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iMac Businesses Apple Hardware

Apple Delays New iMac 513

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is running a story that Apple has delayed the release of the new iMac until September and has stopped taking orders for the current models."
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Apple Delays New iMac

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  • Good (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02, 2004 @04:51AM (#9590354)
    Must...save...money.
    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:40AM (#9590664) Homepage
      Really, this is good for a lot of people. Sure, they can't get an iMac right now, BUT, this will also save them the agony of "I bought an iMac 2 months ago, and now it's a discontinued piece of obsolescense! Thanks a lot, Steve!" syndrome.
    • Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)

      by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @07:51AM (#9590966) Homepage
      For what? An iMac? You're Slashdot: the technological elite. Pity those who have mere iMacs! I myself have a Cray from the 1990s I bought from eBay (sure, it's about as slow as my Pocket PC, but it was featured in Jurassic Park!)
      • Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)

        by DChristensen ( 98850 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:40AM (#9591810) Homepage
        I know this...this is UNIX!
      • Re:Good (Score:3, Funny)

        by geoffspear ( 692508 )
        Well, a good Cray does make a better piece of furniture than an iMac, but considering the space they take up I think the iMac still wins out as an interior design element.
      • Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Melantha_Bacchae ( 232402 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @01:26PM (#9594301)
        Look again. The JP computers were SGIs and Macs. The GUI our little vegetarian hacker used was an SGI demo of a 3D file system interface. You can find it here:

        http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.htm l

        A G4 iMac gives you the UNIX capability and graphics of an SGI machine (I worked with them around 1990) with the ease of use of a Mac. Plus it is more powerful than your old Cray. JP today could be done on iMacs.

        Considering that the SGI machine that I worked with cost as much as a house back then, and Macs were much more expensive, the iMac is a real bargain. You can also pick up the iMac and smack a raptor with it, which you can't do with the other computers used in JP very easily.

        A pity we can't get a port of the game "Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis" for the Mac. I really, really love that game! It would be so cool to control my parks on a real iMac.

        "Oh yeah: 'Oooh!' 'Aaah!'; that's how it always starts, but then later there's running and um.. screaming."
        Ian Malcolm, The Lost World: Jurassic Park
  • by Sad Loser ( 625938 ) * on Friday July 02, 2004 @04:51AM (#9590355)

    This may have more to do with clearing old inventory in retail channels ahead of the traditional educational back to school computer bonanza.
    A well timed announcement of a really sexy new iMac in August will get everyone excited, without cannibalising sales of the present generation of stock.
    • by Biotech9 ( 704202 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:05AM (#9590401) Homepage
      RTFA, or at least think about it, how can they be trying to clear stock by STOPPING SALES. there is no stock, you cannot buy an iMac from Apple.

      This is a fuck-up on Apples part, I assume due to the engineering problems of getting a G5 into an iMac case.
      • by JeffTL ( 667728 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:22AM (#9591603)
        What you forget is that apple.com is not the only place where you can acquire a Mac -- this is Apple, not Gateway or Dell, and Apple has retail channels. The physical Apple stores probably still have some, and of course some of the authorized resellers probably have decently-sized stockpiles.
      • They are stopping _online_ sales. The brick-and-mortar Apple Stores will presumably still have old iMac stock.

        And, this is the first time [in my experience] that an old Apple product will run out of stock before a new Apple product is shipped, so I don't expect the typical rapidly falling prices of a must-clear-stock-sale. On the other hand, maybe people will just sit on their money and wait for the new iMac, and the price will fall because of low demand.

        Who knows.
    • by evenparity ( 569837 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @08:37AM (#9591250)
      It is more likely a problem engineering/production.

      Two issues here: 1) Clearing the retail channels of old inventory, and 2) Start the clock ticking on the consumer decision making process (e.g. there is a lag between when a consumer becomes aware of a product and when he/she is ready to make the purchase).

      To clear the sales channels, you wouldn't really want to announce a new product because people will just decide to wait for the new product. Possibly, announcing the delay will get some consumers frustrated enough to buy an old model, but according to the article, it was an internal schedule, not a public schedule, that is running behind.

      To start the clock on the decision process, you need to actually hype the new product and get people excited about buying it. In this case, they don't reveal anything about the new product, so it is hard to think about buying something you don't know. (But maybe Apple users are just crazy that way....)

