The cube's main attraction to Steve - apart from its shape - was that it operated fan-less. It was all convection cooled, a really nifty feature.
The Cube was designed to have a fan. The fan bracket was already present in the case design. Whatever models that would have come after the initial 500Mhz G4s would likely have had fans, if not for the processors, then for the video cards.
This could mean the same performance (at least) at much less production cost Or the same cost and much more performance. It would still be a very small computer. I can not imagine that someone would say "it is too large"
I would love an Xmac the most and second best is a larger better mini but I do not think either will happen any time soon.
It could work yes. Absolutely. It basically works for all other PC vendors. But with Apple it isn't a question of it working, it's a question of Apple wanting to do it. And time and again, Apple simply doesn't want to do it. Their vision of consumer computing is the iMac. That's pretty much it. The Mac Pro is really designed to serve their content creation market (which is decades old) and the Mac mini is sort of switcher "try it out type machine" and maybe for folks who can't spend $1000+ on an iMac or Mac laptop.
They could do a full headless desktop lineup of low-end, mid-range and high-end:
A 3.25x tall Mac mini making it a Mac cube at 6.5 x 6.5 x 6.5 inches which should have room for a 3.5" drive, an optical, 65W TDP processor and cooling solution, a couple of memory slots, and even a low-profile PCIe slot. They can even use the Mac Pro design language.
A "half" Mac Pro with 95W TDP processor and cooling solution (essentially single Core i7), 3 memory slots, 2 PCI slots, 2 3.5" hard drive bays, 1 optical.
The Mac Pro with 2 125W TDP CPUs, 6-8 memory slots, 4 3.5" hard drive bays, 4 PCIe slots, etc.
Sell them at $700, $1500 and $2500 starting entry points and be fine. They can also keep the iMacs too. They'll likely sell more total units than the current lineup, margins will likely go done, but maybe profits will still the same because of more units. Inventory would be more difficult to manage. More investment would have to be done as they are maintaining 4 unique desktops.
They could do this, don't think there are many business reasons preventing it, but I think they simply don't want to.
Comments
The cube's main attraction to Steve - apart from its shape - was that it operated fan-less. It was all convection cooled, a really nifty feature.
The Cube was designed to have a fan. The fan bracket was already present in the case design. Whatever models that would have come after the initial 500Mhz G4s would likely have had fans, if not for the processors, then for the video cards.
Normal 3.5" drives
Normal CPUs
Normal DVDdrive
This could mean the same performance (at least) at much less production cost Or the same cost and much more performance. It would still be a very small computer. I can not imagine that someone would say "it is too large"
I would love an Xmac the most and second best is a larger better mini but I do not think either will happen any time soon.
It could work yes. Absolutely. It basically works for all other PC vendors. But with Apple it isn't a question of it working, it's a question of Apple wanting to do it. And time and again, Apple simply doesn't want to do it. Their vision of consumer computing is the iMac. That's pretty much it. The Mac Pro is really designed to serve their content creation market (which is decades old) and the Mac mini is sort of switcher "try it out type machine" and maybe for folks who can't spend $1000+ on an iMac or Mac laptop.
They could do a full headless desktop lineup of low-end, mid-range and high-end:
A 3.25x tall Mac mini making it a Mac cube at 6.5 x 6.5 x 6.5 inches which should have room for a 3.5" drive, an optical, 65W TDP processor and cooling solution, a couple of memory slots, and even a low-profile PCIe slot. They can even use the Mac Pro design language.
A "half" Mac Pro with 95W TDP processor and cooling solution (essentially single Core i7), 3 memory slots, 2 PCI slots, 2 3.5" hard drive bays, 1 optical.
The Mac Pro with 2 125W TDP CPUs, 6-8 memory slots, 4 3.5" hard drive bays, 4 PCIe slots, etc.
Sell them at $700, $1500 and $2500 starting entry points and be fine. They can also keep the iMacs too. They'll likely sell more total units than the current lineup, margins will likely go done, but maybe profits will still the same because of more units. Inventory would be more difficult to manage. More investment would have to be done as they are maintaining 4 unique desktops.
They could do this, don't think there are many business reasons preventing it, but I think they simply don't want to.
I can not imagine that someone would say "it is too large"
Oh, there is one person that says it doesn't fit (possibly even it is too large!).
Steve Jobs.
And there goes our beloved xMac to nowhere land.