You know the future of iMac is going to be like a 3 chip design (CPU, GPU, FlashRAM)
Whenever I see the terms flash and RAM used like this I get excited. The problem is there is no such thing as "FlashRAM"* no matter what Apple wants you to believe.
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with a screen, running a cloud computing online apps platform, infact I envisage within a very few short years nearly all computing devices will evolve into this new format.
Cloud computing has certain potential, that I honestly believe but no body is going whole hog into to this. There are so many real problems that companies and individuals will not want to give up local apps and storage. Right off the bat you have huge issues with security that few companies will find acceptable. Then everybody has an issue with the cloud not being available 100% of the time.
Frankly there is a lot of wishful thinking with respect to the cloud. While it certainly has its positivesI don't think we will ever get people handing over all of their needs to the cloud.
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Hardware is virtually already perfected possibly over-bloated, all that needs to change to open pandoras box is the ISPs constraint on limiting connection speed.
If you haven't already noticed Apple have already bought into and adopted this future.
The above statement is just insane. Since when is hardware perfected? Seriously iPad would represent one approach to your cloud platform of the future but it is far form perfected hardware wise. The jump in performance from iPad 1 to iPad should high light just how far we are form perfected.
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That means the iMac et al are already set on a fixed path of change along the lines of the macAir as we have already been intimated too, and all that is left is the case of when the next major redesign accures, I reckon that will be possibly 2012 when SSDs become cheap enough to be viable and the momentum of demand takes over.
In what reality did this thought escape from? The AIRs serve a certain class of user well but they are by no means the end all. AS to SSD's Apple will most certainly move to them as soon as they can, but that has more to do with machine performance and nothing to do with the cloud. In fact I find it simply amazing that you would try to tie the two together.
As a side note SSD's highlight why the cloud will be such a hard sell, it is all about fast local storage. There is simply no way that we will see the low latencies, speed of transfer and reliability in the could any time soon that comes close to local storage.
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Of course cloud computing will eventually put an end to desktop peripheral storage devices, only leaving the professional creative (television channels) and service provider (Cloud) markets in need of the "Xmac" (redesigned MacPro) type of PCIe computer.
Obviously you are dreaming here.
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My games designer son came out with quite a statement the other day having his feet in both camps said there really isn't that much of a divide between MacOS and Windows 7 to decide between today, and he wonders if such large OS systems will be displaced by emerging mobile platforms in virtually all domestic cloud devices, even the iMac.
Actually I see the opposite, a digital hub to support all of these devices needs a more robust and reliable platform. In essence you end up with the hub becoming your local cloud if you will. A place where you keep the stuff that shouldn't be out in the wild or where fast access is extremely important. Actually things like iPhone just highlight that you need a support system beyond what can be found in the cloud.
I do think the time is coming to ditch internal disk drives on the iMac and laptops. Those who really care can always buy an external one. Maybe another year or two, but we're definitely almost there.
That won't happen. The economics don't make sense. Think about it you can by a hell of a lot of storage space for what it costs you to remain connected to the cloud. Storage space that will remain orders of magnitude faster into the foreseeable future.
Oh by storage space I mean what ever tech you can afford and are willing to use. I can see traditional magnetic disks going away real soon. That is no big deal as we have flash drives for the near term and other technologies to support storage needs into the future.
Also, one might not always be in range while traveling....especially abroad to the all powerful "cloud".
The cloud loses most of its appeal as soon as you describe it as 'computers sitting somewhere else', which is essentially what it is.
As you say, it will gain importance, especially in the role of content delivery but I don't see it replacing local storage for everyone. It certainly can for some people. I can imagine people using an iPad-type device and logging into an OS running remotely for anything the iPad can't do on its own but even if you take a consumer HD camcorder and record a film, you're talking about 20GB of data or 160Gbits.
To upload that to a server for editing in 30 minutes would require a sustained upstream of 88Mbits/s. It may happen eventually but we're probably averaging round about 1Mbits/s upstream these days, although I suspect lower.
You also have to consider why you'd rely on servers over local storage. Not everything needs to go into a data centre so there's no reason to purposely make it slower to access.
Computer parts will naturally get smaller and lower powered and it will be interesting to see what manufacturers do when mobile hardware becomes fast enough to use in a desktop form factor. I'm sure we will see dual/quad-core ARM SoCs in desktop machines and TVs fairly soon and they won't look any different from normal displays.
