New Apple iMac Arrives
The latest edition to the growing home computing center is an Apple iMac (Intel E7600 Core 2 Duo/8Gb RAM/1Tb HD/21.5"), which I promptly setup to use Boot Camp with Windows 7 as the default OS. This makes a great Family Room machine, in Windows or MacOS (despite missing HDMI port), and doubles as the iPhone development platform. What is more interesting is the purchase survey, which I took today.
Apple New Purchase Survey
Going though the questions it became clear that there were 3 main goals to the survey: canvass the effect of recent advertising campaigns; perform some basic market research; and make some decisions about Macs of the future. I answered the question about “who am I” correctly (software engineer), so I am sure they ignored everything I said with respect to advertising. Questions related to the second goal were interesting to me (do most people have wireless N or wireless G?), but the third goal – that’s the important one. We, as an industry and as consumers, have benefited from Apple’s presence in the market and I would like this role to continue. I want a say about Apple’s products of the future!
So, just in case my entire survey response ended up in the bit-bucket, I will reiterate some of my survey responses here in the vein hopes that they will actually be heard. . .
What Apple Did Right
The use of industry standard hardware – not just Intel processors – saved Apple from death. This includes seamless operation with most peripherals (printers, etc.) and protocols in use today and not just processors, chipsets, and video cards. But most important is x86/x64, and the ability to run Windows on Mac hardware.
A few misses over the years, but mostly Apple builds what people want.
- Provide Boot Camp (boot manager and drivers)
If your going to spend extra on a Mac, you might as well get something extra in return. Such as the ability to run Windows and MacOS on the same box. Nice.
- Great hardware design. I mean, great hardware design.
What Apple Still Does not “Get”
- The menu bar has got to go
So what if the original MacOS had a bar at the top. MultiFinder is gone; so get rid of the bar.
- Secondary mouse click is critical (not to mention useful)
The new iMac comes with an excellent multi-touch wireless mouse that can detect if you click on its left side vs its right side. By default, however, the mouse control panel preferences are setup to ignore this feature. Although it was a simple change to enable what Apple calls secondary click, this should be the default.
- Charge a little less. Please?
I wish I could have gotten an i5 (or i7) for the price, and adding $200 for 4Gb of DDR3/1066 RAM is double the price I paid from Crucial (which is where I got my second half). I won’t mention what an additional TB of disk space costs, but at least memory is user-replaceable.
- No removable drive? Really?
Somebody tell Apple that (a) hard drives fail, (b) capacity requirements always go up over time, (c) costs always come down over time, and (d) new technology is just around the corner (SSD). Creating a computer without a user-replaceable drive is just stupid. In a year or so when I pry apart the glue in the beautiful glass display panel with a flat-blade screwdriver in order to access the drive, I’ll be cursing out loud. Drop the velvet lint cloth and add 2 screws and a tray.
There’s good and bad, here. XCode is free, and comes with the OS. The App Store is obviously popular (and effective) with consumers. But objective-C? Really? Didn’t even take the time to remove the “ns” (NextStep) from the framework names! Focusing on what’s important or too lazy . . .not sure.
But then there are all those users. Waiting for your app.