somebody's head has swelled!

[Trout74]

I dont know where to begin. I took the original backlash on the new iMac with a grain of salt and slept on it and waitied a good 24 hours to comment. I figured the stats would come out and the deluge of nay sayers would be quited and proved wrong. Im a huge Mac fan and have an iPod and a iPhone and a mini, I even have an old color classic from 1993! ( and it still runs). I also have 2000$ in my savings account that has been there for 6 months waiting on this refresh. I am utterly dissappointed. I am dumbfounded, I truely Believe Steve thinks he can make a pretty/ esthetically pleasing product and fill it with mediocre insides and still sell it to all the zealots out there. I can not think of a worse " new " offering on the market. The graphics just plain stink, color the cat any color you want and drink the coolaid all day, it just plain sucks! Those cards are terrible, no excuse what so ever, I simply cant believe it. I can spec many differnt machines that are much more powerful and pay almost half. I am willing to pay more, and a great deal more, but not for crappy insides. i gig of ram, are you serious?/ Seriously Steve, pull your swelled head out of your A-S_S and at least give us some decent graphics ( arent we supposed to be doing photo and video editing on these machines? forget gamming, how about your core audience?)
\
In short, my money will not be going to Apple, I am not giving Steve one red cent till he wakes up and gets back in the game.

one dissapointed consumer!

 

[bluesman87]

Then dont buy it and wait for something more to your tastes (that way we hear less whining)

 

[gauchogolfer]

Didn't Steve use the new iMacs in his demonstration of iPhoto and iMovie? They both seemed to run great during the demos. It wasn't like he was using Mac Pros, like usual. I think that the 20" is a great deal.

 

[Queso]

If you've waited this long, wait a little longer and see what the benchmark tests come back with on the machines. If you're still unhappy, buy an alternative.

Just don't jump until you have the full picture.

 

[Grenadier]

Then dont buy it and wait for something more to your tastes (that way we hear less whining)

Why should he ?
The fact is, what else is there to buy ?
Im in a similar position to him, and the fact is, I love OSX, but there is nothing else other than the iMac which suits my (or, apparently, his) needs -

Mac Pro: Too expensive, and I dont need four cores
Mac Mini: very underpowered. Besides, integrated graphics suck.

So, other than those two desktop choices, the only other desktop Apple offers is the iMac, which they seem to have totally crippled by the GPU.
The design is also a bit too 'bleh' for me.

Very many Apple fans have rightly been very disappointed in the past 24 hours.

 

[VortexOfPain]

Sounds like someone needs to visit Apple's Feedback page, and add another request for a better GPU:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/338795/

Posting here in forums won't give them the feedback they need. We need as many people as possible to submit feedback. The last iMac lineup later received an option for a faster card, so we can only assume they do listen to feedback!

 

[Trout74]

Why should he ?
The fact is, what else is there to buy ?
Im in a similar position to him, and the fact is, I love OSX, but there is nothing else other than the iMac which suits my (or, apparently, his) needs -

Mac Pro: Too expensive, and I dont need four cores
Mac Mini: very underpowered. Besides, integrated graphics suck.

So, other than those two desktop choices, the only other desktop Apple offers is the iMac, which they seem to have totally crippled by the GPU.
The design is also a bit too 'bleh' for me.

Very many Apple fans have rightly been very disappointed in the past 24 hours.

QFT!

I wanted this new iMac bad! heck I even went and saw it lasst night, the mini( i have one, the 1.42 G4 ) I need more horsepower, but I DONT need a Macpro, but im not going to shell out 2000$ for a computer that is not better or more powerful than what was introduced a year ago. That is a poor use of hard earned money. I know it can video edit and edit photos, but not a well as the last rendition, and that is pathetic, and unacceptable. I will wait for the rev. B but i shouldnt have too!

Trout

 

[himedc]

which they seem to have totally crippled by the GPU.

The 2600 pro is faster then the X1600. The 20 inch iMac was not crippled.

 

[Grenadier]

The 2600 pro is faster then the X1600. The 20 inch iMac was not crippled.

Faster, yes. But not by much.
And here is the issue, the ATi 2000 series is well known as the suckiest in all of GPU options.

Here, just for plain reference, look at the Anandtech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3023&p=6

These cards are pathetic.