Because of the local storage requirement, I reckon the mobile device will be the dominant device connecting wirelessly to standard screens. I think the storage syncing is too much of an annoyance. Eventually just get a 1TB SSD card inside the phone and store everything there (encrypted of course) and backed up at home.
Computers are personal devices and smartphones are the closest extensions of ourselves we can have with us at all times.
An alternative route people often describe is where you walk around with no technology except say an RFID card and if you sit on the train, the table could be a touch-enabled screen and you access personal content that way and take calls on a wireless headset linked to it. That sort of idea kind of works and could even work in a swimming pool but it requires you to conform to the device rather than the other way round and you have to change context too much.
People will try to push all sorts of different form factors so we'll just have to see which one works out best in practise.
I think one day the iMac will be replaced by mobile tech and it's interesting that they are also AIOs really but I'd say people don't mind that setup as much when then the cost is lower.
Well, I'm excited about potentially new iMacs. Sure, the changes will be all under the hood, and the new one will probably look just like the one I have now (which I consider a good thing, frankly).
But if they do come out with SB, Thunderbolt iMacs this year, I may consider selling mine in order to get the new one. There's nothing wrong at all with the 27" 3.06Ghz iMac I have. I love it, and it's caused me zero problems. But if there were a new one out, I would really consider it.
Well, I'm excited about potentially new iMacs. Sure, the changes will be all under the hood, and the new one will probably look just like the one I have now (which I consider a good thing, frankly).
But if they do come out with SB, Thunderbolt iMacs this year, I may consider selling mine in order to get the new one. There's nothing wrong at all with the 27" 3.06Ghz iMac I have. I love it, and it's caused me zero problems. But if there were a new one out, I would really consider it.
Agree completely. I have a dual core 3 gig, 8800GS 24 inch iMac. It's very nice. It's a work of art. But I'd happily sell/trade it in against the forthcoming revision. Think I can wait until iMacs go six core with a much better gpu and stick in an internal SD drive.
That would be my dream iMac at the moment.
But the rumoured iMac sounds like it will be a very nice revision.
Yeah, you and your eight friends go buy Windows boxes.
I seem to recall Apple coming out with Boot Camp. Followed by products by VMWare and Parallels. If even Apple has acknowledged a need to sometimes use Windows Apple better pay attention to the needs of its customers. Especially long time customers. I know more people that have dropped Apple and switched from Macs to Windows then the other way around. In fact I don't know anyone that has switched from PC to Mac.
I seem to recall Apple coming out with Boot Camp. Followed by products by VMWare and Parallels. If even Apple has acknowledged a need to sometimes use Windows Apple better pay attention to the needs of its customers. Especially long time customers. I know more people that have dropped Apple and switched from Macs to Windows then the other way around. In fact I don't know anyone that has switched from PC to Mac.
Well, I switched to Mac in '07 for two reasons: I had been working on G4's/G5's for years at my former workplace and Bootcamp would still allow me to run whatever Windows stuff I needed. Funny, but I really haven't used Bootcamp all that much. These days I only ever use it for an occasional game.
I know of four more people who have made the switch to Mac since, and I know one former Mac (OS8/9) user who switched to Windows because he felt Macs were no longer worth the higher sticker price.
I could easily switch back to Windows, and I just might. I love OSX but if the next MacPro is not a killer, I'd probably get me a custom rackmount PC workstation. The few head-to-head tests that are out there generally indicate that Windows actually performs better for the most part anyway.
Then there is the fact that Apple seems to be losing interest in high-performance computing: with that in mind a $4000 MacPro seems a bit of a risky investment, all the more so when a comparable (not identical) PC can be had for $2500.
But clients do expect to see an Apple machine, and operating a PC is still a bit of a hard sell in audio and advertising land.
It's to ease the transition of "Switching", nothing more.
There's nothing you can do in Windows that you can't in OS X.
So every piece of software is available for both platforms? Even some that are available aren't equal in capability and features. Mac users were really rejoicing about Autocad for OSX until they found out that Autodesk cut out some things for the Mac version. Then a lot of them said why buy the Mac version.
