Updated eMacs, iMacs expected in April - Page 2

that isn't necessary on the whole line, just laptops (as it is currently) Bluetooth 2 should come with 512MB RAM though.

23" iMac is coming...

This is basically a pre-requisite to cheaper 17 and 20" models. Apple doesn't want you to buy a tower, they would rather sell you a more expensive iMac. So, while the 17 and 20" models are set to fall in price, this primes the model range for a high end model to step in at the 1999 price.

There are no balance issues, the sunflower arm is gone afterall, and the larger the screen, the less bezel, so it scarecly has to be larger than the current 20" model, just a tad wider.

Visually, it absolutely makes sense, Apple is slowly paring the iMac's visual interface down to a screen and keyboard. The larger screen means that the desktop dominates your view, it simplifies the AIO even further. It will happen, it will be good...

personally i can deal with a 23" new iMac g5 model at the 1999 price...

only if however the 17 and 20 inchers show improvements of video card, ram and/or hard disk bottleneck issue. personally i can deal with 17 and 20 inchers holding at their price points should these improvements actually happen

given the above, more power to apple and whoever that enjoys a f8cking kick as 23 incher... get some sweet speakers and/or sub, and that's a nice little personal home theater, hell, you can slide your office chair to the side, kick back on a lounge with friends/loved ones/the chick/guy you're trying to seduce and watch a dvd/ divx/ whatever...

Apple Computer was founded April 1, 1976.

I do not think any respected rumor site would be silly enough to use April 1 as a date unless they felt certain their info was reliable. After all, no site wants the ire of Mac users on them for pulling a bad April Fool's Joke.

I noticed the price of refurb iMac G5 1.8 17" and 20" have dropped $50. Clearing inventory perhaps?

I have a current iMac on order - it's taking a lot longer for them to deliver it than I thought and they're estimating 15 or 16 March to me now. Would I be able to cancel at this stage, and if so, should I?

You can cancel. I changed my order from a 17" iMac to a 20" the day before it was supposed to ship.

Would I? Depends on you. I order for the present and rarely wait for the next best thing. I would suggest getting all the ram you can in it. I dread opening the iMac up and putting in more ram. I had 2 x 512 chips put in it. I wish I just got the full 2 gig and been done with it but Apple's ram prices are outrageious.

Eric

Apple has never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, put a decent graphics card in their consumer line. Don't hold your breath, expect just a memory upgrade if we're lucky.

yeah you know, it sounds like heresy but now that i am 'married' to the mac i wouldn't mind having a 'mistress' on the side -- a build-your-own winXP gaming rig with some nvidia/ati SLI thingy, for half-life2, counter-strike condition zero/source, and hmmm... maybe some other games

nahhh f8ck it i think i'll just buy a PS2

hmm gotta get a job first before i consider either option \

Get the PS2. Though this is bound to offend some, a computer as a gaming machine is idiotic (no matter the platform). There aren't enough unique titles to justify it, and the sorts of games that are appreciably better on a computer (not fps) but things like simms, rts, etc... tend to be just as good on a lower spec machine. A computer to satify the measurbators will run about $1000. The same thousand will buy a PS2 and at least a dozen games, but 15-20 if you shop smart. The PS2 will work, and won't crash...

Buy whatever you like for computing, WIN or Mac, both are good. Just don't make gaming the measure of either, unless of course you derive more satisfaction from frame-rate comparos than actually playing the games themselves...

i enjoyed Command and Conquer Generals on an eMac 1.25ghz so generally i agree with you... i am not an FPS head for the most part, but i am dying to check out Half-Life 2..!!

but i am glad i am not going to throw myself into the gaming scene, even though i got into UT2004-ONS-TORLAN for a while, and i enjoy a good PoolDay or IceWorld on CounterStrike, and after a few levels of Doom3, i lost interest in it... but i do want to check out HalfLife2...!!

thanks for the advice basically i am just gonna wait and keep on harassing my local internet gaming cafe to get HalfLife2... until then i've got counterStrike whenever i've got an itchy finger..!! seriously, after watching quite a number of episodes of Alias i feel i have gotten better at counterStrike.. i've stopped shooting at legs and feet, i watch my ammo (short clean bursts), anticipate the enemy, use dumb teammates as decoys, take cover, switch to handgun in emergencies, reload only when i know it's safe, and lay down cover fire when running away

or maybe that day the guys I was playing against just sucked

That's why i love crucial!
(www.crucial.com)

Ps2 blows vs a cheap pc for gamming.My god i almost cry when I hear that.Ps2 can't do vertext and pixil shading,no aniotopic filtering,I no even sure trilinar filtering,Enveromental bump mapping (make shiny surfaces like light reflecting off a marble floor and making textures not look flat,Dot3 bumpmapping and way more.Ps2 hardware in grafix is about the same a working with DX5/6 or whatever version of opengl was when quake3 came out or before.I can't even do t&l the major feat of dx7.

my system is old 1.16ghz Amd Xp with 768mb sdram with a gf4ti4400 and i can play farcry,hl2,doom 3,any new game at 1024x768 or 800x600.
Doom 3 At 800x600 with high quaity i got 20 to 40 fps and it looked good

my system cost me 250 bucks +150 for the video card over a year ago.U don't need to spend 1000bucks on a pc.for gamming u only do once and a while.

