[geekcentric]

Ick, No Firewire, no DVD (I still use DVD/CD but it's for music/video production).

Granted you can fork over all the extra dough to buy all these items separate, but not practical.

I love my iMac, I think it's so very powerful for the price point. It's been the ultimate workhorse in my everyday work (and gaming). Glad I got this before this new revamp.

I don't really understand the thinness aspect. It's supposed to sit on a desktop, are people's desks getting too small or something?

[icerabbit]

ericole, on 25 October 2012 - 08:56 AM, said:

Quote

I wonder who at Apple thought placing the SDXC card slot on the back side of the new iMac was a good, user-friendly idea.

Exactly, my biggest complaint about the iMac that I have had for about 7 years now is that ALL of the ports are on the back. Sure, the front is pretty, but with so many peripherals (iPods, iPads, cameras, etc) it is a royal pain. For USB I finally got a USB splitter that just sits on my desk. Also still use CD/DVD a LOT! Very unfortunate and user-UN friendly in many ways with this new machine. I also agree - why does it matter if it is that thin? What does Apple have with thinness?

Personally I've never liked Apple's system anorexia either. How thin is thin enough? Instead of using space savings for extra functionality, better cooling, ... they jump ahead of the curve, push even more difficult and expensive designs while stripping out core functionality. Yes, we may be less dependent on optical media, but I have ripped music cds and burned dvds this week. With plenty more on the way. Ideally I'd like to consolidate different data collections to Blu-Ray. Anyway.

With a deep desk facing a wall, it is a similar thing with my mini & monitor stand. Every time I've got to plug the odd thing in, I either have to turn the display or the whole system around 90 degrees. Either that or using a mirror or cluttering the desk with various hubs, like when we had cubes on our desk, needed more ports and didn't want to flip the thing up all the time. With the G5 I always had those quick access ports in the front empty.

I have to build a bigger monitor stand as the new mini won't fit in the space provisioned for the old mini, and I'm seriously considering whipping something up with a rotating base, whether a simple centered dowel or mini lazy susan. Or, I know kinda crazy, put a ministack at 90 degree angle under or above the mini so all the extra ports would be on the side. Thanks to form over function.

At some point in the not too distant future we can expect Apple to sell a computer with only a power plug. That'll solve it for all us I/O nuts

[Hologram]

icerabbit, on 27 October 2012 - 04:56 AM, said:

...

At some point in the not too distant future we can expect Apple to sell a computer with only a power plug. That'll solve it for all us I/O nuts

Now that's just silly. It will be powered wirelessly through iCloud of course, and tied to our iTunes accounts.

I wonder what Apple will call the technology since they already used "Thunderbolt" and "Lightning". THOR? (I think we can safely rule out "iThor)".

This post has been edited by Hologram: 27 October 2012 - 05:50 AM

[icerabbit]

For notebooks and iOS devices there will of course be wireless charging, but I don't see wireless power supply happening just yet. Plenty of wall sockets and a wire is cheap.

[Hologram]

icerabbit, on 27 October 2012 - 11:26 AM, said:

For notebooks and iOS devices there will of course be wireless charging, but I don't see wireless power supply happening just yet. Plenty of wall sockets and a wire is cheap.

I was being silly ... but sillier things have happened, so who knows?

[Biallystock]

Quote

it's inevitable - apple dropped the floppy disk and it was a similar argument, it was only a matter of time until they killed the superdrive.

And FireWire and Thunderbolt and everything else you need that makes everything that you plug into your Mac work.

But then the new dumbed down Apple consumer JUST chats on facebook and browses cat videos on youtube.

"Everything else" is just so yesterday!

btw the loss of the Floppy disk was a stupidity that cost us a lot of time, money and PC customers at the time. The external Floppy Disk drive we were forced to buy was totally unreliable, so we had to resort to another Mac/PC with a drive and email/transfer the files back to ourselves. Actually "stupid" doesn't begin to describe these decisions. Everytime Apple makes life harder we just give up and get to do less, bit by bit we have got to where we are today.

[ingus]

Hologram, on 27 October 2012 - 05:43 AM, said:

icerabbit, on 27 October 2012 - 04:56 AM, said:

...

At some point in the not too distant future we can expect Apple to sell a computer with only a power plug. That'll solve it for all us I/O nuts

Now that's just silly. It will be powered wirelessly through iCloud of course, and tied to our iTunes accounts.

I wonder what Apple will call the technology since they already used "Thunderbolt" and "Lightning". THOR? (I think we can safely rule out "iThor)".

Thor! That was really funny, but did you say it with a lisp? As in "I laughed tho hard, I'm tho thor I can't pith?".

[jeffdickey]

I love my Mid-2011 iMac (and the Early-2008 one chugging along next to it), because they're Macs, <em>NOT</em> because they're iMacs. Hardware reliability. Stable, consistent OS. Fabulous support in most of the world.

Equally importantly, neither a laptop nor an iOS device.

I look at the new iMacs and shudder. I look at the iOS features in Mountain Lion (and certain to expand in future), and wonder what happened to the Apple refrain of "good enough, isn't".

Will Rogers said that "just because something is new, doesn't mean it's better". I'd rather have an iMac that's as thick as this one (about an inch), but with better cooling, so I don't have to refrigerate the room to 20 C or below in order to keep the new iMac from overheating as the old one did. I look at an ancient PowerTower Pro 225 sitting in a corner that hasn't been powered up in a year, but probably would still now — with a fan card, and an extra fan mounted on the back of the case. Sure, it's louder than any modern kit I own — but I didn't need to wear a sweater to use it.

The Mac Pro is a VERY nice personal server tower system. But most of us don't need 12 cores, or 64 GB RAM, four hard drives, and so on. We <em>would</em> like a mini-tower (not a Mini) that we can stick somewhere, cart around without herniating, and stick a FireWire connector onto if we've still a couple of shelves full of perfectly-working kit. Yes, I'm talking about legacy, and the whole point of the iMac in recent years is to pretend that 'legacy' doesn't exist. It does, and if trajectories continue as they are, I can see myself shifting back to Linux for large parts of my work in a couple of years, or maybe even a Windows 9 (if Microsoft survive the omnishambles that will be Windows 8).

What to do?