New 17 inch iMacs at MWNY!

[macfreak88]

A source at Think Secret said that there should be a 17 inch Screen iMac at MWNY. And if this rumor is true they said that there probaly will be speed bosts on the erlier models!

Here is the link:Think Secret

-Macfreak

 

[fryke]

Yes, exactly. Apple needs to get rid of their G4 towers and adds speed to the G4 iMac?

IF the iMac sees a speed increase, the G4 sees one, too. At the same time or FIRST in the G4 tower.

 

[azosx]

There's going to be a lot of unhappy Mac-campers if Apple releases 17" iMacs with out a processor speed increase as well.

How they will do this without bumping up the PowerMacs processor speed at the same time will be interesting.

If they don't this is what'll happen. Thousands will place orders for the new 17" iMac at 800MHz then receive their unit only to find that 3 weeks later Apple bumps both the iMacs and PowerMacs to 1GHz and 1.2GHz.

Pissed off will not beging to describe these people's reaction. Many will probably send their units back, and Apple will eat the cost.

Second, 3 weeks later Apple will bump the PowerMacs but not the iMacs. A month and a half later the iMacs are bumped and people are still pissed but without the option to return their new 17" iMacs, feeling like they've been totally burned by Apple.

The iMacs are cutting into the PowerMacs profits so badly that Apple had to raise the price of the iMacs to recoupe some of it. I don't that the price increase was due to LCD manufacturing costs. No other LCD manufacturer bumped the price of their displays.

Little differentiates the iMac from the PowerMac anymore. And with 17" displays, how many home consumers are going to buy a PowerMac for $1500 and a 17" Studio display for another $1000? They both have the same RAM, same system bus, and are close in CPU speed. SMP and L3 cache are about it. Expandability as well but the new iMac is a much more well balanced system then the old one.

I'm sure even professionals are purchasing them now to save $1500.

Hopefully they are smart enough to only incorporate DDR RAM and anything else new architecturally wise into the PowerMacs and not iMacs. If not, the G5 will be the PowerMacs only salvation and unfortunately, it's going to be well in to 2003 before we might possibly even see it.

 

[edX]

Pissed off will not beging to describe these people's reaction. Many will probably send their units back, and Apple will eat the cost.

i think you are exaggerating. yes, those of us who buy a mac and then the next one gets better or cheaper or both feel like we should have gotten more. but it is impossible to avoid these days. Everyone who purchases a mac ends up feeling this way too quickly these days. That's just the way that it is.

and frankly, i doubt most people really notice or care. they are ready to buy - they buy. they don't pay a whole lot of attention to the prices and features after that because they are no longer "in the market".

only mac fanatics who are true geeks pay such close attention to this kind of thing. and really, overall, they represent a very small part of apple's customer base.

i'm not saying that apple can just release whatever they want and have it be a hit. that would be ridiculous. but they are not so tightly bound to have to make last weeks customer get the same deal as next week's customer. very few businesses work that way. i applaud the few that do, but apple doesn't have a track record of being one, nor seem to need to do this.

 

[azosx]

True, but it's always the people who attend the MW conferences who are most concerned with the latest and greatest and that phone in their orders moments after they keynote speach ends.

These people forkout lots of money just to support Apple and they are the ones that will likely get burned.

Apple just seems to have a history of releasing things to their benefit, not the consumer. This doesn't happen in the PC market too often because everything is announced months before it is actually released. Rarely is anything a surprise.

I usually always buy after new products are released so as to get the best deal on what was once bleeding edge the day before.

 

[edX]

I usually always buy after new products are released so as to get the best deal on what was once bleeding edge the day before.

yea, that seems like only way for me to afford anything better at all. but anything i buy, i have come to expect that there will be something better in 2-3 mos. It's just how it goes. you can wait forever for the perfect computer at the perfect price to be built - but what are you going to use until then? Which is why apple won't have a problem selling off any old stock. I have watched in the past, and everytime apple discontinued production of a product, it was impossible to find a few weeks later because the prices always get too good to resist.

and people who do buy cutting edge technology normally know that it is practically obsolete as soon as they get it set up no matter what (at least in terms of being 'cutting edge').

 

[azosx]

Originally posted by Ed Spruiell

yea, that seems like only way for me to afford anything better at all. but anything i buy, i have come to expect that there will be something better in 2-3 mos. It's just how it goes. you can wait forever for the perfect computer at the perfect price to be built - but what are you going to use until then? Which is why apple won't have a problem selling off any old stock. I have watched in the past, and everytime apple discontinued production of a product, it was impossible to find a few weeks later because the prices always get too good to resist.

and people who do buy cutting edge technology normally know that it is practically obsolete as soon as they get it set up no matter what (at least in terms of being 'cutting edge').

This is another way Apple kind of sticks it to the customer.

They rarely release something new without discontinuing the lowend machine, so to release something new, they have to sell most of their lowend stock so they don't take a loss on their profit margin.

It would be nice to see Apple release new products before they completely deplete their lowend stock and continue to sell it at a reduced price. They don't do this though like the PC companies.