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iMac: Has Apple lost its inovative touch?

Z

Zechsy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 31, 2008
4
0
Hey,

As the title suggests, I'm not sure wether Apple will deliver with its new iMac. The new All-in-one PC's that have hit the market have put the bar on certain aspects a bit higher, the're defeniantly not perfect, but they really try to do something. Something I actually expected to come first from Apple.

Look at the Sony JS. Outside of the GPU, the specs are more then solid. Possibility getting Blu-ray for it on the higher models. And it looks sleek too.

Now take a look at HP's Touchsmart, this one does quite well actually. Touchscreen, Blu-Ray drive, 2.1Gz is a bit low tho but overall, this is an incredible All-in-One system.

Then I'm looking at the current iMacs. At 1600Dollars you're getting a spec that's inferior to a MacBook Pro. No touchscreen, no blu-ray, ...looks sleek tho.

Where am I heading? I'm going to say that those PC-naysayers are right at the moment, too many people simply mindlessly buy one.

What do you think? Am I completely wrong or is there a tiny bit of truth?
 
I don't think so. The iMac is still a great machine. The design is perfect and no one has come close yet. HP are trying but they are FUGLY.

Have you ever tried using a touch screen by the way. Other than your iPhone, touch screen computers make your arms ACHE. It's totally impracticable and bad for your eyes. Imagine having to sit close enough to the screen so that you can touch it at arms length. Fine for a 17" but my 24" would hurt my eyes. Futhermore, no kids would be able to use it. IMHO adding a touch screen would be pointless at this stage of UI development.

Blu-Ray. Who uses Blu-Ray?? The states? In Europe it hasn't really hit off at all. Very few know what it is, and when they do they don't want to spend the ridiculous prices to get a Blue Ray DVD film. They are just not widespread enough, especially when Apple has films and the touch of a button on iTunes. It's always been my theory that Blu Ray wont work... just like MiniDisc didn't. DVD added size and quality benefits on VHS. VHS was sluggish and ugly. Average home users didn't particularly like them hanging round the house. Blu-Ray means buying an expensive player, buying new expensive disks and at the end of the day they aren't space saving just better quality. Downloads will be the next big change. But not for another 18 months at least. BluRay will disperse.

So yeh. I respect your opinion. We all want the latest and greatest. But who are WE? We are the innovators (read: geeks) who are up on these things. The average consumer. The ones who make the money for these companies... well... they just want a cheap, web browsing, photo editing machine.
 
as far as i was concerned, macs were never really feature packed. they offer innovation in other areas such as ease of use, logical design of their hardware, beautiful/quality designs- and of-course osx.

apple wants you to use itunes as your media source, so i dont blame them for the lack of blu-ray, and i dont really expect them to in the near future.

if youre so concerned about clock speeds and video cards, you should just get an ailenware or an xps, but theres more to computers than that.
 
I think that there is a balance between specs and integration.

In my case, I will usually take integration over specs.

I've looked at Sony, Dell, HP and some other offerings. Could the iMac be improved? Sure.

I would expect that the next iMac will have a similar footprint and be thinner. Still a nice design IMHO.
 
Zechsy said:
Now take a look at HP's Touchsmart, this one does quite well actually. Touchscreen, Blu-Ray drive, 2.1Gz is a bit low tho but overall, this is an incredible All-in-One system.
Click to expand...

Personally, I find the Touchsmart to be a bit gimmicky. Touch navigation makes perfect sense on a small, hand-held device (iTouch), but I really don't see the value on a desktop computer. Besides, fingerprints and smudges on a monitor drive me crazy!
 
I don't like the HP unit at all. When Apple integrates more multi-touch into their desktops it will be along the lines of the multi-touch trackpad with the portable units i.e. your fingers will become the mouse interacting with the screen, not you physically touching the screen, tiring your arms out and gooping it up with fingerprints. :p ;)

With regards to Blu Ray, I agree with SpaceMagic.