The fact they are better is not good enough - the iMacs are already limited severely by the fact you cant change the GPU.
Now, Apple forcing you to be stuck with a 2400 or 2600 until you upgrade (usually 3-5 years for the average user) is just plainly insulting !

These cards are ALREADY obsolete - as stated in many places, this struggles to perform better than the 7600GT in the previous revision of the iMac.

Besides, we are not talking about spending £300 on a crap Dell,
we are refering to a iMac which costs about £1500 when decently kitted out in the UK store, and we have a damn right to be offered something better than a GPU you will find in a £400 desktop.

 

[MagicWok]

It just perplexes me how on earth this decision on the graphics card was made in the first place.

I mean, with EA arriving with their arsenal of games, it's piss easy for Apple to start picking away at the PC gaming market and abolishing the argument that Mac's don't have games to play...

Enthusiats and casual gamers are not going to be impressed by the non-upgradable graphics card, that is so poorly underpowered to be pushing out decent graphics at the native res of 1920x1200 lest we forget! The C2D, especially the extreme edition, will just be sitting there waiting for the struggling graphics card to feed it information. The iMac is such an unbalanced mainstream desktop IMO.

A Mac Pro is just too much for the average Joe to spend when looking for an affordable system to play games. You can spec a PC that will come at the same price of the iMac and totally overpower it. The only reason I haven't bought/built my own PC due to being fed up with the situation, is because I love using OSX. Shame...

Meh

 

[himedc]

Faster, yes. But not by much.
And here is the issue, the ATi 2000 series is well known as the suckiest in all of GPU options.

Here, just for plain reference, look at the Anandtech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3023&p=6

These cards are pathetic.

The fact they are better is not good enough - the iMacs are already limited severely by the fact you cant change the GPU.
Now, Apple forcing you to be stuck with a 2400 or 2600 until you upgrade (usually 3-5 years for the average user) is just plainly insulting !

These cards are ALREADY obsolete - as stated in many places, this struggles to perform better than the 7600GT in the previous revision of the iMac.

Besides, we are not talking about spending £300 on a crap Dell,
we are refering to a iMac which costs about £1500 when decently kitted out in the UK store, and we have a damn right to be offered something better than a GPU you will find in a £400 desktop.

Well said, and I agree with you for the most part. I just don't like that people are making it look like the 2600 Pro is a downgrade.

 

[MagicWok]

Besides, we are not talking about spending £300 on a crap Dell, we are refering to a iMac which costs about £1500 when decently kitted out in the UK store, and we have a damn right to be offered something better than a GPU you will find in a £400 desktop.

For £1,500, I'm building for my brother - a PC that comes with the Q6600 which will be overclocked to 3GHz+, 4GB's of PC8500 DDR2 and a very very nice EVGA 8800GTX KO AC3. All coming in housed in the very nice Antec P182 case. Shame it'll be with Vista 64 LOL, but I look what I can get for the same money as the iMac and I find it impossible to argue in the iMac's favour if someone asked me.

And besides, being forced a glossy screen I won't get one from that viewpoint as I need accurate colour reproduction for my work. Which btw I do on a 24" Dell which is better spec'd than the current ACD's and is cheaper lol.

 

[Roy Hobbs]

I dont know where to begin. I took the original backlash on the new iMac with a grain of salt and slept on it and waitied a good 24 hours to comment. I figured the stats would come out and the deluge of nay sayers would be quited and proved wrong. Im a huge Mac fan and have an iPod and a iPhone and a mini, I even have an old color classic from 1993! ( and it still runs). I also have 2000$ in my savings account that has been there for 6 months waiting on this refresh. I am utterly dissappointed. I am dumbfounded, I truely Believe Steve thinks he can make a pretty/ esthetically pleasing product and fill it with mediocre insides and still sell it to all the zealots out there. I can not think of a worse " new " offering on the market. The graphics just plain stink, color the cat any color you want and drink the coolaid all day, it just plain sucks! Those cards are terrible, no excuse what so ever, I simply cant believe it. I can spec many differnt machines that are much more powerful and pay almost half. I am willing to pay more, and a great deal more, but not for crappy insides. i gig of ram, are you serious?/ Seriously Steve, pull your swelled head out of your A-S_S and at least give us some decent graphics ( arent we supposed to be doing photo and video editing on these machines? forget gamming, how about your core audience?)
\
In short, my money will not be going to Apple, I am not giving Steve one red cent till he wakes up and gets back in the game.

one dissapointed consumer!