I can't see a 23" iMac. What would be the rational for it?

This would have to be one heck of an expensive machine. A fast G5, at least. Maybe two. It would have to have at least a 9600 128MByte card. A large HD, better audio in and out, more ports. At least one Firewire 800, and 1 400. 3 or four USB 2 ports. etc.

As I say, expensive. Who would buy it? I wouldn't. I've been doing video, publishing, and photo work for years. This would be fast enough, but if it's not upgradable, forget it.

This is the year of HD. We need an iMac HD

yup.. 23" cinema display technically can handle 1080p full HDTV spec

now cram that into a sweet g5 iMac and you're surfing the year of HD..!**

an complement it with an Elgato HDTV tuner/receiver thingy. f8cking sweet personal home theatre dude...

**23" iMac g5 may need better video card to do HDTV/video/GPU number crunching

Yeppers, an HD iMac would totally RULE! If the price were right I bet Apple would sell lots of them, just keep it at the current $1900. Oh, and put in a good video chipset!

23" and 30" are still far too expernsive. In the UK it's £699 for 20" £1249 for 23" and £2099 for 30" They really need to get the 23" down to £1000 if it's going to sell properly (as well as fixing the magenta)

When I'm busy shooting the bad guys I often exclaim "My God this thing can't do vertext!" and "Where the hell is the aniotopic filtering damnit!?" and get so distracted that I get blown to pieces. I blame the lack of of Dot3 bumpmapping for my demise.

Yeah, very funny guys.

HD 1920 x 1080 on the iMac 23". Ha, Ha.

Try $2999.95 That would be closer.

Well i never liked any consels after i got into pc gaming there just no match vs a pc or even a mac.I like rts games like warcraft 1/2/3,fps,turn based games like civ2/3 and kohan,role playing games like BGate 1/2+addion,neverwinternights,and many others,space sims like X2-the threat,decent freespace and the list goes on.same with fps like hl1/2,doom3,thief 1/2/3 etc.

I don't game on the fastest comp in the world.
athlon xp1800 @1.16ghz,768mb sdram@100mhz cas 2,2,2 and a gf4ti4400.cost to me was 250cdn +150cdn for my gf4ti4400 over a year ago and no its not a dell its all retail parts and a enermax 350 watt ps. I just moved my hdd,cdrw,sound card over from my old celeron 366 that i have got in 2000.So pretty much i am saying even if your a part time gammer u don't need to spend a crap load for the fastest just to game on a pc.Still have way more choices for great games than what a ps2/xbox,game cube.

Here kicker my system ran doom 3 at 800x600 @high setting's and i got between 25 to 40 fps .

You have more choices on a PC since your preferred game types practically define what PC gaming is about today. Actually it has become a niche.

I have played PC games for at least ten years, and will do that again sometime in the future because there are things only a PC can do properly, but right now I'm obscenely happy with a console. Actually I want to buy additional consoles to further expand the game selection I have access to. The only thing that pisses me off about consoles is their lack of support for standard computer monitors and standard peripherals.

If we were talking about an average person who already has a Mac for "computery" stuff, consoles are the obvious choice. On the average, consoles have the wider selection of games, the game quality is both better and more consistent, and the console is cheaper, even ignoring the fact that it takes know-how and time (= money) to locate parts, assemble and troubleshoot a cheap PC.

PC's (even high end) blow, they don't even have dynamic radiosity rendering or raytracing. I almost cry when I think some people would play such inferior games, when superior eyecandy has been in Pixar movies for over ten years

Again, there are games and game types where the PC reigns supreme, but moddability, networking, standard input devices and ubiquituousness due to dual use are the reasons for their success. Not graphics.