As for the design, the iMac's design is great, and I honestly don't know what more Apple could do in terms of a ground-breaking design change. The unit will no doubt become thinner and so forth, but there isn't much more Apple could do in my opinion that would be heralded as "revolutionary", at least not in the foreseeable future. Eventually though I know Apple will prove me wrong. ;) :D
 
Zechsy said:
Now take a look at HP's Touchsmart, this one does quite well actually. Touchscreen, Blu-Ray drive, 2.1Gz is a bit low tho but overall, this is an incredible All-in-One system.
Click to expand...

The Touchsmart is a nice concept but it doesn't work well in real use. I tried it at a store for some time and at the end of my short session my arms were tired. It also would require an operating system (Win7 possibly?) that has been specifically augmented with features suitable for touchscreen use. Hitting the Vista start button in the bottom corner was awkward, partially due to the fact that unlike for example the iPhone, the screen on the Touchsmart is recessed so your fingers keep hitting the corners. Any touchscreen computer should have the bezel and screen at the same level for comfortable use.

Like it or not, BluRay is the future of optical media. I don't own a BluRay drive yet but do like movies in 1080p resolution so it would be nice if Apple started implementing those. Probably just not widespread enough yet for them though. Maybe the next iteration (with Core i7 hardware etc) of Macs will have 'em.

Even though imitators, possibly with better specs are slowly coming on the market, I still think the iMac is a relevant and above all good looking product. They just need to upgrade the specs a bit and put a nicer panel in the 20" model.
 
Touchsmart isn't so great. Touching it with fatty fingers and so on the screen will be dirty and doesn't take touch very well. And touchsmart costs more than iMac and it's specs are bad.

Apples thing is OS X, other computers can't use is leagelly.
 
The iMac is still relevant. I don't believe though I could be very wrong, that any other all in one has as powerful processor or as powerful graphics as the iMac offers.
Not to mention that when new all in ones come out they always seem to refer to them as iMac killers.
When they refer to them as HP Touchsmart killers or something similar then you'll know that they are no longer relevant.
 
ditzy said:
Not to mention that when new all in ones come out they always seem to refer to them as iMac killers.
When they refer to them as HP Touchsmart killers or something similar then you'll know that they are no longer relevant.
Click to expand...

Excellent point. We all know who they are still chasing. These guys may be getting closer but they are still in Apple's rearview mirror, not the other way around.
 
Just did some more research as I should have done before posting, especially as I haven't checked out the other all in ones in about four months.
Sony do have a better processor in their high end model. It is however significantly more expensive than the iMac, and the graphics still aren't as good.
 
Zechsy said:
Then I'm looking at the current iMacs. At 1600Dollars you're getting a spec that's inferior to a MacBook Pro. No touchscreen, no blu-ray, ...looks sleek tho.
Click to expand...

There is a reason the specs for a year-old (consumer-level) iMac are lower than the brand new (professional-level) MacBook Pro. I don't think I have to spell it out for you.

As for touchscreen, it's fantastic on the iPhone and iPod touch, but it's still a gimmick when it comes to a larger machine, especially one with a 24"+ screen. Why would I want to drag my finger two feet across a screen when I can drag my mouse 4 inches?

And as for Blu-Ray, it would be nice (I guess) but it's probably not a great investment for Apple. That technology is not likely to have the staying power DVD has had.
 
Touch screen in its current form is useless other than for public kiosks and some other circumstances. It's a gimmick. It would be nice as a BTO option for the people that do need it (and the idiots that want to be fashionable).

The iMac is the fastest, the iMac has the best GPU, the iMac looks the best.

I'd also love to know why you think putting in a blu ray drive is an innovation. I can put off the shelf components into a computer as well. The word has been totally raped of its real meaning.
 
SpaceMagic said:
I don't think so. The iMac is still a great machine. The design is perfect and no one has come close yet. HP are trying but they are FUGLY.

Have you ever tried using a touch screen by the way. Other than your iPhone, touch screen computers make your arms ACHE. It's totally impracticable and bad for your eyes. Imagine having to sit close enough to the screen so that you can touch it at arms length. Fine for a 17" but my 24" would hurt my eyes. Futhermore, no kids would be able to use it. IMHO adding a touch screen would be pointless at this stage of UI development.