Comments
You know the future of iMac is going to be like a 3 chip design (CPU, GPU, FlashRAM)
Whenever I see the terms flash and RAM used like this I get excited. The problem is there is no such thing as "FlashRAM"* no matter what Apple wants you to believe.
with a screen, running a cloud computing online apps platform, infact I envisage within a very few short years nearly all computing devices will evolve into this new format.
Cloud computing has certain potential, that I honestly believe but no body is going whole hog into to this. There are so many real problems that companies and individuals will not want to give up local apps and storage. Right off the bat you have huge issues with security that few companies will find acceptable. Then everybody has an issue with the cloud not being available 100% of the time.
Frankly there is a lot of wishful thinking with respect to the cloud. While it certainly has its positivesI don't think we will ever get people handing over all of their needs to the cloud.
Hardware is virtually already perfected possibly over-bloated, all that needs to change to open pandoras box is the ISPs constraint on limiting connection speed.
If you haven't already noticed Apple have already bought into and adopted this future.
The above statement is just insane. Since when is hardware perfected? Seriously iPad would represent one approach to your cloud platform of the future but it is far form perfected hardware wise. The jump in performance from iPad 1 to iPad should high light just how far we are form perfected.
That means the iMac et al are already set on a fixed path of change along the lines of the macAir as we have already been intimated too, and all that is left is the case of when the next major redesign accures, I reckon that will be possibly 2012 when SSDs become cheap enough to be viable and the momentum of demand takes over.
In what reality did this thought escape from? The AIRs serve a certain class of user well but they are by no means the end all. AS to SSD's Apple will most certainly move to them as soon as they can, but that has more to do with machine performance and nothing to do with the cloud. In fact I find it simply amazing that you would try to tie the two together.
As a side note SSD's highlight why the cloud will be such a hard sell, it is all about fast local storage. There is simply no way that we will see the low latencies, speed of transfer and reliability in the could any time soon that comes close to local storage.
Of course cloud computing will eventually put an end to desktop peripheral storage devices, only leaving the professional creative (television channels) and service provider (Cloud) markets in need of the "Xmac" (redesigned MacPro) type of PCIe computer.
Obviously you are dreaming here.
My games designer son came out with quite a statement the other day having his feet in both camps said there really isn't that much of a divide between MacOS and Windows 7 to decide between today, and he wonders if such large OS systems will be displaced by emerging mobile platforms in virtually all domestic cloud devices, even the iMac.
Actually I see the opposite, a digital hub to support all of these devices needs a more robust and reliable platform. In essence you end up with the hub becoming your local cloud if you will. A place where you keep the stuff that shouldn't be out in the wild or where fast access is extremely important. Actually things like iPhone just highlight that you need a support system beyond what can be found in the cloud.
I do think the time is coming to ditch internal disk drives on the iMac and laptops. Those who really care can always buy an external one. Maybe another year or two, but we're definitely almost there.
That won't happen. The economics don't make sense. Think about it you can by a hell of a lot of storage space for what it costs you to remain connected to the cloud. Storage space that will remain orders of magnitude faster into the foreseeable future.
Oh by storage space I mean what ever tech you can afford and are willing to use. I can see traditional magnetic disks going away real soon. That is no big deal as we have flash drives for the near term and other technologies to support storage needs into the future.
Also, one might not always be in range while traveling....especially abroad to the all powerful "cloud".
The cloud loses most of its appeal as soon as you describe it as 'computers sitting somewhere else', which is essentially what it is.
As you say, it will gain importance, especially in the role of content delivery but I don't see it replacing local storage for everyone. It certainly can for some people. I can imagine people using an iPad-type device and logging into an OS running remotely for anything the iPad can't do on its own but even if you take a consumer HD camcorder and record a film, you're talking about 20GB of data or 160Gbits.
To upload that to a server for editing in 30 minutes would require a sustained upstream of 88Mbits/s. It may happen eventually but we're probably averaging round about 1Mbits/s upstream these days, although I suspect lower.
You also have to consider why you'd rely on servers over local storage. Not everything needs to go into a data centre so there's no reason to purposely make it slower to access.
Computer parts will naturally get smaller and lower powered and it will be interesting to see what manufacturers do when mobile hardware becomes fast enough to use in a desktop form factor. I'm sure we will see dual/quad-core ARM SoCs in desktop machines and TVs fairly soon and they won't look any different from normal displays.