      The irony is, if this is an announcement of a misstep, the announcement itself is further hurting Apple's business. Apple's got great marketing and product design, but its business processes really need some work.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02, 2004 @04:57AM (#9590373)
    then users will need to upgrade to a jPod and perhaps a jPaq for compatability - a great marketing scheme
  • Pre-announced (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iJed ( 594606 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:02AM (#9590388) Homepage
    Its amazing to see Apple actually pre-announce a product! This is virtually unheard of, espessially for something as important as the next gen iMac. It looks to me like this pre-announcement is the result of some terrible mistake in predicting when all parts (PowerPC 970FX maybe?) would be available.
    • Re:Pre-announced (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bob[Bob] ( 60151 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:05AM (#9590402) Journal
      They say as much in their statement [apple.com]:

      "We planned to have our next generation iMac ready by the time the inventory of current iMacs runs out in the next few weeks, but our planning was obviously less than perfect."

      Quite candid, really.
      • Re:Pre-announced (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:02AM (#9590558)
        Quite candid, really.

        I must say, my esteem for Apple as a company raises each time they communicate "normally" (i.e. without going through heavy PR filtering). So few companies do it nowadays...
      • "We planned to have our next generation iMac ready by the time the inventory of current iMacs runs out in the next few weeks, but our planning was obviously less than perfect."

        What makes you think this is anything less than PR filtering? A big part of Apple's PR strategy is the branding themselves as a friendly corporation vs. the evil Microsoft. Pound for pound, however, I suspect Apple spends just as much on PR as Microsoft does. Now this shouldn't count against Macs; I encourage everyone to make dec
    • Re:Pre-announced (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Deltan ( 217782 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:20AM (#9590445)
      Well it sounds like it was only preannounced because they screwed up and were running out of supply on current iMacs. The alternative to not saying anything about your new product line is not very desirable, "we are no longer selling iMacs".
      • Re:Pre-announced (Score:5, Insightful)

        by edhall ( 10025 ) <slashdot@weirdnoise.com> on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:29AM (#9590630) Homepage

        Thinking about it, the announcement makes perfect sense. Usually pre-announcements have the effect of depressing sales as folks decide to wait for the upgraded version. That generally makes them a bad idea, but in this case it's exactly the results desired. It will help eke out the remaining inventory such that fewer people are left unhappy -- those that need the latest and greatest will wait, with the limited inventory going to those who can't wait.

        -Ed
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:04AM (#9590398)
    Maybe they decided that the current Design Style was just... shite! Back to large beige boxes that we can stack CDs on and arrange all your happy meal toys over!
    • Re:Think different (Score:5, Insightful)

      by A. Pizmo Clam ( 779689 ) <apismo_clam.yahoo@com> on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:23AM (#9590457) Homepage
      I had one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs. While other people were praising its beauty, I thought it was kinda ugly. As a fashion statement, the blue translucent plastic seemed somehow akin to bell-bottom trousers and leisure suits. The periodic release of new machines with different color schemes seemed to support that view.

      But it was a fine computer. The original iMac was a brave departure from the beige boxes we'd all become so accustomed to. The compact all-in-one design simplified things for people who don't want to invest a lot of time in figuring out how everything goes together. (You or I may feel unfulfilled with any computer we haven't built with our bare hands from raw sand, but there are plenty of folks who just want to use the thing.)

      The iMac moved things forward in part by turning its back on a lot of legacy stuff. The iMac upset a lot of long-time Mac fanatics who were upset that they couldn't plug their old ADB and serial peripherals into the USB ports. Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives, I guess the iMac's work here is done.

      Snif... Drat... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
      • Re:Think different (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dogtanian ( 588974 )
        Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives,

        That doesn't mean shit; the original floppy-less iMac came out in *1998*. Now, the omission of the floppy drive could be justified nowadays (assuming you can boot from the USB key), but 1998 was a long time ago, and I think the decision was wrong at the time.