The graphics card and 1 gig of RAM is more than enough for most of the general population. Apple markets to the mass consumer not the FanBoys on macrumors, if you want more power and better graphics get a Mac Pro and stop all the damn complaining.

 

[Eidorian]

It just perplexes me how on earth this decision on the graphics card was made in the first place.

I mean, with EA arriving with their arsenal of games, it's piss easy for Apple to start picking away at the PC gaming market and abolishing the argument that Mac's don't have games to play...

Enthusiats and casual gamers are not going to be impressed by the non-upgradable graphics card, that is so poorly underpowered to be pushing out decent graphics at the native res of 1920x1200 lest we forget! The C2D, especially the extreme edition, will just be sitting there waiting for the struggling graphics card to feed it information. The iMac is such an unbalanced mainstream desktop IMO.

A Mac Pro is just too much for the average Joe to spend when looking for an affordable system to play games. You can spec a PC that will come at the same price of the iMac and totally overpower it. The only reason I haven't bought/built my own PC due to being fed up with the situation, is because I love using OSX. Shame...

Meh

Apple goes for processors speed first and all other components second.

The graphics card and 1 gig of RAM is more than enough for most of the general population. Apple markets to the mass consumer not the FanBoys on macrumors, if you want more power and better graphics get a Mac Pro and stop all the damn complaining.

So we're supposed to all get Mac Pros then? It's hard telling people that want to run any games that they'll be stuck with 1024 x 768 for any new games. A lot of people expect a lot from this new iMac and are going to be let down.

Carmack at WWDC and now these underpowered iMacs? Yeah, gaming is sure coming to OS X.

 

[Grenadier]

The graphics card and 1 gig of RAM is more than enough for most of the general population. Apple markets to the mass consumer not the FanBoys on macrumors, if you want more power and better graphics get a Mac Pro and stop all the damn complaining.

1GB of RAM I can live with - it only costs £90 on the UK store to upgrade to 2GB anyway.

But...
you seem to spectactularly fail to understand that, usually, when a computer is refreshed and updated, its meant to become better.
This is not a question of marketing to the mass consumers or fanboys, but a question of being totally, and excuse my harsh use of words,
TOTALLY SCREWED OVER.
Have you even seen the performance of the 2400 and 2600 cards ?

And anyway, I, among probably 90% of people here dont have the damn cash to blow on a Mac Pro just to have a half-decent GPU. That thing costs between £2500-£3000 when customised to your liking.

It's hard telling people that want to run any games that they'll be stuck with 1024 x 768 for any new games. A lot of people expect a lot from this new iMac and are going to be let down.

Sadly, hardly even that.
If you look at a benchmark of Supreme Commander, on any of those two cards at 1024x768, the game is still unplayable.

 

[johnee]

And besides, being forced a glossy screen I won't get one from that viewpoint as I need accurate colour reproduction for my work. Which btw I do on a 24" Dell which is better spec'd than the current ACD's and is cheaper lol.

Someone in another thread (quite a while ago actually) proved that dell's displays weren't as accurate as ACDs. I can't remember the whole thing, but the person showed real evidence based on dell's specs that the displays were not as good.

 

[Trout74]

Well I guess its just another waiting game, come on rev. B!! Another year with a 1.42 G4.

trout

 

[BlackMax]

I agree somewhat with the OP.

I like the new design. I like the fact that it is thinner and has cleaner lines (haven't seen it in person yet) than the previous iMac. I like the bump in processor, the lower price points and the new keyboard looks promising. But I am disappointed in the choice of GPU and the fact that all models except the top model come with 1 GB memory standard.

I was really hoping that Apple would bump the graphics performance of these new iMacs up a little more than they did. I have been waiting to purchase one as a replacement for an old aging PC my kids have been using. Now that my kids are older and playing more games this iMac would need to be able to keep up with their current games, like Oblivion. These iMacs will do that (barely, at a reasonable frame rate), but doesn't have a lot of "future" growth potential in it from a gaming point of view.