And regarding graphics and media, technology is really a minuscule part of it. Most PC games get stomped in graphics by older, weaker consoles running older games. Why? Because the game studio actually cared and hired good enough graphic artists, animators, motion capture experts instead of sitting the lead programmer in front of MS Paintbrush. I could make 512x512 textures and populate a map with them, and they would utterly suck compared to a real texture artist working with 64x64 textures and the same map.
Oops. You just showed you don't understand what T&L means. It's a hardware acceleration feature in *graphics cards* for offloading operations to the GPU that the CPU would otherwise perform. A PS2 does not have a "graphics card". PS2's CPU and its vector coprocessors are purposely designed for the specific group of tasks that includes T&L, so there is no need to offload that anywhere. The whole term makes absolutely no sense in this context. It's like you'd say "Ferraris don't come from the factory with nitrous, so they aren't fast". A purpose built tool needs no add-ons to do the job!

nevermind..

I forgot add that point about consoles they are easy to setup for the avg person.my sister had a ps2 for like a week and 1/2 then the dvd drive died.Even when your looking up parts there alot of good forums for ppl to ask for help on building a pc and troubleshoot and I am part of 1 pc forum.


ncix.com is a pretty good spot to buy a custom built pc from i find if u are live canada.
well i will say i am not the avg comp user and i like to learn more about everything computer realted on mac's/linux/Windows and i goin to try to get a copy of oracal x86 and play with that maybe after i get my new harddrive.My 2nd hdd a scsi2 9.1 giger don't like spinning up till it get a "trigger" from windowsxp booting up so when i had linux on there on my scsi but if i shut down the pc i couldn't get the boot loader to show up because my scsi never spin up to say it was there .

i thought i heard doom4 and half-life3 and UT2006 will feature dynamic radiosity and up to 64-bounce raytracing? all thanks to the ATI Radeon SuperDuperUltra XXXXXTTTT8000000000 card which comes with a separate minibar-sized-fridge unit to cool the damn thing

Gon i know what Hardware t&l is btw Transformation & Lighting.
Well about on consoles they are 1 spec for each so they can optimize grafix and code for but then they have to worry about low memory and then too they are on the market for years.Example look at deus Ex 1 (i think its for mac too)The maps where pretty big looked not to bad for its age and used Unreal Torament engine and it was built for the pc.Deus Ex 2 was built for the xbox and it used a heavly modified Unreal warfare engine,looked pretty darn good over the frist one but then there was the small maps because of it working with less than 60mb of ram.Same thing with thief 3 small maps.When there selling games for mac/pc they gotta think about what does most of the market that would buy this have avg ram,avg video card,avg cpu.So givin that there is they gotta have modes like doom3 and hl2 or just 1 mode and pick what user system to make it for low,mid,high.

Doom 3 on mac is prime example where there targeting the market and hardware right now so far with the demo as it looks u lucky ppl with dual g5 1.8 and up with x800 or 6800ddl/GT be able to play it and anyone that has a new imac possably upriver without a paddle and the upper G4 users your worst off than the imac G5 users.
I know there more work to be done for doom 3 on mac.
Its the same with your's mac's its a control platform with 1 chipset maker,motherboard maker and even apple controls video drivers.With the software u have is optimize too the teeth or getting there.Pc market has many chipset makers,audio,ati,nv,3dlabs,etc. then there hardware makers the list goes on and it is a hard platform to control.Even with MS flaws it does not a bad job keeping all that hardware/software goin but is not always easy.

sunilraman u shouldn't throw stones at glass houses u know giving the fact the only way g5 got to 2.5ghz atm is because of water cooling.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/G5.ars/1
The bottom of the page he says the temp and u ppl that have this system post your temps to prove me incorrect.i would like to be proved wrong about it.
This is not to flame but with temps like that with water cooling the would of been no way in u know where apple could of done it with what they do with the dual 2ghz.

Sorry for the double post.But look i know i goin to be the black sheep here givin the fact i don't own a mac.I would like to have a older G4 PM bare bone.Just one to play but money tight so i can't.Heck i like to have a older sun sparc system to play with.I love tech on computers on any platform there my car per say ppl like rebuilding old cars and spend XXXX amount of money on them to just see what it looks like after there done.or buy a 10k ski doo or 4 wheeler.

Not owning a Mac is not a problem (as far as these forums are concerned). I do hope you get a Mac soon for your sake!

hey what did i do? as you see from my above posts, i mentioned i was considering either setting up a gaming-only PC for half-life2 and counterstrike condition zero/ counterstrike source because i got hooked on this in the past few years. and i loved ONS-TORLAN UT2004 for a while, which runs like a dog in a wheelchair on my iBook g4 933mhz 256mb RAM...

also i was considering just a console instead of worrying (yup, i got other things to worry about) about a build-my-own box although its fun to go back to the old skool on that (i was digging in and looking at motherboards and upgrading and stuff since the 486 days)**

what stones did i throw?

