MacDailyNews - Headless iMac for $499 [rumor] - and the PC performance paradox of 2005
MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home
A company that Apple reportedly is sueing announced yesterday that Apple is going to be selling a wonderfully compact, decently powerful Macintosh computer at an unimaginably low price for a Mac - under five hundred dollars.
Osbourne computers went out of business under the burden of such a rumor, started by Osbourne himself, the company's owner and founder, back in the 1980s. It was a rumor because it never came true. The company had intended to make the computer but they ran out of engineering money, so they could never finish designing it. Why did they they run out of money? Because everybody about to buy a new Osbourne computer juset put their plans on old so they could buy the new computer which was supposed to be lighter, faster, and more powerful.
Is ThinkSecret tring to pull an Osbourne-style economic assualt on Apple computer? Time will tell. Time will tell.
<dream>
Personally, I would love to be able to buy a really compact Macintosh with a lot of RAM and a really fast processor and a WiFi connection but no monitor. Because then I could use it as a compute and application server from my regular desktop and notebook Macintosh's.
With Apple's Remote Desktop service running on it, I could access it to run GUI applications from any Macintosh in the house - I would just have to buy Apple Remote Desktop client licenses. With VNC (virtual network computer) server running on it, I could run GUI applications on it from Mac or Linux box in the house - and VNC is free.
If it ran really cool, was really small, had a WiFi connection and didn't need a computer or monitor hooked up to it, I would buy several of them, over time, and just let them run on a bookshelf. I could run them off of a filtered 5 plug power strip. With no internal hard drive, a momentary loss of power would not be able to corrupt their storage - they have none let us say - and reboot time would be virtually instantaneous because they would just boot the OS and run applications off flash memory.
I do not expect such a Macintosh computer to be developed any time soon though. It is so obvious a computer to make, that I think Apple would have made it by now. Though perhaps before this year it would have been a little expensive to make due to the price of flash memory. Apparently flash memory is cheap has heck now, though. I bought a 1 GB USB flash memory fob a month ago for under a hundred dollars at Staples and it was not even on discount - someone I know saw one selling for $79 mail order! So, Apple probably could make a kick-ass diskless server for way under a grand if they wanted to do so.
To further build castles in the clouds, I could let my imagination run away with me and visualize that this server Macintosh computer that does not exist and probably never will would have a USB port to connect things like the new RadioShark, so any computer in the house could play any radio station and be controllable from that Mac without me getting up from my Mac - streaming MP3 audio is great. If it had a Firewire port on it, I could hook up an Apple iSight and have a bit of a home security system. "Hey, cat! What are you doing approaching my Mac micro server on the bookshelf? I see you!!" I could just imagine watching the started, guilty look on my cats face as I observed her on the screen of my Powerbook from upstairs while she tried to quickly rearrange her features into a semblance of innocence at the sound of my voice.
</dream>
Although, I do admit - the PC market has never been such an easy nut for Apple or anyone with a non-Microsoft OS as it is right now.
The second part of this article I am blogging about and musing over mentioned that the latest PCs, which I know have very fast processors and come with Microsoft's latest and most expensive OS, actualy run very slowly in real life. Way slower than a Mac.
The person who wrote the article recounts the story of a family friend whose own family computer was not a Mac. It was running Microsoft Windows XP. It was so "infested with adware and spyware" that it ran at a crawl. He asked them if they had ever done anything remove that stuff. They replied that yes they had. Just three weeks before they had taken it to Best Buy and paid $30 to have the spyware they had beck then removed.
Just leaving the risks of having so many unknown digital footpads wares running on a personal computer system aside, it is a really serious performance issue for PCs now days. It is not any issue at all for Macintosh's. Macintosh's come with pretty fast processors and a fast OS with an unbeatable graphics hardware/software combination. Check one out in a store (Apple, Microcenter, etc.) and you will see what I mean.
But the great thing about Macs is they don't slow down once you have used them a while. They don't soak up adware popup programs and spyware keyboard sniffer programs and email spam relay station enslavement programs like a leaky boat taking on water within minutes after you hook them up to the Internet. In fact, if you do not install Microsoft Office for the Mac on them, the threat of such things does not exist on Mac OS X. And Mac OS X has been out almost four years - longer than MS-Windows XP by about half a year.
