All in all, my experience has been really good. The machine is elegant, very quiet, and fast. This is by far the best iMac they've made. If someone crammed x86 hardware into a shell like this, most hardware geeks that I know would drool over the thermal system and the level of engineering that went into this. But since it's a mac, everyone makes fun of me (although you should have seen mr. grumpypants TheSMJ's face when I showed him how the lid came off and then the interior of the machine)
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LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited January 2005
most hardware geeks that I know would drool over the thermal system and the level of engineering that went into this
At first, I just raised rolled my eyes, thinking, "he's gone off the deep end, worshipping the Mac for its eye appeal". After more attentive viewing of those images though, I have to agree, it's impressive, elegant engineering. Wish one of their engineers had designed the cooling for this fast but poorly cooled Gateway Pentium M I'm typing on now!
At first, I just raised rolled my eyes, thinking, "he's gone off the deep end, worshipping the Mac for its eye appeal". After more attentive viewing of those images though, I have to agree, it's impressive, elegant engineering. Wish one of their engineers had designed the cooling for this fast but poorly cooled Gateway Pentium M I'm typing on now!
I wouldn't make fun of it. I agree with you, it looks to be very well thought out.
You guys will find that if you look at them objectively, the newer macs- at least the G4 tower, G4 cube, G5 tower, and G5 iMac, as well as possibly the last G4 iMac-the one that looks like a desk lamp-and maybe the G3 (I haven't seen the inside of either the G3 or the newer G4 iMac in detail) are all very, very well designed. As is the Minimac, in point of fact (I refuse to call it the mac mini, because Minimac just sounds cooler ).
Most low-cost PC manufacturers slap together Frankenstein machines by hacking away features from the high end (of three years ago, anyway) and putting the warmed-over parts in ill-fitting cheap plastic boxes. They don’t really have a choice, since they don’t design any of the parts, from operating system to motherboard. That’s why most budget PC cases seem to be littered with a mish-mash of uncoordinated stickers from every component vendor on the planet. But Apple engineers can handcraft a new machine from scratch. For Mac mini, that means taking the time to decide just which elements make a Mac a Mac and then figuring out how to shrink them. And that process just happened to reinvent the whole concept of a desktop computer.
Cut out the hyperbole and marketing bull**** and look at the two statements I bolded. They're right. While it allows them to produce highly proprietary systems with limited upgradeability if they so choose (e.g. mobos with the CPUs soldered on, the new Minimac which has 1 DIMM slot, etc.) it also allows them to carefully integrate the whole system. Open up a G5 or G4 tower, and you won't see much of anything, if anything at all, in the way of cabling until you look for it, in the G5 especially. Despite the possible lack of cpu power (depending on who you listen to), you generally can't fault their engineering.
It seems like they hired a fresh new crop of engineers around the time the G4 tower came out. Suddenly macs became these amazingly well thought out machines. The G4 tower was the first case I ever went "wow!" at when I opened it up to work on it. You pull a ring, the whole thing unfolds like a book, with everything right there for you to work on. I've never seen a G4 cube in person. The G4 iMac (the desklamp one) - that one is not so hot... It's a total nightmare to work on. But the G5 tower and the G5 iMac are simply stunning to work on. The tower is flawless. There is not a cable to be found in there. The power leads are all rails, even the sata bus only has a tiny little nub of a cable to go to the bus. It is a masterpiece of case engineering, and I'm beginning to feel the same way about the iMac version.
Comments
You guys will find that if you look at them objectively, the newer macs- at least the G4 tower, G4 cube, G5 tower, and G5 iMac, as well as possibly the last G4 iMac-the one that looks like a desk lamp-and maybe the G3 (I haven't seen the inside of either the G3 or the newer G4 iMac in detail) are all very, very well designed. As is the Minimac, in point of fact (I refuse to call it the mac mini, because Minimac just sounds cooler
This is off Apple's page on the new Minimac:
Cut out the hyperbole and marketing bull**** and look at the two statements I bolded. They're right. While it allows them to produce highly proprietary systems with limited upgradeability if they so choose (e.g. mobos with the CPUs soldered on, the new Minimac which has 1 DIMM slot, etc.) it also allows them to carefully integrate the whole system. Open up a G5 or G4 tower, and you won't see much of anything, if anything at all, in the way of cabling until you look for it, in the G5 especially. Despite the possible lack of cpu power (depending on who you listen to), you generally can't fault their engineering.