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iMac 24" – why no video-in?

irishgrizzly

irishgrizzly

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 15, 2006
1,461
2
Or for any other iMacs, but esp the 24". For little extra cost this would be a great selling point. Connect consoles to it and use it as an external display for a laptop, mac pro etc.

Why has this not been done?
 
get the elgato eyetv hybrid ... it plugs in usb and its about $175
I will probably get one in about a month or so
 
I am hoping to get a Wii at some point and since I have no other display other than my iMac, having video input for the console would have been excellent.

Have to say, the EyeTV Hybrid seems extremely expensive and rather overkill since I do not want to use it for cable TV or anything.

Guess I might just ask my cable provider to install another cable point in my bedroom...
 
Yeah if this had finally had a built in tuner, plus maybe spare hdmi/component/phono/video (supporting the new consoles etc.) input it would have been really great..

A 24" beautiful LCD TV, with built in apple computer... perfect for bedrooms and studies everywhere...

A product that solved, HD TV, DVR, DVD burner/recorder, TV recording, and personal computer all in one... WOW !!!!!

A missed opportunity...
 
mkrishnan said:
Is there some deeply beautiful logic to this comment that I'm completely failing to grasp?
Click to expand...

I think its good old fashioned grumpiness ==>
4332340dae856_1741n.jpg
 
Well, if you want a video in, and they put RCA analog video in, they would need an analog to digital converter to upconvert to a format the computer and the editing software needs. This must be of decent quality so that audio and video stay syncronized (in other words, a hardware based converter). The converters on the market today that do this well are in the $150-$250 range. You don't want this added to the price of your Mac if you don't use it, right? You can input video in from a digital source using firewire. Analog users are dwindling. And Apple is famous for not hanging around to help those that don't move forward with technology.
 
It's also a matter of if they had component and/or hdmi inputs, then they would need to add buttons on the bezel to switch between inputs, control gamma/brightness of the video ports, and so forth. and that would ruin the athstetic (sp?) of the iMac. My Gateway LCD has 5 buttons on the side for controlling all of the settings and switching between different inputs.

On the other hand, they could do some engineering work and show the inputs in a window on the desktop that could be controlled like a DVD (toggle between a window and full-screen views. They could probably integrate it into the QuickTime player, and ship all of the iMacs with QuickTime Pro to add the full-screen feature. That would require Apple to care about gamers though, and they don't.
 
surely this will become a major issue

nobody who spent the money wants to throw the monitor away when the mac becomes too old/slow...if they don't fix it I suspect people won't buy integrated systems again.

Mind you, it is interesting that your only choices for use with an external monitor are either too limited (Mac Mini) or too expensive (Mac Pro).
 
MacRumorUser said:
A product that solved, HD TV, DVR, DVD burner/recorder, TV recording, and personal computer all in one... WOW !!!!!

A missed opportunity...
Click to expand...


Thats exactly what I use my iMac for, it works great. Elgato HD TV Mini usb tuner, the EyeTV PVR software is very nice and getting better with every release (newest release just added a built in webserver that automatically converts your recordings to iPhone/iPod Touch & streams them over wifi).

Rob
 
LCD technology is advancing fairly quickly now and the prices are dropping alongside. By the time your Mac's internals are "obsolete", the screen will be also. A few years ago you would not have been able to buy a 24" panel for the cost of the iMac today.
 
flopticalcube said:
LCD technology is advancing fairly quickly now and the prices are dropping alongside. By the time your Mac's internals are "obsolete", the screen will be also. A few years ago you would not have been able to buy a 24" panel for the cost of the iMac today.
Click to expand...

Maybe not - if I had a 4 year old 17" LCD monitor I would rather use it as a second display than throw it out, even if it had lost most of its value. True that there will be cheap displays available in 4 years, but why throw away a perfectly good display and buy another one?
 
This is a total Mac entry stopper for me . I guess this made my decision simple. Maybe I should thank Apple for saving me nearly $2000 . I wanted to get an IMac 24 for my home , but since I have a PC laptop from work where I need to do all my work on for my Job ( I work from home a lot ) , I always connect the laptop to my home display, kayoed , and mouse.

I just can't get over how totally short sited the decision not to have a video in is. I know so many people ( my company and others ) that have laptops for the main work machine that they carry from work and home all the time and never use the screen on the laptop.
 
The company isn't doing well by accident... they think things through

It's probably been considered and wisely rejected.

- Add $75 manufacturing cost to the machine, and one more port, and one more point of support complexity.
- Adds $150 to $200 to the street price of the product.
- Four years from now, 5% of the users will use the feature to avoid buying a $150 (at that time) 24" LCD monitor.

It is simply not possible that the sales lost by raising the price $150 to $200 could be recovered from the very few people who would switch from non-buyers to buyers for this feature. Not they people who SAY they would have bought an iMac if it had video in... the very very few who actually would have changed their minds over this esoteric feature.

It's just an economic non-starter if you go past the surface, but it's emotionally appealing. Sort of like "I wish they would port OS X to generic hardware." If they did, the high-end providers could destroy Apple's software margin and the low-end providers could destroy OS X's reputation. But it is continually brought up as something Apple "just doesn't get".

It's an all-in-one world.
 
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