A company that Apple reportedly is sueing announced yesterday that Apple is going to be selling a wonderfully compact, decently powerful Macintosh computer at an unimaginably low price for a Mac - under five hundred dollars.
Osbourne computers went out of business under the burden of such a rumor, started by Osbourne himself, the company's owner and founder, back in the 1980s. It was a rumor because it never came true. The company had intended to make the computer but they ran out of engineering money, so they could never finish designing it. Why did they they run out of money? Because everybody about to buy a new Osbourne computer juset put their plans on old so they could buy the new computer which was supposed to be lighter, faster, and more powerful.
Is ThinkSecret tring to pull an Osbourne-style economic assualt on Apple computer? Time will tell. Time will tell.
<dream>
Personally, I would love to be able to buy a really compact Macintosh with a lot of RAM and a really fast processor and a WiFi connection but no monitor. Because then I could use it as a compute and application server from my regular desktop and notebook Macintosh's.
With Apple's Remote Desktop service running on it, I could access it to run GUI applications from any Macintosh in the house - I would just have to buy Apple Remote Desktop client licenses. With VNC (virtual network computer) server running on it, I could run GUI applications on it from Mac or Linux box in the house - and VNC is free.
If it ran really cool, was really small, had a WiFi connection and didn't need a computer or monitor hooked up to it, I would buy several of them, over time, and just let them run on a bookshelf. I could run them off of a filtered 5 plug power strip. With no internal hard drive, a momentary loss of power would not be able to corrupt their storage - they have none let us say - and reboot time would be virtually instantaneous because they would just boot the OS and run applications off flash memory.
I do not expect such a Macintosh computer to be developed any time soon though. It is so obvious a computer to make, that I think Apple would have made it by now. Though perhaps before this year it would have been a little expensive to make due to the price of flash memory. Apparently flash memory is cheap has heck now, though. I bought a 1 GB USB flash memory fob a month ago for under a hundred dollars at Staples and it was not even on discount - someone I know saw one selling for $79 mail order! So, Apple probably could make a kick-ass diskless server for way under a grand if they wanted to do so.
To further build castles in the clouds, I could let my imagination run away with me and visualize that this server Macintosh computer that does not exist and probably never will would have a USB port to connect things like the new RadioShark, so any computer in the house could play any radio station and be controllable from that Mac without me getting up from my Mac - streaming MP3 audio is great. If it had a Firewire port on it, I could hook up an Apple iSight and have a bit of a home security system. "Hey, cat! What are you doing approaching my Mac micro server on the bookshelf? I see you!!" I could just imagine watching the started, guilty look on my cats face as I observed her on the screen of my Powerbook from upstairs while she tried to quickly rearrange her features into a semblance of innocence at the sound of my voice.
</dream>
Although, I do admit - the PC market has never been such an easy nut for Apple or anyone with a non-Microsoft OS as it is right now.
The second part of this article I am blogging about and musing over mentioned that the latest PCs, which I know have very fast processors and come with Microsoft's latest and most expensive OS, actualy run very slowly in real life. Way slower than a Mac.
The person who wrote the article recounts the story of a family friend whose own family computer was not a Mac. It was running Microsoft Windows XP. It was so "infested with adware and spyware" that it ran at a crawl. He asked them if they had ever done anything remove that stuff. They replied that yes they had. Just three weeks before they had taken it to Best Buy and paid $30 to have the spyware they had beck then removed.
Just leaving the risks of having so many unknown digital footpads wares running on a personal computer system aside, it is a really serious performance issue for PCs now days. It is not any issue at all for Macintosh's. Macintosh's come with pretty fast processors and a fast OS with an unbeatable graphics hardware/software combination. Check one out in a store (Apple, Microcenter, etc.) and you will see what I mean.
But the great thing about Macs is they don't slow down once you have used them a while. They don't soak up adware popup programs and spyware keyboard sniffer programs and email spam relay station enslavement programs like a leaky boat taking on water within minutes after you hook them up to the Internet. In fact, if you do not install Microsoft Office for the Mac on them, the threat of such things does not exist on Mac OS X. And Mac OS X has been out almost four years - longer than MS-Windows XP by about half a year.
posted by John Collins | 1:46 PM
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