eMac is on borrowed time. I give it another year. ('CRTs are DEAD!')
Jade, a capable post.
I'd like to see Apple 'mini-tower' the G5 with a 0.09 rev'. In fact, they are nearly there with the G4 tower at lowest ever prices. If they could cut the price by another 10-20%, they'd be near as dammit competitive with most PC towers. A mini-tower G5 Cube would be nice.
Apple could keep the iMac 3 'AIO' (?) for those folks that like the limitations pro and con that go with it.
The eMac is a dumpy lard-ass of a computer with a below average screen, an imac retard design that glommed its way into existance because Apple knew they couldn't get the new iMac into the old iMac's price points. LCD and all that...
A redesign perhaps. A pizza box, a little bigger than the keyboard 'pizza box' of the iBook with a separate or hinged 17 inch LCD on top (iMac sans expensive chrome arm?)
So, yes. Time for an eMac funeral. Just not yet...but I think we're not too far away from it...
Apple could and should do better than the eMac. Along with the G4 tower? It's one of the two unexceptional hardware products Apple has right now.
Well firewire is better for lots of applications, but it would be nice to have USB 2 to hook up my flash drive to an emac...or get one of those usb 2 card readers. Little stuff but hey it's a nice to have.
AS a side note: most of the time windows will not see a video camera unless it has firewire. Tried with a camera with USB 2 and a firewire cable, and the camera did not exist as a video device under usb 2. Once it was plugged in via firewire everything worked fine.
Those same people would happily buy a compact tower and other manufacturers cheap display to save a little money.
I disagree. Most adults have no clue what to buy. Apple should simply drop the "e", call it a Mac and market to everyone. If its good enough for all those young impressionably kids that schools are buying it for, then it ought to be good enough for their parents too.
The original Macintosh II was a tower box. Apple did a study and discovered that less that 5% of buyers ever stuck a second card in all those empty expansion slots. (The first card was the Nubus video card). Yes, the Quadra 900 was a monster hit with the publishing crowd, but that was a professional group. People buying a computer for their home didn't make use of the expansion. That's one reason why Apple embarked on all forms of in-betweens - IIci, IIsi, Quadra 700, Quadra 640...
If Apple has learned anything since the early nineties - its that artifical brands like Centris don't sell and towers with empty slots eat into profit margins. Its my opinion that the "mini-tower" is a fantasy perpetuated by people who can't afford to pay Apple's asking rate for the top of the line and won't accept Apple's entry level offerings.
If Apple has learned anything since the early nineties - its that artifical brands like Centris don't sell and towers with empty slots eat into profit margins. Its my opinion that the "mini-tower" is a fantasy perpetuated by people who can't afford to pay Apple's asking rate for the top of the line and won't accept Apple's entry level offerings.
CRT's are not dead. The eMac is not dead.
And of course there is no need for apple if potential custiomers do not want or can't afford the products. Apple has made it pretty clear a major goal is to increase marketshare. And the product line needs to match up with what the market wants. Unfortunately not all of apples customers can afford a $2500 g5. Apple isn't striving to be the BMW of the computer market....I think they are gunning for the Honda or Toyota of computers. Highest quality and reliability in a superior product (and ever increasing marketshare). Apple doesn't need to be the cheapest to gain marketshare, but products need to be in line with market dynamics.
Apple has hsown it will not become a me too vendor, and not afraid to place bets on future tech. When the flat panel imac was released Steve Jobs said the CRT is dead, and I think Apple is waiting for the right opportunity to make their prediction come true. PCs still have serial, parellel and ps2 ports as well as floppy drives (well Dell has started listing it as an option not default configuration). Apple won't mind being the first to drop a legacy technology.
The CRT AIO form factor is here to stay, at least another year or so. The eMac needs revamping with a new motherboard and a G5 processor, but it is far from dead.
In 1988, Steve launched his NeXT cube without a floppy drive - claiming the floppy was dead and the future was CD-ROM. It took a long time before that floppy finally disappeared. In fact, a floppy drive re-appeared on subsequent NeXT models.
The eMac and its progeny will most likely continue to utilize CRTs until Apple creates an equivalently profitable business model for an LCD screen.
