“At the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, CEO Steve Jobs unveiled new iMac desktop computers on Tuesday, featuring a sleek aluminum-and-glass design,” Richard Koman reports for CIO Today. “Jobs spent most of his iMac talk cooing over the new aluminum-and-glass design. ‘It’s just stunning. It’s just gorgeous,’ Jobs said.”
Koman reports, “But the updates are modest, considering they were due to be delivered in June, observed Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group. ‘The iMacs were late and there’s no touch stuff,’ he said, arguing that ‘the iMac is lagging behind the HP TouchSmart.’
Koman reports, “He added that it’s ‘unusual for HP to be ahead of Apple’ in the all-in-one machines, and said that today’s announcements show that ‘for the past six months, the major work was on the iPhone and it pretty much eclipsed everything else.'”
Full article, Think Before You Click™, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Did we miss the announcement where Apple promised new iMacs in June? No, we did not, because Apple promised no such thing. So, right off the bat, unsurprisingly, Enderle is wrong.
Here’s a little test anyone can try: pretend that you’re using a vertical touchscreen for 5 minutes — single touches, please — HP’s so-called “TouchSmart” can’t do multi-touch. So, click around, manipulate pretend scroll bars, imagine some typing on the keyboard, then back up to the screen, back and forth, pointing and clicking for 5 minutes. We’ll wait…
What’s that, your arms are tired? You’d better start curling dumbbells, if you’re going to listen to dumbbells like Rob Enderle.
As Steve Jobs said yesterday, “Makes sense for the iPhone, not sure it makes sense in the Mac.”
A multi-touch UI for laptop, tablet, or kiosk Mac? No problem. For a desktop with a vertical screen? No.
HP’s suggests their thing is great for “checking the weather before you leave the office.” As if pointing and pressing icons on a vertical screen is somehow easier than simply squeezing the sides of a Mighty Mouse once to get the weather instantly via Dashboard as with Apple’s iMac.
Here’s another test: take a look at the machines side-by-side below:
Rob Enderle must be as blind as he is stupid. What the hell is that thing on the right? Does HP have even a single “designer” on the payroll? If so, the poor bastard got his degree at The Fugly Institute. Extraneous Nonsense is not a good aesthetic to follow.
HP’s conglomeration comes with an AMD Turion 64 X 2 Dual Core processor. Apple’s iMac comes with your choice of an 2.0GHz, 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, or 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.
HP’s mess comes with a footprint of 21.77-inches! Apple’s iMac footprint is a mere 7.4-inches — or zero if you mount it on an arm. (You’ll need a medium-sized crane to “mount” HP’s pile of junk somewhere; we’d suggest a landfill, if they’d take it.)
HP’s contraption comes with Microsoft’s “Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium.” Apple’s iMac comes with Mac OS X and, if it must, can also run Windows. HP’s thing can’t run Mac OS X or iLife, iWork, Final Cut, etc.
The HP pile has a 19-inch screen and retails for $1,849.99. Apple’s 20-inch iMac costs $650.99 less at $1199.00. Apple’s 24-inch iMac costs $50.99 less at $1,799.00.
Apple’s iMac lags behind HP’s piece like a new BMW lags behind a 1991 Yugo with a flat tire. HP has never been ahead of Apple in all-in-one-machines — or anything else for that matter, beyond overcharging for printer cartridges and foisting low-end junk onto the PC market targeted at those occupying the left side of the bell curve.
As Steve Jobs said yesterday, “We can’t ship junk. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. The difference is, we don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products.”
Rob Enderle is simply an idiot — picking apart these Enderle messes sometimes makes us feel bad; it’s like taunting the retarded — but Richard Koman and other writers who continue to quote his nonsense are the ones who come off as the real morons.