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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Monday, April 29, 2002
11:13 - Gah!
http://www.apple.com/education/emac/

(top) link

I think that's the reaction everybody has had this morning to the out-of-the-blue announcement of the eMac. At least, once we realized it was for real, and not some kind of bizarre post-April-Fools joke.

It's a new edumacation-oriented Mac-- priced at $999 and $1199, which is what I would probably peg as its biggest weakness for its target market-- which seems to amount specification-wise to the new iMac with a 17" CRT and no DVD-R option, which brings the price down by about $400. Now, granted, it means Steve-o's "Death of the CRT" comment back in January may have been a tad premature-- so I'm wondering whether this machine has only been in development for less than four months or something.

It's a nice piece of design work. The speakers have covers (which they seem to have removed for a few of the PR shots). The screen is big, supports hi-res mode (1280x1024), and weighs 50 pounds (hey, built-in theft protection, as some wag pointed out). It has a G4. It has lots of FireWire and USB. The AirPort slot is right inside the optical-drive door, which makes me wonder-- yeah, it's easy to install, but it's also easy for a kid to yank it out... isn't it? ...Unless it's a PCMCIA card...?

So, hey-- it could be a winner. Sure caught us all by surprise. Nice pre-WWDC fanfare-less announcement, Steve. We never know what you're gonna do next, do we?

Naturally, because it's a CRT-based all-in-one, its shape is reminiscent of the orignial iMac (which, incidentally, is still being sold). What really gets me is how so many of the headlines are now cackling about the machine's lack of candy-like colors. "No pretty colors on this souped-up machine!" crows the San Francisco Chronicle. Has nobody been paying attention? For two years now we've been hearing groundless rumors being started by random pundits about how the TiBook will be available in several anodized metallic colors and patterns, how the iPod would soon come with snap-on color patterns, how the Luxo iMac would soon be available in black and green and ultramarine. Hello? They haven't been doing multiple colors for years now. That was an iMac stunt, designed to grab people's attention for Apple's comeback. And now that comeback has succeeded, and so Apple's design aesthetic has moved on to the current silvery-white and stainless-steel look. No, it's not "Snow", so all you resellers-- quit listing the iBook and the iPod and the iMac as "Snow", like you expect there to be new color options any day now.

I'm also hearing that some morons are still pissing and moaning about the lack of floppy drives in new Macs, and (bizarrely) acting surprised that this one doesn't have a floppy either. Why the crap should it? Macs haven't had floppies since 1998-- and good riddance to 'em. We don't need floppies. We have CDs. Burning a CD is now almost as fast as writing to a floppy-- so why confuse people with two forms of media that do almost exactly the same thing? What's the point of supporting an obsolete 80s technology when we have a perfectly serviceable replacement? These machines are designed to be online at all times, so they can share files over the network just fine. Boot floppy? Hey, Slick, Macs can boot from CD just fine, unlike PCs. No freaky BIOS settings here. Just hold down C while booting. "But it would only cost them like $5 to add a floppy drive, and then it could be compatible with PCs!" Yeah, and they'd have to make room in the case and design around it, and it'd be another component to worry about in a machine designed for simplicity. Look, floppies are dead, and the sooner you get used to that, the better off we'll all be.

And if your beef with the lack of floppy is because it interferes with your ability to run Linux on a Mac, well, I've got a few ideas for where you can insert that disk.

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© Brian Tiemann