I never really cared for the eMac that much any way...I'm not that type of user. I like the more powerful products...that is why I bought my PowerBook when I got it last summer (2002)...but, it is a good product (the eMac) and I think they do need to replace it with a cheaper tower, like a lot of people are suggesting...I can see how a product like this would be desireable to educational facilities
I am an eMac-vangeilist. I turned my Mom-in-law on to one (1gHz with Combo) three months ago, and my Mom is going to buy one at the end of the month, my cousin will have on in early January.
Why? Simplicity.
The eMac offers everything they want out of a computing experience, AND MORE, for a price below that of comporably equipped Windows machines (and I don't mean eMachines because they SUCK AT ANY PRICE). They want, first of all, for the computer to work when they want to work. In all three cases their respective Windows machines crashed, burned, or failed repeatedly due not so much to the hardware, but the age of the machines in question. In all cases I think only my Mom's Acer Aspire reached above 333mHz. In all three cases even upgrading RAM was beyond their limited understanding of computer hardware.
What tasks do they want/need to do? The same things MOST low-power users do, write in a word processor/spreadsheet program, surf, email, chat. None of them are heavy gamers, none of them are graphics professionals.
The thing my Mom-in-law said when she first saw an eMac in a MacMall catalog was "I like this, it makes sense". She knew that all the guts lived behind the CRT screen and immediately recognized that it would:
1- save space
2- not require her to get on the floor and monkey with cables
3- the screen was large and clear enough to see without glasses or squinting
Of course OSX is a benefit too, in all cases they moved (or are moving) from Win 95/98 to OSX and the change is amazing to see. Even my Mom who is baffled by email attachments even after 6 years of computer ownership and use, understood "where things went" on my iMac.
The CRT form factor IS attractive. The eMac looks like a computer and offers an immediate familiarity to new users. It's heavy and rugged too which appeals to their sense of quality workmanship.
I tell everyone I know who's thinking of switching to look at the eMac first. I hope it sticks around for years to come because it's the best switchers tool I've ever seen, and for the price, you can't beat it.
The eMac is perfect for people who don't have a computer yet, or have one but it's so old nothing is salvageable from it.
I think Apple should make a new product line, which would basically be a cheap G5 tower. 1.6-1.8ghz (single CPU). Good graphics (radeon 9200 maybe?) and bam it into a case form factor. Use it to sell more Apple LCD panels - all adverts would carry the LCD with it.
Switchers won't switch because they are not happy about trashing all of their old CRTs/TFTs, Keyboards and mice. Even if the value of them is probably small compared to the actual computer, it's a very material possesion and what the switcher would have been looking at for months before hand.
I think Apple should make a new product line, which would basically be a cheap G5 tower. 1.6-1.8ghz (single CPU). Good graphics (radeon 9200 maybe?) and bam it into a case form factor. Use it to sell more Apple LCD panels - all adverts would carry the LCD with it.
Unfortunately Apple's 'low end' IS a 1.6GHz tower with graphics equivalent to the Radeon 9200. Apple keeps cutting the price, but you can't get something (low-end workstation) for nothing (low-end desktop price).
I direct you to the Power Mac G4, which Apple has around as a cheap tower.
I had a conversation with an Apple employee at my local CompUSA last week. I said something along the lines of the title of this thread. I have no love for the eMac. Never really have. It is like buying a fiberglass Ferrari body to put over a pontiac chassis.
But that being said, shabbasuraj is right on. The Apple guy said that the eMac has a place in education. School labs cannot handle iMacs, because the flat panels are not "kid friendly" and the "brilliant arm" gets a real workout with a roomfull of kids. Mr Apple said that, even though the iMac is a beautiful thing for a grownup or a supervised child, the eMac is much more attuned to a more durability-demanding educational setting.
In my local school, where my sister is a teacher, the labs are all eMac, and she has a 17" iMac. Kids are no longer allowed near her iMac, because the whole "finger-poked-at-flat-panel" equation does not compute with 10 year-olds.
Indeed, the eMac needs updates to it's ports. It's an anchor. It's a big, heavy, white cannonball... but it has a place. For some, the price is right as well.