**edit: i Switched into Mac mostly in 2000-2001 because i was quite 'focused' on being and being seen as a designer, and then stayed hooked on Macs till this day because 1. it just works 2. see number 1. 3. because of number 1 its easier to help my parents with it. i still like to go and have a nice CounterStrike PoolDay session at my local internet games cafe... every now and then

just to clarify this, this was just a lighthearted comment not meant to make bad fun of pc or mac...

and yes, cooling will be an important issue for pc and mac in the next 5 years...

of course no current hardware* is designed to do radiosity and raytracing in real time... not yet, anyway...

*edit: as in off-the shelf 'consumer' GPU cards

Good for you. But while you might be able to remember (or google) what the abbreviation stands for, you made it obvious you do not understand what T&L means, you don't understand PS2 architecture, or you don't understand either.

The gpu, instead of the cpu, makes the calculations for the moves and rotations of the vertices and the lighting of the polygons.Proggramming it no i can't do that.

sunilraman I take the stones part back.I just really makes me worry about the G5 2.5ghz dual running so hot 75-80°C underload with water cooling.I hope the ppl luck with that setup because if a fan start to or does dies on the radrator.I hope u are close to the power plug to give it a yank.Max core i think is 90C even still.

PPC chips have always been designed to run hotter than x86 chips. I don't find the temps to be all that startling. PC types jump up and down with glee when they see it though.

If someone could show evidence that Macs and their chips have a shorter lifetime because of this I would find it to be interesting, but there isn't any because it's not true.

Most all high-end chips run at these high temps (I'm not including x86 in that category, as they don't qualify as high-end).

I know PPC run hot.My point was its awful close a g5 2.5 running at 75-80°C or more if u live in a warmer parts of the world.When your max core temp is 90C before u should really start getting like plz don't burn oh crap nooooooo point.Then there the point about lower life span i never said anything about that.But there is a bigger risk of thing happing that will fry your cpu on that setup.


1)Lower than spec fan speed on the radrator so temps start to clime even closer to the max temp or well above it and damage or fry it.No fan is the same thats why if u look at spec's they will say + or- XX%.
2)A fan dieds out of the 2 and kills your chip.

U gotta admite if u had 2 systems side by side and both the same and one running say 55to 65C and the other running 75-80°C with a max core temp of 90C what would u choose?I would choose the 55 to 65 temp one.

no worries thomaz

we apple users like our PPC running hot because in the cooler parts of the world especially during winter, you don't have to buy a separate heater for your room

umm... keeps you warm at night, that PowerMac g4 or g5, purring away, downloading/ rendering/ whatever

i have not read reports on reliability, stability, etc. of the PowerMac dual g5 2.5ghz with liquid cooling so i can't comment

but like previous poster said, because it runs hotter does not mean it is less reliable, apple G3 and G4 laptops are quite warm a lot of the time but the CPUs seem to be able to last many (5-10) years in most cases

apple has admitted g5 is a challenge because of heat issues, trust me, their throwing their best and brightest as well as a lot of R&D cash at the problem to solve it, in two areas:
1. bring the powermac g5 to and above 3ghz
2. the powerbook g5

Well the only way they will get to the big 3g's is by possably IBM use SOI on there chips and i don't see why they an't.They are helping Amd with this and amd new 90nm SOI chips run cooler and burn alot less power than there older 130nm chips.Same as Ibm helping Amd with strained silicone tech to allow much faster gate's swithing=more mhz.

Well I think there is also a lot of talk on the next gen PPC chips based on the Power5 architecture, current G5 chip is based on the Power4 architecture

Thomaz, I'll reply to both of your last posts here.

First of all, if both of those machines were the same e.g. x86's, then definitely the 55C one. The max core temp on that one could very well be 90C or higher as well. But if one was the Mac and it ran at 80c, then no question, the Mac.

When in a hot climate, and or a humid one, ALL computer manufacturers highly recommend air conditioning. NONE of these machines is advised to be operated at temps higher than 85 degrees. It is irresponsible to run them at 90+ temps, esp. with high humidity.

Secondly, IBM's PPC chips do use SOI. Where did you get the idea that they don't? They also use copper interconnects.

As IBM invented both technologies, they use them on their own chips first. AMD's chips got SOI later than the PPC's did. As an aside, silicone is soft and malleable. It's used for calk, not chips. You mean silicon, as in quartz.

Emphasis mine. You sure about that? Since it was, apparently, the move from 130nm to 90nm that made the watercooling necessary for the Powermacs...
Shrunk processors eat less power, but the heat is harder to dissipate, thus resulting in higher core temperature.