        The fact that the majority of (original) iMacs I've seen had an external drive would seem to bear this out.
  • Good riddance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:08AM (#9590412)
    I know taste is a personal thing, but I never liked the design of the current iMacs. In fact, I think it's rather ugly. I liked the design of the Cube a lot better, and I suspect it would have sold better than the G4 iMacs if it was priced somewhat saner.
  • by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation@@@gmail...com> on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:15AM (#9590430) Journal
    In the education market, Apple has historically emphasized its iBook notebook PC and the eMac desktop machine rather than the iMac computer, which has a circular base and a flat-panel screen that hovers above it.

    Last I checked, the iMac's flat panel was attached via a swing-arm to the circular base. Where can I find one with no arm where the LCD magically hovers above? Perhaps this is the new model in fall? The hoverMac?
  • Sony Ad (Score:2, Offtopic)

    Is it just me, or was the photo shown on the article the recently unveiled Sony Walkman [slashdot.org] music device?
  • Mabey (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dncsky1530 ( 711564 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:17AM (#9590436) Homepage
    I bought one of the flat panel iMacs the moment it was announced, about 2.5 years ago, and it still works great. The iMac was an incredible value, had an excellent screen, and a fast CPU. I know that sales have been slowing, and the design has been out there for about 3 years, but it is still has alot of potential, and is definately a good bargain.

    On the other hand I can't wait to see the new iMacs (mabey i'll buy one), And 3 years is a long time for a computer design. Unless your talking about a PC where towers have been 'in' for over 10 years.

    I would really like to know how this is going to affect the Apple resellers who would have a large inventory of iMacs which they would undoubtably have to lower the price on. And as we have seen, Apple is not always on good terms [neowin.net] with its resellers
    • Re:Mabey [sic] (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jimbolaya ( 526861 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:28AM (#9590625) Homepage
      I would really like to know how this is going to affect the Apple resellers who would have a large inventory of iMacs which they would undoubtably have to lower the price on.

      Well, if Apple's flat out of iMacs for at least two full months, my guess is whatever little inventory is out there on the market shouldn't have that much difficulty finding happy new owners who don't want to wait 'till September.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:23AM (#9590455)
    Apple has always been a pioneer when it comes to technology.. things like imac, emac, ipod and newton come to mind. Nevertheless, I think in light of pushing the envelope, Apple often refuses to consider some people don't like doing things different... and therefore alienate a good percentage of potential customers who would buy a product if they made one that was applicable to the way they do things TODAY.

    A good example of this is the emac, which is a great computer but is overkill for the tasks of checking email and cruising the 'net, and too inflexible to do things like operate with external music devices (ie MOTU).

    Apple currrently sells Emacs for $799. That's pretty cheap, but I think Apple highly underestimates what the public really wants. Most people want a computer that is expandable, and can accomodate things internally (or at least have the option to).

    Most people have a monitor of sufficient size to meet their current needs, but have a computer that is too slow. Out of these, most would probably end up re-using their old monitor if it weren't for the fact that Dell generally bundles it in with the package.

    I would gladly give up the CRT in the Emac for a cheap Macintosh tower that has slots for expansion, and places to put those extra hard drives.

    My guess is many people would change to a mac if it was cheap enough (which I believe the Emac is appropriately priced), and eliminating the CRT wold more then likely offset the cost of adding slots and materials for the drive space.

    This is just my two bits, but I believe both of those bits are on, so I guess that's my three bits. .
    • by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:15AM (#9590590) Homepage
      Most people want a computer that is expandable, and can accomodate things internally (or at least have the option to).

      Are you sure about that? Years ago, I read a study that said that most people never open their PCs, from purchase to disposal. They treat it as an appliance. I know people like that, they don't want to know what's inside the magic box and they don't care.

      • by mdarksbane ( 587589 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:44AM (#9590674)
        I know all of one person who is not a CSE who has opened their computer to upgrade it. I know one more who has paid the cost of a new computer to upgrade theirs (when it made no sense).

        No one else's has ever been opened unless I was visiting and wanted a peek inside.

        And remember; you can't upgrade PCI or video in an imac. Aside from that, they're about as expandable as one of the towers, and they come with anything a *normal* user (ie, someone who doesn't play FPS or need SATA RAID) would need built-in.
    • by period3 ( 94751 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @07:05AM (#9590756)
      Apple currrently sells Emacs for $799. That's pretty cheap

      Good deal, but you can get it much cheaper
      here [gnu.org].