With the 20" imac, the 15" has now become the entry-level consumer machine. I cannot find anyone in my MUG that has an eMac. They start with 15" iMacs and G3 iBooks.
I'm not-so-secretly hoping that the eMac gets a major revision at MWSF to turn into a mini-tower.
It would be good timing: the 20th anniversary of the Mac is coming next month. The eMac has generally been neglected this year. MWSF also tends to have a new hardware introduction of some sort. And, although I don't know if this is truly the case, the demand for a cheap tower has been steadily increasing this year. Wouldn't it be nice of Apple to release a system at $799 or less that lets people use any display they want, from a $50 17" CRT to a $2000 23" Cinema HD?
For those who dun mind a CRT dusplay, the eMac is really a good piece of machine. And its price is attractive too. It will be a pity if they are granted a funeral.
It's funeral is long overdue. Get rid of it or education only. Also get rid of the G4 tower. Lower the price of the imac to the emac range and reduce the number of models. Now introduce your headless imac or cube with a dual G4 across the range and PCI slots as well.
The iBook and iMac don't have Firewire 800. That must mean that they're going to be discontinued.
USB2 isn't really needed in the education market, and there's no reason to include it. The eMac's appeal is its price, and Apple isn't stupid enough to jack up its price just to include a feature that most of their customers won't use.
FW800 is unnecessary in a consumer product line. Considering the peripherals utilizing it are pretty unnecessary for the average consumer who picks up a white apple computer. In fact do high end PCs even come with fw800, many don't even have 6pin firewire.
But looking at the dates:
USB 2.0 was official in late 2000
FW800 2002
So it could have been in the products for nearly 3 years! An eternity in computer years.
My personal opinion is the aluminum powerbooks were actually meant to hold a different chip (really defining the year of the laptop)
Here are some observations
1. Apple had the g5 up their sleeve for quite awhile. And the redesign had to be mostly completed by Jan 2003
2. Apple tends to match products pretty closely (in terms of design: imacs and blue and white g3s, early power mac g4 and g3 powerbooks, Tibooks and later g4 powermacs and cubes
3. The aluminum design was pretty radical and added a lot of additional functionality
4. apple execs have said it is taking longer to stick a g5 in powerbooks than expected
5. it took forever for the auminum 15" pbs to come out
I think Apple initially intended to eaither create a g5 powerbook or use a significantly revised chip in the powerbooks at the beginning of the year, but the engineering was more challenging than expected. I think the g5 powerbooks will be very similar in design to the current powerbooks.
PS rumor has it 20" imacs are availible in the Apple quarterly promo store for employees...and typically discontinued products turn up there. (and emacs too)
i've heard new emac's are on their way (from a few spymac members)... also, its a great solution for college students, and while sales might not be the best, it is th only option for some. it might die after a while, but it'll go through one more makeover.
Comments
eMac is on borrowed time. I give it another year. ('CRTs are DEAD!')
Jade, a capable post.
I'd like to see Apple 'mini-tower' the G5 with a 0.09 rev'. In fact, they are nearly there with the G4 tower at lowest ever prices. If they could cut the price by another 10-20%, they'd be near as dammit competitive with most PC towers. A mini-tower G5 Cube would be nice.
Apple could keep the iMac 3 'AIO' (?) for those folks that like the limitations pro and con that go with it.
The eMac is a dumpy lard-ass of a computer with a below average screen, an imac retard design that glommed its way into existance because Apple knew they couldn't get the new iMac into the old iMac's price points. LCD and all that...
A redesign perhaps. A pizza box, a little bigger than the keyboard 'pizza box' of the iBook with a separate or hinged 17 inch LCD on top (iMac sans expensive chrome arm?)
So, yes. Time for an eMac funeral. Just not yet...but I think we're not too far away from it...
Apple could and should do better than the eMac. Along with the G4 tower? It's one of the two unexceptional hardware products Apple has right now.
Lemon Bon Bon
AS a side note: most of the time windows will not see a video camera unless it has firewire. Tried with a camera with USB 2 and a firewire cable, and the camera did not exist as a video device under usb 2. Once it was plugged in via firewire everything worked fine.
Those same people would happily buy a compact tower and other manufacturers cheap display to save a little money.
