“I was secretly looking forward to Apple’s announcements at MacWorld; I have to admit, I was deeply disappointed,” Rob Enderle writes for Designtechnica. “The iMac and Titanium notebook designs were, in my eyes, dated. Granted, in many ways they are still very clean designs and stand out against their competitors, but the current iMac isn’t as innovative as the last one (and others did similar things last decade) and the Titanium hasn’t changed that much since it was released a long time ago. While I was very sure, given the timing of Intel’s new part, that Apple was going to release their first Intel-based products, knowing Apple, I also believed they would use this opportunity to refresh these designs. Unfortunately, they didn’t; I can’t help but feel disappointed.”
“For buyers, this would suggest waiting until after mid-year to purchase the new platform (which, if you recall, was the date that Steve Jobs originally set). This should result in not only a better experience but hardware from Apple that may go farther in setting the pace in hardware design than ever before,” Enderle writes. “One thought: These things could become collectors’ items, as the initial runs could be relatively small for an Apple product. However, MacWorld was no match for CES this round; next round, I’m not so sure… Apple will have to do a lot to match the wow factor of [some of the products announced at CES]. However, Apple does have Steve Jobs, who often can make even mediocre things seem spectacular.”
Full article here.
Apple debuted the current iMac design (up to 1/2-inch thinner and 15 percent lighter with built-in iSight camera) only three months ago, in October 2005. Apple debuted the aluminum PowerBook enclosure on January 7, 2003 with the 17-inch model. Apple replaced the 15-inch Titanium PowerBook with the aluminum PowerBook on September 16, 2003. Apple portable Pro Macs have featured aluminum enclosures since that time. As usual, Enderle obviously missed those not-so-minor facts. That one man can get so much wrong so often and continue to write articles and be quoted by others is amazing and sad.
[UPDATE: 11:45am EST: Added 17-inch PowerBook aluminum release date information to MDN Take.]
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