  • This official pressrelease just in from Apple Headquarters:

    "We regret to announce this delay in the release of the new iMac. The reason for this delay is that we are close to developing a mouse with MORE THAN ONE BUTTON! Although we know that many people are eagerly awaiting the new iMac we believe that most users, when introduced to a multi-button mouse, will agree that it was worth the delay."
  • by NeedleSurfer ( 768029 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:57AM (#9590547)
    Apple as been a very secretive company in its past, which is absolutely bad if you wanna get in the entreprise market which Apple has now started to try. Even the media market can't deal with secrecy anymore, it's fun to be surprised but it might cost you a lot by realizing the new product fits way better than the old for less money.

    Anyway, thing is, Apple should always do this, maybe not a year in advance but a few month is good, let's hope this isn't just a reaction to a problem but the beginning of a new attitude...
  • by ITR81 ( 727140 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @05:58AM (#9590548)
    The reason I know because about 10 days ago I ordered a 15inch iMac for my biz. but a couple days later Apple sends me an email informing me I've been upgraded to a 17inch iMac. So right now only 17 and 20inch iMacs are in inventory, but I'm sure you can find some more at say CompUSA and Apple Stores and Apple resellers.
  • by be951 ( 772934 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:36AM (#9590644)
    Surely these delays are a death knell for Apple. It is only a matter of time before they go under. 2005 will be the year that Apple dies. If not then, definitely by 2027 (or very soon after that!).
  • by adpowers ( 153922 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:50AM (#9590697)
    I think I have an idea of what the new design will be like, assuming they go for a whole new look. Remember what they did with the PowerMacs last year at WWDC and the monitors this year at WWDC (and last year with the finder). That's right! The next iMac is going to be brushed metal. Is this a fact? Hell no. Does it sound reasonable by extrapolating their current design patters? Sure... why not. Plus, it is the most interesting thing I can come up with at 04:50 in the morning.

    Andrew
  • by michaeldot ( 751590 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @06:59AM (#9590726)
    ...which may explain why Jon was last seen wandering around Steve Jobs' vegetable patch muttering "I know we've got to ship, but all I can come up with is these damn broccoli sticks."
  • by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @07:16AM (#9590797) Homepage
    Dunno about anyone else, but in the picture box for the article is a picture of the Sony HD-based MP3 player (mentioned yesterday).

    Maybe this is how Sony plans on selling it? Confusing people about it being an Apple product?
  • I can't quite figure out why Apple didn't roll out a prototype of the iMac at WWDC or spill a few pictures to the rumor sites (to quickly remove later). Is there more buzz to be had by not hinting at what's to come? I mean Apple stock took a 6% drop in the futures market already -- wouldn't building up some kind of semi-tangible excitment help mitigate that?

    Apparently not, as Apple seems to make pretty smart PR moves, but I still wonder -- Why not spill the beans now? I suppose the G5 in the iMac is a shoo-in at this point (and we'd be disappointed if it wasn't), but how about another hint or two? Maybe it'll show movies from the net and replace your TV. Maybe the floppy's back! ;^D Toss your stockholders a bone!
  • by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @08:10AM (#9591073)
    Apple is famous for doing stunts like this for hype. But, I think this one might have been a flub on the forecasting. Maybe outsourcing is biting them in the butt this time.

    Whatever the cause, it's mysterious and it's anybody's guess. Jobs is probably whipping up a huge frenzy and they might spring it on everyone a bit earlier than they announced.

    No matter what, we're all just rumor whores on this thread anyway :)
  • by Extrymas ( 588771 ) <[gnu] [at] [takas.lt]> on Friday July 02, 2004 @09:07AM (#9591506) Homepage Journal
    The upcoming iMac is called iMLate
  • by CrazyTalk ( 662055 ) on Friday July 02, 2004 @10:19AM (#9592152)
    Problem with the iMac is, you have to change the monitor when you change computers (problem with the original macs too). Wish they would bring back a desktop box (Dual G5 servers too expensive, not for mass consumption) that was affordable. I have an old Mac monitor in my basement gathering dust - no modern screenless macs I would buy to plug it into, though!

    Slightly off topic, but is anyone else sick of the "i" prefix yet? iMac, iTunes, iLife, iPod - time to give it a rest.

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