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Apple has neglected its Macs for a long time. Think about it. When was the last time the iMac got a significant (non-spec-based) update? 2004. Their lower end laptops? 2001. Higher end? 2003. Years and years for some of these models. In this blog posting I want to outline what I think should be done about it.

I write this two hours before an Apple event in which Steve Jobs is expected to show a new iMac. My guess is that it’ll have an uninspired design that mimics the Cinema Displays, with some specs boosted and pricing reshuffles, and at least one braindead move (my guess is a 2.5” HD for the sake of thinness.) It is this event that has inspired me to post something that’ll either look really smart in two hours or really obsolete and stupid. We’ll see!

There was a famous slide used in an old 1999 Apple presentation that showed a 2×2 grid of products, divided into “Consumer” and “Pro”, and “Desktop” and “Laptop”. That seems to have evolved over time with oddball products like the Mac mini and eMac, but has generally been the model Apple has used for the past decade or so.

I’ve come up with what I think should be the grid, and I’ll explicate from it.

(“Jew” means “money-conscious”.)

iMac

The first and most comprehensive idea I have is for the iMac. I want to explain mainly in pictures.

Design

The iMac I envision is much like the current iMac, but with several aesthetic and functional differences that should make it more aesthetically appealing, but more importantly it would be an attempt to bring in the gamer market and other people who stupidly clamour for a “headless iMac”. I’ll start with a dissection of my mockup:

It’s a little hard to explain. I’ll go over the main bits:

• CPU etc is integrated. The screen is the computer, blah blah. Just like before.
• The bezel is as slim as possible. Some form of iPhone-like metal surround is used to minimise the visual impact of the bezel, so that it looks like almost all of the screen surface is actual pixels. This makes the screen look bigger than it would with a large bezel, and would be a pretty striking design change.
• There is a bottom strip. This is for function and aesthetics. A translucent Apple logo would sit in the middle of this black strip, which does pretty neat things. On the right there is an OLED screen, which appears to simply generate symbols to appear on the bottom right corner of the monitor - for instance, when turned off, it would take the form of a power button. It’d have a touch sensor for this use, and look\feel a bit like the old Studio Displays did in this sense.
• The bottom strip would change colour. Through the use of some sort of fluorescent light, the bottom strip would modify its colour depending on how the bottom few pixels of the screen look. With the Leopard background, it’d be green. With a DVD movie, it’d fade to black. With a maximised Photoshop window, it’d turn white. This is a little like the Philips Ambilight televisions, and would help extend the idea that you’re working on a single giant canvas, rather than a box with a screen on it.
• The iSight camera is hidden behind the screen. I have no idea how this works, but Apple patented it, right? Helps clear clutter and would make for more personal iChat conversations.
• Other stuff is hidden as always. There would be a microphone at the top centre, but it’d be almost invisible, just a little hole between the bezel and screen. An IR sensor would be behind the bottom strip, probably on the left. The metal body would cause issues for wifi and bluetooth reception, so the base would be made in a way that facilitated its use as an antenna.
• USB ports are located on the side. A little ugly, but they’d look much less offensive on a black iMac like this, and are simply a must. Reaching to the back of an iMac is annoying.
• It’d come with Bluetooth keyboards and mice. With USB ports on the side, why not push wireless? The input devices should charge via a mini-usb plug.

Here are a few ideas for the OLED screen, by the way. You could use it for all manner of things, but power, sleep and iSight should be the main ones.

Functionality

These are all largely aesthetic issues, though - functionality is the more important part of the design, and I have a few ideas to improve this.

The specs of the iMac have always been considered fairly highly, except for the GPU card. For this reason I’m not even recommending that Apple switch to desktop CPUs instead of the notebook CPUs - Apple tends to go for processors that do the job quite effectively, and I think in an enclosure as thin as the iMac’s it’d need the notebook chip. But the GPU is an issue that I think should be addressed by a simple inclusion of a PCI Express slot.

How would that work? Well, like the original iMac G5, the back of this iMac would be removable, and there would be a large space kept for a user-supplied video card. You would simply plug it in, attach a slim, internal dvi plug to it, and close the iMac up again. This would allow gamers to buy an iMac and replace the card with one they got on Newegg for $200, and play all their games in Bootcamp. They could also update the hard drive, RAM, optical drive, and other such features at will.

Another idea would be for the 24” iMac to use its extra internal space for a second hard drive. This second drive could be custom ordered with the iMac, so that it mirrors its data via Time Machine, while using the extra free space for file versioning stuff.

What would it sell for? $1299 for the 20” low end, $1499 for the 20” high end, and $1799 for a 24” model. A larger model could come at a later point.

eMac

I hate the Mac mini. Apple computers should be like appliances, not dorky boxes with wires to plug in and random shit to connect and ugh. So I’m recommending that gets thrown away, and replaced by a new eMac.

The iMac is a decidedly high-end computer, but Apple really needs something to compete with the $400 Dell systems of the world. I think they should simply take a 2006-era iMac, cut down the specifications, and sell it cheap for the educational and low end market.

It should have specs along the lines of a 1.6ghz Celeron M, with 1gb RAM, 160gb HD, CDRW\DVD reader drive, Intel graphics, and a fixed 17” screen. It should not have WiFi, Bluetooth, iSight, FW800, or any of the general niceties the real iMac would have. The focus should be on cutting costs.

I think Apple could sell this for $599, or even $499. And I think they’d sell millions. And when they made a new one, they could keep producing the old stock, and sell it for $400.

Mac Pro

Oh, the other desktop I haven’t really touched on. I think the Mac Pro is really quite good enough. The design is old, but it’s very functional. I think it just needs some spec updates.

Now for the portables..

iPhone with Keyboard

I’ll have more ideas on this later, but I think the iPhone plus a Stowaway-style fold-out keyboard could be Apple’s “ultraportable” offering. Imagine Pages on the iPhone, or iChat, or IRC.. it’d be a great way for students and business people to always have a small computer with them.

MacBook Mini

I’ve always had this idea that the MacBook should be sold in cute colours. The picture I used in the grid I ripped off from Sony (they do a bunch of magnesium alloy laptops with pastel colours), but it’s essentially the same idea. The MacBook should be cool and personal like this, with a thinner bezel and generally smaller body size. Apple were once unique for having a compact laptop (iBook G4) for a low price, these days they seem to be allowing the MacBook to bulk up in order to encourage more MBP usage. That’s no good! The MacBook mini should be slim, thin and attractive. The current one is dull, big, dated and boring.

Oh, and it should be lighter too. Damn thing is heavy.

MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro is a hard one, as the design is kinda timeless. Either way, I think the MBP could do with some sort of new metal used for its design, and perhaps some curves reminiscent of the PowerBook G3. I always thought Liquidmetal could look cool, but Vaio-style Magnesium could be another idea.

I also think OLEDs could be put to use on the MacBook Pro quite effectively - why not have an extra row of function keys at the top that look like the Optimus keyboard? On a cramped keyboard, it’d be very useful to have flexible buttons that change icons and things depending on context.

Of course, eliminating the ugly forehead and IR spot on the current MBP would be a great idea too.

Conclusion

Again, I don’t expect much - this is just an exercise in pointing out that Apple’s computers CAN be improved, much in the same way a forthcoming posting about OS X shows how much more Leopard could be doing. I’ll go to sleep now and wake up to a new iMac. I hope my pessimistic guess turns out to be wrong.