Blu-Ray. Who uses Blu-Ray?? The states? In Europe it hasn't really hit off at all. Very few know what it is, and when they do they don't want to spend the ridiculous prices to get a Blue Ray DVD film. They are just not widespread enough, especially when Apple has films and the touch of a button on iTunes. It's always been my theory that Blu Ray wont work... just like MiniDisc didn't. DVD added size and quality benefits on VHS. VHS was sluggish and ugly. Average home users didn't particularly like them hanging round the house. Blu-Ray means buying an expensive player, buying new expensive disks and at the end of the day they aren't space saving just better quality. Downloads will be the next big change. But not for another 18 months at least. BluRay will disperse.

So yeh. I respect your opinion. We all want the latest and greatest. But who are WE? We are the innovators (read: geeks) who are up on these things. The average consumer. The ones who make the money for these companies... well... they just want a cheap, web browsing, photo editing machine.
Click to expand...

if apple would enable bluray viewing support in the os for use with even an external drive, they should

i mean heck, when i go into bb or blockbuster, it seems half the store is filled with bluray these days. and my computer cant even play them!
 
i don't think that blu ray is a bad investment for apple, although i'm not convinced that right now is the best time to start offering drives standard.

part of the hold that DVD has on the market is linked to the fact that most people who have a current computer have a dvd burning drive... we consume the discs in the form of commercial dvd's as well as -/+R's and RW's, games are written on DVD discs, etc... at this stage, blu ray support mostly makes sense for customers like me who would like to deliver content on blu-ray or need to back-up old project files without tying up TB's of hard drive space.

the problem as i see it is that encoding HD video on an iMac and then burning it in a playable format (on a blu-ray player) is a process that would currently take 24 hours or more for a couple hours of content, and most consumers of this type of computer are more likely to focus on the inconvenience rather than the benefit, especially if these monitors don't support b-r video.

BTO blu ray drives just for playback (and compliant hardware to go with them) are a great idea for apple in my opinion.

when there are more powerful computers at this level and when blu ray can be more cheaply manufactured (at higher volume) then i think that it's going to gain a lot more traction than it currently has.
 
Fomaphone said:
part of the hold that DVD has on the market is linked to the fact that most people who have a current computer have a dvd burning drive... we consume the discs in the form of commercial dvd's as well as -/+R's and RW's, games are written on DVD discs, etc...
Click to expand...

While that is somewhat true, DVD killed VHS way before DVD-R drives became standard fare on consumer-level computers.

The reason I believe Blu-Ray will never be that big is because streaming is the big thing. I would say the "next big thing" but it's already here. Blu-Ray may end up being the storage device of the future, but as a medium for watching movies and playing games, it is probably no better than an intermediary.

As soon as the general population is as comfortable buying movies electronically as they are buying music that way, Blu-Ray is in big trouble. And if the studios ever get their way and have you stream your movies and pay for them every time you watch (or have some sort of auto-renewing account ala Netflix), the idea of owning a box with an optical drive for viewing entertainment will be out the window.

Apple thinks they are ahead of the game with Apple TV (and they probably are), so I don't think we'll ever see Blu-Ray on the iMac. IMO.
 
children said:
as far as i was concerned, macs were never really feature packed. they offer innovation in other areas such as ease of use, logical design of their hardware, beautiful/quality designs- and of-course osx.

apple wants you to use itunes as your media source, so i dont blame them for the lack of blu-ray, and i dont really expect them to in the near future.

if youre so concerned about clock speeds and video cards, you should just get an ailenware or an xps, but theres more to computers than that.
Click to expand...

are you referring to IMacs only? Because I have a 8 core mac pro amongst my stable of macs and even though it has a high price try finding a windows pc that can do what it can

besides, alienware has been sucking it lately, from the people I know that use those,

mac will always have the innovation of stability, and I say that after being stuck in pc hell until the last 5 years
 
Why do people even bring up brand names when it comes to PC's? Plain and simple all companies rip you off.. People who want PC's should learn to build there own or get custom built ones, they are faster, cheaper, and better :p..
 
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