC and fans spin at max speed, and just touching the laptop can make you feel a bit worried about if such use could cause harm to your laptop: they don't seem to be designed for such a 100% resources work.

 

While I understand that this "to the limit" thermal behaviour might be reasonable for laptops, I don't agree to have it on a desktop. The new iMac design looks like if it can suffer the same thermal limits as current Apple laptops, and that wouldn't be nice. If you look at the photos posted today, you'll see the iMac advertised with last generation games... but... if playing such games pushes the iMac thermal design to the limit, then it's not a good design, no matter how much I love this new look.

 

I agree. As a photographer needing to swap cards out frequently, this is not optimal. I would have rather it been on the bottom. 

These people that suddenly show up with made-up statistics ("optical media less common today than floppies back in the day") dont add nothing to an educated well formed discussion.

 

Thank you for your reply. I was about to do the same thing and expose the same arguments. I'll also add, buying classical and opera albums on mp3 / iTunes format is a big no-no for me. Still go for optical there. And should I ignore my +1000 CD collection? my +1000 DVD collection?

 

Extra note. I work with a lot of 2 minute to 10 minute video spots, from various sources including TV stations and media companies, and their favorite storage solution is still the DVD. You try looking professional to a costumer by sending dropbox download links or through a USB drive. "Please return USB drive to us after you are done".. Uh... No.

 

Sorry. All in one this is not.

I thought the best part of the event was when Apple Insider's live blog announced the new iMacs have the retina display.

You can still use Firewire with a Thunderbolt to Firewire adaptor - at least there are two Thunderbolt ports. But yeah, Firewire hard drives won't be made any more.

Re: I thought the best part of the event was when Apple Insider's live blog announced the new iMacs have the retina display.

 

They do if you stand far enough away !!!

Only in the 21 inch. I fear it's a laptop drive - I'd rather have 750 GB at 7200-rpm (instead of 1 TB at 5400-rpm), as you can get in the MacBook Pro.

I agree with you - I use the optical drive almost daily (I produce DVDs of martial arts workshops).

Thanks for bringing reason into the discussion. Now get ready for the backlash.

According to Apple, the Retina MBP cuts glare significantly. However, I find that the glare is still there, it just isn't as sharp (it's not like a mirror anymore, it kind of spreads the glare out to a wider area). It looks pretty unnatural to me. This sounds better, but we'll see how it actually looks.

 

Where's the cord?

Don't speak too soon - with Apple's quality control lately, some of them just might melt.

And third, they had to cripple some components (5400-rpm drive laptop drive in a desktop).

This was exactly what I was hoping for!

 

I'm looking forward to ordering a 21.5" with the 1 TB fusion drive.

That's great, if you like compressed music, obnoxious Hulu commercials, and watching Netflix through the Silverlight player (and not getting recent movies). That's how life should be - a descent toward the bottom.

I hope the 1TB HDD isn't a Seagate

 

http://www.apple.com/support/imac-harddrive/

You need one of these

 

Very nice machine, but marketing pictures are little misrepresenting the true thickness.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apples-new-imac-thicker-than-it-seems

I actually believed that it was 5mm thick throughout the machine, since unable to watch the launch presentation. Little disappointed that it is not and other people will be, once they see the machine in-store.

Maybe old fashioned and just like pure honesty.

Do the new iMacs support jumbo frames? My i7 27" iMac doesn't and I dream of one day being able to re-enable jumbo frames on the home LAN. 

"What am I suppose to do with the hundreds of floppy disks I have" said by thousands when the original iMac came out.

I understand people still have a need for optical discs but in a couple of years it won't matter. There will still be a market for external optical disc drives for years to come and eventually those will be phased out just like floppy drives.

I'm sure apple's has looked at the statistics and realized the majority of users rarely use an optical drive and its just wasted space and stupidity expensive to repair for users when it fails while external optical drives run $40 or so.

Personally I haven't had a need for a optical drive in my MacBook Air since I got it in 2011. Every single program is downloadable and I usually do that when I have the disc just download the latest version to be safe like I always have done. Music is purchased online (amazon, iTunes etc) and movies are played on my Blu-ray player

 

It's difficult to tell whether this is sarcasm. It should be sarcasm, but I'm not entirely sure. The reason thickness shouldn't matter much with a desktop is that it has virtually no effect on where it can be placed or how it can be used. The cords tend to ensure that it won't be moved around much, and this doesn't offer anything in the way of device consolidation. If you were sitting in front of one, you'd never notice the difference in density. What concerns me is that Apple has in the past prioritized aesthetics over things like quiet operation. The mini can generate a fair amount of fan noise, and this isn't something that should be necessary on a desktop. Desktops should not be subject to potential throttling or noise issues as you would have with a notebook. Otherwise that is yet another advantage ticked off the list. In terms of glare reduction, I like that part. Matte coatings apply a very small bump so that light is reflected in different angles or scattered. It's somewhat of a micro-faceted effect. Taking this approach of just trying to reduce glare as much as possible isn't so bad. If color viewing is critical, you should work in a light controlled environment anyway. It's just important that the user isn't obviously reflected due to the backlight from the display.

 

The bumpiness causes it to reflect in different directions when viewed from the front. I'm still disturbed by some aspects of this design. I've seen a bunch of imac problems, although I kind of want to like it.

The 2011 imac can already get pretty hot as it is. You should wait for others to beta test these things for you or purchase it at a time when you'll definitely have time to test it thoroughly within the return period.

One benefit is that it looks a lot nicer on your desk. The other is that it will sell a lot more if it looks nice. By the way you are talking I am not sure you remember what computers looked like 15 years ago. Hideous. Most people take pleasure in using a beautifully piece of equipment. Most people like their offices and homes to look nice. As long as the new iMac is as good, or better than its predecessor it's a win win. Remember that design can never stay still - if it does it moves backwards. That applies to 'looks' as much as technological design / development.

So when you say you are diverging, do you mean to say that you'd be happy with a souped up Quadra and lots of cables and ports as long as you have a big monitor?

It's white (^_-)

I wouldn't think Anobit has anything to do with this. This is all making the OS know where to put files and making the file system see it as one drive. Anobit should be bringing up more reliable NAND and perhaps better controllers, of which I'm hoping means we can get faster and smaller NAND without the issues currently associated with them.

"Insanely thin" is silly, and sacrifices reliability.

I'm an engineer, so I know something about technical design.  The thinner a computer is, the more tightly packed the components, the hotter it will run, the more likely something will fail.  This is just basic "laws of physics" stuff.  In addition, the fact that they had to struggle with getting the "screen bonding" process to work is another indication that they're on the hairy edge of this thing failing (e.g. screen delaminating over time, air bubbles appearing, etc).  Of course it looks cool, but let's face it, the older iMac looked extremely cool also (dare I say, "cool enough"?).  By pushing the packaging envelope in this way, Apple has sacrificed reliability and robustness, just to go from "ridiculously thin" to "insanely thin".  And who ultimately pays the price?  We do -- either by having to pay for Apple Care to protect our failure-prone new toy, or (if we roll the dice) by having to replace it years before we should have had to.   I would personally MUCH rather have an iMac that is less thin, has an optical drive, and will let me sleep at night not worrying that I'm "on the edge of failure" with my new toy.

1) Can't wait for December. Bought a desk and desk chair on Amazon last week in anticipation of my big move back to a desktop PC after about 12 years with a notebook.

2) FW is gone!

If you are swapping cards out often I'd think you'd have an external USB card reader for that.