Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Friday, September 17, 2004
11:09 - I still want one http://www.iht.com/articles/539149.html	(top)
Steven sends this quite positive review of the new iMac, in the International Herald Tribune. (Well, of course it's positive�it's by David Pogue. But then, not even every Mac partisan was thrilled with the old iMac.) It rightly presents the thing from the "Okay, we may as well try to capitalize on the styling cues of the iPod now" angle, as well as pointing out that this design is far from radical�other computer makers have done all-in-ones like this numerous times before. (In fact, Apple's done it too.) But it also stands a fairly good chance of succeeding. True, it doesn't have the whole "Luxo" vibe that accompanied the old desk-lamp model into the limelight; you can't animate the new one sticking its tongue out at people or limbo-ing on the beach. But you can just show it to someone and have him completely "get it", and understand that this is really all there is to the computer. Just the "screen". Which is a compelling concept; many people, I know from experience, have no idea what the big box part of a computer is really even for. It's just this big noisy thing that you stick disks into; the monitor is what a lot of people think of as the "computer", because hey, it's what's always at eye level, and it's what you interact with. And this one has the undeniably bigger screen, and is just as easy to move around on your desk�without having to have a 20-pound weight inserted in the base to help counterbalance a big 20-inch screen. There's also a pretty eye-opening downside: There's been some online griping about the placement of the new iMac's connectors - three USB, two FireWire, Ethernet, modem, optical audio output, TV output and so on. They are arranged vertically on the back. "No wonder Apple's iMac photos never show anything plugged in, like printers, cameras or iPods," goes the complaint. "The dangling cords would destroy the futuristic purity of the hovering-screen look." Indeed. That's a lot of connector jacks down the right side of the screen. I'm sure Apple's trying to build on the tradition of having keyboard/mouse connectors in that region of the backs of their LCD monitors; but, well, look at this. That's not just a couple of USB jacks. It's everything. And once your speakers, camcorder, digicam, iPod, keyboard/mouse, iSight, joystick, Ethernet/modem, and headphones are all plugged in, this thing's going to look like a mummy dragging chains, especially if you try to adjust the screen tilt. (Having industrial-looking items like the Ethernet cable dangling through space like that is going to be a big uglifying factor.) Perhaps it would have been better if Apple had arranged the ports along the bottom center of the screen unit, so the cables would at least be hidden behind the stand, or routed through another hole in it. True, they're more accessible this way; but there's also definitely a case to be made for keeping them out of the way, especially if Apple plans to have these iMacs become stars in the white-and-brushed-chrome postmodern foyers of evil corporations in Hollywood films for the next few years. Maybe they should have allowed the base stand to be half an inch high or so, so the connectors could all be reflected down into the base through a more complex coupling at the pivot. Or, as Steven suggests, maybe they could have had a second thick cable coming from the screen unit to a satellite port-reflector box, into which you'd then plug everything. However, these ideas kinda throw a monkey-wrench into that confusingly fun feature of the iMac, the fact that you can remove the screen unit from the stand altogether, making it into a corded laptop with separate keyboard, or a non-functioning tablet PC. Who knows where they plan to go with that. But at least it does tell us, as does the fact that they managed to internalize the power supply into the unit (hallelujah!), that a G5-based laptop can't be that far off. Pogue being Pogue, he also doggedly points out that $1300 really isn't that much to pay for an upmarket consumer PC these days; though he concedes that this is the age of the $450 entry-level Dell, and while you can buy a top-end PC in the same performance class as the Power Mac G5 for a very similar (or even higher) cost, most consumers aren't going to be interested in the very top end. They'll be comparing the iMac, however unfairly, to PCs 1/3 its cost, and that's a game Apple's never going to be able to win. But, well, that's fine; it's not like this is the worst it's ever been. Remember when entry-level Macs cost $2499 and top-end ones were $7500? Altogether, I'd still be all over one. It's a G5, and that's hard to argue with; and it has big screens, which are essential these days (Apple sort of failed to predict, with the Luxo iMac, the sudden shift in expectations of LCD screen sizes, to the point where 17" is now considered pretty much the functional minimum). Those dangling cords aren't going to be pretty, but I'm sure we'll either find it doesn't bother us that much (the bottom edge of the unit isn't that high off the ground), or Apple will release a 2nd-gen model six months from now that shuffles them out of the way more effectively. With the packaging job they've done here, it's clear they're more than capable of figuring it out.