New iMacs almost ready [again]
Will we really see revised prosumer desktops soon, or will this just be another false alarm like November with this year’s lackluster Macworld conference? Whatever the case, at least one industry observer believes most of the changes will be under the hood, though it is not yet clear if the iMac will arrive powered by a dual or quadcore processor.
Quoting Kaufman analyst Shaw Wu, Fortune reports that new iMacs will be out before March, or June at the latest.
“While new the iMac appears to be almost ready for primetime, what is holding it up appears to be business reasons and a potential small technical hurdle,” according to Shaw Wu speaking to AppleInsider.
The small technical reason could be a need to improve the iMac’s heat dissipation, which could herald the inclusion of quad-core Intel processors or simply provide headroom for processor speed bumps (News.com) down the road. However, Apple may balk at undermining its high-margin, quad-core Mac Pro sales, a product that is performing poorly in the economic downturn.
“While Leopard would take advantage of multiple cores, Snow Leopard takes it to the next level with better support for multi-core, multi-processors, and OpenCL, with enhanced graphics capability,” Shaw Wu told Fortune.
The issue of Snow Leopard is another complication, but one that’s more related to the business of selling computers than the technical. That is, Apple’s next generation OS will benefit from a number of hardware enhancements that new iMacs will offer—should you the company wait and release both together?
Although a specific date has not been set, Apple did say at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference that Snow Leopard would ship in about a year.
Whatever the case, the last time the iMac received a speed bump was spring 2008 and September 2007 saw the last major overhaul of the all-in-one, prosumer desktop. Thereupon, Wu notes that Apple’s desktop sales, which Tim Cook has said are ‘mostly iMac,’ fell 16 percent last quarter.
Perhaps sooner would be better than later…
What’s your take?
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January 27th, 2009
The iMacs desperately need an upgrade. They are still really quick because they run Mac OSX and if you ask most graphics developers, macs are worth the extra. However, this much for a Core 2 Duo processor and an at best reasonable graphics card is a bit much: core 2 quad processors should be being introduced. After all, Intel recently released lower power versions of core 2 quad using smaller chips (I think it was from 90nm to 65nm or something like that) so heat dissipation should be less of an issue. I’m sure apple will work something out, but I myself am going to hold out for a new iMac before I buy one as opposed to buying one now.
Unfortunately, I fear apple will delay any new iMac until snow leopard, or vice versa.
Maybe they’ll finally give the ridiculously overpriced mac mini a bit of love too?