[ChillieMac]

The current iMac suffers bad sales because of it's lack of price to performance ratio and it fails to meet the needs of MOST CONSUMERS* and the lack of upgrade options to get the machine capeable of doing what they need.

By MOST CONSUMERS*, I mean gamers (which is no small number considering how HUGE the gaming market). Regardless of whether you play games or not, there are dozens of people for every one of you who do or would if their machines weren't already outdated in terms of performance.

Also, aside from the lucrative gaming market, Mac OS X is extremely graphics rich and demanding and more of the performance and "snapiness" will DEPEND on great GPU performance.

Here's what I propose...

Upgradeable video cards OR the current top graphics card soldered to the motherboard (ATI Radeo 9800).

If upgradeable...

PCI Express - ATI X300 with BTO option for ATI X600 (leave the X800 for PowerMac towers).

This allows customers to pick what level of video they need according to what they use it for. Having upgradeable video cards would give incentive to ATI and NVidia to make more cards compatible for us Mac users.

As for the fear of galvinizing sales from the PowerMac G5 towers...

a) get over it...don't lose sales to customers who are unwilling to pay $2000 plus to get decent hardware

b) there will be enough differences to make the distinction between consumer desktops and pro desktops
1) Single vs. Dual processors
2) Expansion slots
3) More RAM slots (up to 8GB on towers, up to 4 GB on iMacs)
4) Headless (allows choice of monitors)
5) Built-in Bluetooth and Airport Xtreme (build to order on iMacs)

c) Price point is key...more than eMacs and less than PowerMacs
Good
17" LCD
G5 1.6
256MB RAM (DDR400), expandable to 4GB
60 GB Serial ATA HD
Combo DVD/CDRW Drive
NVidia 5200 32MB
$999

Better
17" LCD
G5 1.8
512MB RAM (2 256MB DDR 400), expandable to 4GB
80 GB Serial ATA HD
Combo DVD/CDRW Drive
ATI 9600 64MB
$1299

Best
17" LCD (maybe 20" as Best plus option for $350 more)
G5 2.0
512MB RAM (1 512 DDR 400 stick)
80 GB Serial ATA HD
SuperDrive
PCI Express ATI X300
$1599

Granted this setup would require PowerMac G5 towers to bump up their graphics cards (128 MB Video RAM as low end, 256 MB High end), and a minimum of 512 DDR 400 for the towers as well.

Not one of these suggestions would seriously hurt Apple's profit margin and would seriously attract sales.

Would YOU buy one of these machines in a slick new case?

Comments welcome.

[Ryan Becker]

What is the point of this post?

This is the gaming forum, not a hardware forum. And, I see no point in getting yourself excited over something you have no control over....

-Ryan

[Forte]

Hmmn, well, it's an interesting idea, but I'm not too sure it'll help Mac gamers much. The real problem with gaming on the Mac, is that not nearly enough companies see it as a viable platform. You're quite right that something gaming-related will attract more sales. However, I tend to think that the hardware is already good enough to make a good game (often with intensive 3D games, they are not optimised well, on any platform, thus sometimes requiring the tiresome 'upgrade and upgrade again' cycle that occurs with some platforms almost every time new games are released - Macs don't need that, IMVHO, they're cost-effective by not requiring that so much), but not enough developers make the games in the first place.
Additional, flashier hardware isn't going to change that - more people demanding Mac support from their favourite developers is.

[a2daj]

I love the random statistics.

[DBvader]

I can't really see Apple releasing 17" iMacs starting under 1000 dollars. Factor in simply the cost of the widescreen monitor and the R&D, and the price point just doesn't seem realistic.

Swapable video cards sounds like a great idea, but my guess is that will ultimately come down to the form factor and how easily it will allow for expandability.

[cszar2001]

Upgradable graphics cards are a must since CPU speeds have hit the wall (for the moment at least).
Apple has introduced that feature in the current line of PB�s - I think they are clever enough to offer such an option in the new iMac�s too.

[Luca Rescigno]

PowerBook G4s don't have upgradable graphics. They have a build-to-order option that allows you to double the amount of video RAM on the high end models. The 15" and 17" PowerBooks all use the same GPU, and you can't upgrade them after you buy them.

Anyway, I would agree that it's not the hardware, it's the game developers. Most games these days are just not optimized well enough for the Mac. They don't take enough advantage of the graphics card or the processor (not to mention common Mac advantages like dual processors and AltiVec). I finally got myself a Radeon 9800 last week, and I'm finally getting decent performance in most games. But a typical PC user will get gaming performance equal to my G4 with a homebuilt PC that costs $500. Call Of Duty is basically the only game that runs as well on my Mac as on a PC (other than the Stalingrad level, which is slow even with my superfast GPU, but fast on every PC I've seen).

And I don't think that MOST CONSUMERS are gamers. I'd say that most consumers are families who use the computer for email and web, occasionally music or some other kind of multimedia, and also let their kids play games sometimes. A lot of kids these days will just get their own computer for gaming once they are old enough to save up for one, and in that case they'll just buy a gaming PC. You're not going to convince a sixten year old that he'd be better off with a Mac. My brother, a definite Mac fanatic, has a PC for gaming. He uses his Mac for everything else. And I don't see anything wrong with that.

[Truepop]

the current iMac suffers from bad sells because there are none to be sold.