I think it is clear that Apple does not consider the gaming niche a market they are interested in going after. I'm sure there were a lot of trade off considerations made (overall cost, heat, energy consumption, noise, etc.) when they chose the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO as their top of the line GPU. I just wish Apple could have offered one more GPU upgrade option, perhaps the Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT or GTX, just to see how well it sold. Even the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT would have been better.

I've read that the 2600 PRO is offered in a passive cooling configuration, so I'm wondering if new iMacs are using passive cooling on the 2600 Pro and perhaps that is why Apple went with the 2600 PRO?

I'm sure these new iMacs will sell just fine as they are and I believe they are great machines for everything except gaming. I'll still end up purchasing one once Leopard is released, because the alternative is a PC with Vista and I'm not going that direction. I am just disappointed because of what these new iMacs "could have been"

 

[zign]

Here, just for plain reference, look at the Anandtech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3023&p=6

The HD 2600 Pro reviewed there has 256MB DDR2. The ones in iMacs are 256MB GDDR3. They will perform better. From the reviews I read (in russian) they are very close to 8600GT and that is with beta drivers. Those who tried the updated beta drivers are seeing improvements, so once the drivers are updated the cards should perform quite nicely.

 

[destroyboredom]

If its a gaming rig you're after then may be you are in the wrong market. For the average consumer, they won't give 2 hoots about the video card. All they want is a machine that can send e-mail, surf the web, and run a word processor (and more than likely is less virus and spyware ridden than a windows machine).

If you want a machine that will play games and handle digital media then go for a Mac Pro or used Powermac G5.

I will admit the ATI choice is a strange one when you consider they were purchased by AMD. Just seems like a conflict of interest with the Intel deal.

 

[Grenadier]

The HD 2600 Pro reviewed there has 256MB DDR2. The ones in iMacs are 256MB GDDR3. They will perform better. From the reviews I read (in russian) they are very close to 8600GT and that is with beta drivers. Those who tried the updated beta drivers are seeing improvements, so once the drivers are updated the cards should perform quite nicely.

You give me hope.
How far away do you think a driver update is ?
If they managed to get the 2600 Pro to perform on par with a 8600 GTS,
well, I would be a very happy man.

The 8600GTS is by no means a card which will kill every game, and run it at 120FPS, but atleast it will run current games at high quality with decent frame rates.

*crosses fingers*

 

[iSee]

i gig of ram, are you serious?

You can upgrade the RAM to 4GB, so this isn't a reasonable complaint. You'll want to get the RAM from someone cheaper than Apple, obviously,

 

[Eidorian]

You give me hope.
How far away do you think a driver update is ?
If they managed to get the 2600 Pro to perform on pay with a 8600 GTS,
well, I would be a very happy man.

The 8600GTS is by no means a card which will kill every game, and run it at 120FPS, but atleast it will run current games at high quality with decent frame rates.

*crosses fingers*

That isn't going to happen.

If its a gaming rig you're after then may be you are in the wrong market. For the average consumer, they won't give 2 hoots about the video card. All they want is a machine that can send e-mail, surf the web, and run a word processor (and more than likely is less virus and spyware ridden than a windows machine).

If you want a machine that will play games and handle digital media then go for a Mac Pro or used Powermac G5.

I will admit the ATI choice is a strange one when you consider they were purchased by AMD. Just seems like a conflict of interest with the Intel deal.

I think Apple should have stuck with the X3100 in the iMac then. Gaming doesn't matter at all. Have fun telling people they can't run any GPU or demanding 3D applications.

 

[Grenadier]

That isn't going to happen.

Its a long shot, I know, but 'zign' did state that this uses GDDR3.
I know the card is crippled in many other areas, but perhaps it...well, possible that it will perform better since this is different memory.

Meh, but the best hope for gaming on the iMac, is, as stated previously, a GPU refresh, which judging by the previous track record, may well be another year.
How depressing.

I was so looking forward to buying one of these new iMacs and running BF2
Sigh, back to my old 700MHz G4...

 

[Eidorian]

Its a long shot, I know, but 'zign' did state that this uses GDDR3.
I know the card is crippled in many other areas, but perhaps it...well, possible that it will perform better since this is different memory

The HD2600XT can't compete with the 8600GTS. How do you hope that the Pro will?