Because of the local storage requirement, I reckon the mobile device will be the dominant device connecting wirelessly to standard screens. I think the storage syncing is too much of an annoyance. Eventually just get a 1TB SSD card inside the phone and store everything there (encrypted of course) and backed up at home.
Computers are personal devices and smartphones are the closest extensions of ourselves we can have with us at all times.
An alternative route people often describe is where you walk around with no technology except say an RFID card and if you sit on the train, the table could be a touch-enabled screen and you access personal content that way and take calls on a wireless headset linked to it. That sort of idea kind of works and could even work in a swimming pool but it requires you to conform to the device rather than the other way round and you have to change context too much.
People will try to push all sorts of different form factors so we'll just have to see which one works out best in practise.
I think one day the iMac will be replaced by mobile tech and it's interesting that they are also AIOs really but I'd say people don't mind that setup as much when then the cost is lower.
But if they do come out with SB, Thunderbolt iMacs this year, I may consider selling mine in order to get the new one. There's nothing wrong at all with the 27" 3.06Ghz iMac I have. I love it, and it's caused me zero problems. But if there were a new one out, I would really consider it.
Well, I'm excited about potentially new iMacs. Sure, the changes will be all under the hood, and the new one will probably look just like the one I have now (which I consider a good thing, frankly).
But if they do come out with SB, Thunderbolt iMacs this year, I may consider selling mine in order to get the new one. There's nothing wrong at all with the 27" 3.06Ghz iMac I have. I love it, and it's caused me zero problems. But if there were a new one out, I would really consider it.
Agree completely. I have a dual core 3 gig, 8800GS 24 inch iMac. It's very nice. It's a work of art. But I'd happily sell/trade it in against the forthcoming revision. Think I can wait until iMacs go six core with a much better gpu and stick in an internal SD drive.
That would be my dream iMac at the moment.
But the rumoured iMac sounds like it will be a very nice revision.
Lemon Bon Bon.
http://www.mojipod.sk/pozname-konfig...novych-imacov/
Oh! It can be fake also...
I'll cover these with my reply to MacTac below.
Yeah, you and your eight friends go buy Windows boxes.
I seem to recall Apple coming out with Boot Camp. Followed by products by VMWare and Parallels. If even Apple has acknowledged a need to sometimes use Windows Apple better pay attention to the needs of its customers. Especially long time customers. I know more people that have dropped Apple and switched from Macs to Windows then the other way around. In fact I don't know anyone that has switched from PC to Mac.
I seem to recall Apple coming out with Boot Camp. Followed by products by VMWare and Parallels. If even Apple has acknowledged a need to sometimes use Windows Apple better pay attention to the needs of its customers. Especially long time customers. I know more people that have dropped Apple and switched from Macs to Windows then the other way around. In fact I don't know anyone that has switched from PC to Mac.
Well, I switched to Mac in '07 for two reasons: I had been working on G4's/G5's for years at my former workplace and Bootcamp would still allow me to run whatever Windows stuff I needed. Funny, but I really haven't used Bootcamp all that much. These days I only ever use it for an occasional game.
I know of four more people who have made the switch to Mac since, and I know one former Mac (OS8/9) user who switched to Windows because he felt Macs were no longer worth the higher sticker price.
I could easily switch back to Windows, and I just might. I love OSX but if the next MacPro is not a killer, I'd probably get me a custom rackmount PC workstation. The few head-to-head tests that are out there generally indicate that Windows actually performs better for the most part anyway.
Then there is the fact that Apple seems to be losing interest in high-performance computing: with that in mind a $4000 MacPro seems a bit of a risky investment, all the more so when a comparable (not identical) PC can be had for $2500.
But clients do expect to see an Apple machine, and operating a PC is still a bit of a hard sell in audio and advertising land.
If even Apple has acknowledged a need to sometimes use Windows Apple better pay attention to the needs of its customers.
HA!
It's to ease the transition of "Switching", nothing more.
There's nothing you can do in Windows that you can't in OS X.
HA!
It's to ease the transition of "Switching", nothing more.
There's nothing you can do in Windows that you can't in OS X.
So every piece of software is available for both platforms? Even some that are available aren't equal in capability and features. Mac users were really rejoicing about Autocad for OSX until they found out that Autodesk cut out some things for the Mac version. Then a lot of them said why buy the Mac version.
Now you can have all three in one machine. How cool is that?