I disagree. Most adults have no clue what to buy. Apple should simply drop the "e", call it a Mac and market to everyone. If its good enough for all those young impressionably kids that schools are buying it for, then it ought to be good enough for their parents too.
The original Macintosh II was a tower box. Apple did a study and discovered that less that 5% of buyers ever stuck a second card in all those empty expansion slots. (The first card was the Nubus video card). Yes, the Quadra 900 was a monster hit with the publishing crowd, but that was a professional group. People buying a computer for their home didn't make use of the expansion. That's one reason why Apple embarked on all forms of in-betweens - IIci, IIsi, Quadra 700, Quadra 640...
If Apple has learned anything since the early nineties - its that artifical brands like Centris don't sell and towers with empty slots eat into profit margins. Its my opinion that the "mini-tower" is a fantasy perpetuated by people who can't afford to pay Apple's asking rate for the top of the line and won't accept Apple's entry level offerings.
CRT's are not dead. The eMac is not dead.
Originally posted by heaven or las vegas
If Apple has learned anything since the early nineties - its that artifical brands like Centris don't sell and towers with empty slots eat into profit margins. Its my opinion that the "mini-tower" is a fantasy perpetuated by people who can't afford to pay Apple's asking rate for the top of the line and won't accept Apple's entry level offerings.
CRT's are not dead. The eMac is not dead.
And of course there is no need for apple if potential custiomers do not want or can't afford the products. Apple has made it pretty clear a major goal is to increase marketshare. And the product line needs to match up with what the market wants. Unfortunately not all of apples customers can afford a $2500 g5. Apple isn't striving to be the BMW of the computer market....I think they are gunning for the Honda or Toyota of computers. Highest quality and reliability in a superior product (and ever increasing marketshare). Apple doesn't need to be the cheapest to gain marketshare, but products need to be in line with market dynamics.
Apple has hsown it will not become a me too vendor, and not afraid to place bets on future tech. When the flat panel imac was released Steve Jobs said the CRT is dead, and I think Apple is waiting for the right opportunity to make their prediction come true. PCs still have serial, parellel and ps2 ports as well as floppy drives (well Dell has started listing it as an option not default configuration). Apple won't mind being the first to drop a legacy technology.
The CRT AIO form factor is here to stay, at least another year or so. The eMac needs revamping with a new motherboard and a G5 processor, but it is far from dead.
Steve Jobs said the CRT is dead
In 1988, Steve launched his NeXT cube without a floppy drive - claiming the floppy was dead and the future was CD-ROM. It took a long time before that floppy finally disappeared. In fact, a floppy drive re-appeared on subsequent NeXT models.
The eMac and its progeny will most likely continue to utilize CRTs until Apple creates an equivalently profitable business model for an LCD screen.
Why? Simplicity.
The eMac offers everything they want out of a computing experience, AND MORE, for a price below that of comporably equipped Windows machines (and I don't mean eMachines because they SUCK AT ANY PRICE). They want, first of all, for the computer to work when they want to work. In all three cases their respective Windows machines crashed, burned, or failed repeatedly due not so much to the hardware, but the age of the machines in question. In all cases I think only my Mom's Acer Aspire reached above 333mHz. In all three cases even upgrading RAM was beyond their limited understanding of computer hardware.
What tasks do they want/need to do? The same things MOST low-power users do, write in a word processor/spreadsheet program, surf, email, chat. None of them are heavy gamers, none of them are graphics professionals.
The thing my Mom-in-law said when she first saw an eMac in a MacMall catalog was "I like this, it makes sense". She knew that all the guts lived behind the CRT screen and immediately recognized that it would:
1- save space
2- not require her to get on the floor and monkey with cables
3- the screen was large and clear enough to see without glasses or squinting
Of course OSX is a benefit too, in all cases they moved (or are moving) from Win 95/98 to OSX and the change is amazing to see. Even my Mom who is baffled by email attachments even after 6 years of computer ownership and use, understood "where things went" on my iMac.
The CRT form factor IS attractive. The eMac looks like a computer and offers an immediate familiarity to new users. It's heavy and rugged too which appeals to their sense of quality workmanship.
