Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Apple introduced the redesigned iMac yesterday and I have to say that I like it very much. Like any machine, it has its good and its bad, and this one is mostly good in my opinion.

Read on as I address some of the compliments, comments, and criticisms of the new iMac.

I’ve always been a minimalist of sorts. Reducing clutter and keeping things in the simplest possible state is a personal theme of mine, and I think that’s why I find the iMac so attractive. It’s a monitor and a stand and not much else. The machine is reduced to what the user directly interacts with, and the focus is shifted from the computer itself to what is done with the computer instead. When I appeared on television and said, “Mac OS X gets out of your way,” I meant that the operating system allowed me to concentrate on what I was doing rather than what the machine was doing. The iMac seems to be the consumer desktop extension of that idea.

On the Apple front page, the tag line presented with the picture of the new iMac is, “From the creators of iPod,” and an iPod is placed next to the iMac to demonstrate their similarities. This should make it perfectly clear at whom Apple is aiming the iMac: iPod purchasers who are curious about what Macs have to offer. The iMac looks similar to the iPod form the side, as in the picture mentioned above, and the front; a white, round-rect body form with an LCD screen at the top and a chin of sorts that contains the speakers and Apple logo. The similarities are purposeful.

The specs for the machine are pretty decent. Since the new iMac is based on a G5 chip, its inevitable that it’ll be compared to its PowerMac G5 big brother. Differences such as front-side bus speeds and the iMac’s lack of a Firewire 800 port are intended to more clearly differentiate Apple’s consumer products from its professional ones Ñ if you have a need for Firewire 800, Apple expects you to need the features of a PowerMac G5 or PowerBook that surrounds it.

One place where the new iMac seems to be lacking, and maybe the one spec people have complained most about in the first two days since introduction, is the 256 MB RAM that it ships with. A couple of minutes of thought (which is a lot to ask for on the Internet, I know) reveals why Apple includes this comparatively small amount of RAM in a new machine.

First, and I think most obviously, its a cost-cutting measure. Apple is continuously criticized, usually unfairly, for selling products that aren’t dirt cheap. In the past several years, Apple has made a real effort to keep prices down, and the most effective way to do that is to keep manufacturing costs down, which means including a minimal set of hardware in each unit. 256 MB RAM is really the minimum that’s needed to run Panther, so that’s what Apple includes with its consumer machine. Adding more at the factory will either increase the price point or reduce Apple’s profit, and its not worth it considering consumers can easily purchase cheaper RAM from a third party and easily upgrade it themselves. Apple knows its customers are aware of this.

Secondly, Apple resellers use promotions such as additional RAM to move machines. If you look in a catalog such as Mac Warehouse, you’ll see their prices on Apple hardware are usually within $5 of what Apple is asking. They constantly use “Free 512MB upgrade!” or “Double your RAM!” promotions to differentiate themselves from Apple and other resellers. If new machines came with greater amounts of RAM, promotions like that would no longer be practical because it would cost so much to add any meaningful RAM upgrade to a machine that resellers wouldn’t bother.

One thing not included with the new iMacs that I think should be a standard component on every new Mac sold is Bluetooth. Leaving this component out is, again, a cost-cutting measure. I think Bluetooth is prevalent enough in the Mac world that, in principle, it should be a given.

Wireless connectivity in the form of an AirPort Extreme card is not included in any model, although every model is AirPort ready. I can understand why this feature was left out. In reality, wireless networking is still very much a nerd thing and most people that Apple is targeting with the new iMac don’t have a need for it. Keeping hardware that is likely going to be unused out of the machine again keeps costs down. Usually Apple includes AirPort hardware in the highest-end models of a product, and I would have guessed they were going to do that this time also, but they didn’t.

The new iMac isn’t intended to be Apple’s cutting-edge machine Ñ that role is reserved for the PowerMac and PowerBook lines. iMac and iBook are Apple’s consumer lines, the play-it-safe machines, as it were. Anyone who expected the iMac to be the latest and greatest wow-inspiring machine hasn’t paid attention. Apple has come up with some interesting and innovative external designs for the iMac in the past, and I consider this one among them, but internally they’ve been fairly conservative.

And now for some gut feelings: In the end, I think Apple will sell a ton of these things, and as has been the case recently, Apple will have supply issues during the first several months they’re on sale. The 17-inch model is due to ship mid-September, and it’ll probably be December before 20-inch models ship in any kind of volume. A respectable number of people purchasing the new iMacs will be Windows converts, but I don’t expect a tidal wave of Windows users to flock to the iMac, its simply an unrealistic expectation (although I’m sure the press will hold iMac sales to that ridiculous standard). In a few months time we’ll hear about the “failure” of the iMac in increasing meaningless market share (I’m going out on a limb, I know…), and Apple will give those analyses half a second’s thought while they roll in their new giant pile of money.

Personally, I’d really like to have one to replace the Cube currently on my desk. I could use a faster, compact desktop machine like that for my consulting business and that would free up the Cube for use as a machine for testing. Any G5 would be more than powerful enough for the day-to-day stuff I do, and the 20-incher would provide the amount of screen real estate I need. Perhaps I’ll be an iMac owner myself in the not-so-distant future.