“On Tuesday, Philip Schiller walked onto a Paris stage at the Apple Expo 2004 to announce new products. Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide product marketing was replacing the recuperating Steve Jobs. He mentioned that the founder and chief executive would be back in September, and that ‘September cannot come soon enough.’ If he checked a calendar he’d find that, in fact, September came the next day. The company seems to have lost track of time, and it showed with the G5 iMac… the machine comes in one old-fashioned color: 1988 platinum white. The design is hardly inspirational. In fact, if you put two headlamps on it and a metal sun visor over its ‘windshield,’ it would be reminiscent of a 1954 DeSoto,” John C. Dvorak scribbles for CBS MarketWatch.

“The architecture is risky. First of all, they jammed the entire computer into the screen, making the idea of changing ‘monitors’ or screens impractical… What’s worse, the engineering required that all of the USB, audio, Ethernet and modem connectors (10 of them, not including the power line) are awkwardly and inconveniently placed on the back of the bulky monitor-computer. With all these wires running off the back of this top-heavy machine, there’s a good possibility that one will get tripped over. I suspect the iMac will go flying. This lash-up just does not look stable,” Dvorak opines. “Even if I’m wrong, I’d still like to know what happened to all those fancy colors Apple was promoting.”

“The fancy colors are now relegated to the iPod, which now seems to be Apple’s primary focus. Schiller spent a lot of time bragging about Apple’s 59 percent market share in the MP3 player market. Is this something to be proud of? Where does this market head? Almost anything with a small amount of memory can be turned into an MP3 player nowadays; you just need a headphone jack,” Dvorak fumes.

It goes on and on and on here.

MacDailyNews Take: Unfortunately, the original “Big Fat Idiot,” John C. Dvorak, has managed to put crayon to construction paper yet again. The new iMac G5 looks nothing like a 1954 DeSoto, except on John’s home planet, the ever-cloudy and perpetually dark Ignoramus. If you put two headlamps and a metal sun visor on John’s head, you’d have a moron dressed as a car. The idea of changing monitors has always been impractical in an all-in-one computer design going back to even before 1984′s original Macintosh, but John’s just catching up now. If top-heavy Johnny has another doughnut, there’s a good possibility that he’ll be the one tripping over; we can only pray it’s off the side of The Golden Gate Bridge. Next, John wants to know “what happened to all those fancy colors Apple was promoting?” The answer is that Apple hasn’t had a color other than white or metal in its Macintosh line since the iMac G3 was introduced in July 2001. That’s over three years ago, Mr. Dvorak. ’54 DeSoto John sure is current, huh? The iPod has 58% market share according to Schiller, not 59% as John mistakenly scrawled. Still, yes, it’s something to be very proud of and the iPod is Apple’s Trojan Horse that shows the Wintel masses what quality really is and causes them to consider why they don’t have a Mac, too.

Bonus MacDailyNews Trivia: Did you know that John C. Dvorak and his two cohorts, Rob Enderle and Paul Thurrott, avoid being seen together at trade shows due to the inevitable chaos that ensues? It seems that as a trio, the group simply cannot avoid being mistaken for these guys.