I tell everyone I know who's thinking of switching to look at the eMac first. I hope it sticks around for years to come because it's the best switchers tool I've ever seen, and for the price, you can't beat it.
I think Apple should make a new product line, which would basically be a cheap G5 tower. 1.6-1.8ghz (single CPU). Good graphics (radeon 9200 maybe?) and bam it into a case form factor. Use it to sell more Apple LCD panels - all adverts would carry the LCD with it.
Switchers won't switch because they are not happy about trashing all of their old CRTs/TFTs, Keyboards and mice. Even if the value of them is probably small compared to the actual computer, it's a very material possesion and what the switcher would have been looking at for months before hand.
Originally posted by aldo
I think Apple should make a new product line, which would basically be a cheap G5 tower. 1.6-1.8ghz (single CPU). Good graphics (radeon 9200 maybe?) and bam it into a case form factor. Use it to sell more Apple LCD panels - all adverts would carry the LCD with it.
Unfortunately Apple's 'low end' IS a 1.6GHz tower with graphics equivalent to the Radeon 9200. Apple keeps cutting the price, but you can't get something (low-end workstation) for nothing (low-end desktop price).
I direct you to the Power Mac G4, which Apple has around as a cheap tower.
Barto
But that being said, shabbasuraj is right on. The Apple guy said that the eMac has a place in education. School labs cannot handle iMacs, because the flat panels are not "kid friendly" and the "brilliant arm" gets a real workout with a roomfull of kids. Mr Apple said that, even though the iMac is a beautiful thing for a grownup or a supervised child, the eMac is much more attuned to a more durability-demanding educational setting.
In my local school, where my sister is a teacher, the labs are all eMac, and she has a 17" iMac. Kids are no longer allowed near her iMac, because the whole "finger-poked-at-flat-panel" equation does not compute with 10 year-olds.
Indeed, the eMac needs updates to it's ports. It's an anchor. It's a big, heavy, white cannonball... but it has a place. For some, the price is right as well.
With the 20" imac, the 15" has now become the entry-level consumer machine. I cannot find anyone in my MUG that has an eMac. They start with 15" iMacs and G3 iBooks.
A Dell Dimension released in 2000 with the 1GHz Pentium III, 256MB of memory, a 30GB hard drive, a CD-RW drive and a DVD player cost $5,999.
Surely a modern day equivalent of the black plague.
my 333 iMac may get put to pasture.
I keep my 350 MHz purple iMac right next to the 1 GHz eMac. The two get along famously.
It would be good timing: the 20th anniversary of the Mac is coming next month. The eMac has generally been neglected this year. MWSF also tends to have a new hardware introduction of some sort. And, although I don't know if this is truly the case, the demand for a cheap tower has been steadily increasing this year. Wouldn't it be nice of Apple to release a system at $799 or less that lets people use any display they want, from a $50 17" CRT to a $2000 23" Cinema HD?
USB2 isn't really needed in the education market, and there's no reason to include it. The eMac's appeal is its price, and Apple isn't stupid enough to jack up its price just to include a feature that most of their customers won't use.
don't bury something that isn't dead yet.
...
But looking at the dates:
USB 2.0 was official in late 2000
FW800 2002
So it could have been in the products for nearly 3 years! An eternity in computer years.
My personal opinion is the aluminum powerbooks were actually meant to hold a different chip (really defining the year of the laptop)
Here are some observations
1. Apple had the g5 up their sleeve for quite awhile. And the redesign had to be mostly completed by Jan 2003
2. Apple tends to match products pretty closely (in terms of design: imacs and blue and white g3s, early power mac g4 and g3 powerbooks, Tibooks and later g4 powermacs and cubes
3. The aluminum design was pretty radical and added a lot of additional functionality
4. apple execs have said it is taking longer to stick a g5 in powerbooks than expected
5. it took forever for the auminum 15" pbs to come out
I think Apple initially intended to eaither create a g5 powerbook or use a significantly revised chip in the powerbooks at the beginning of the year, but the engineering was more challenging than expected. I think the g5 powerbooks will be very similar in design to the current powerbooks.
PS rumor has it 20" imacs are availible in the Apple quarterly promo store for employees...and typically discontinued products turn up there. (and emacs too)