Apple or Frankenstein?
 Well...I got up this morning and found out that Apple had released the new Power Macs. There's no real drama in this announcement. The design looks exactly like the pictures that made the rumor sites. The specs are in line with what had been rumored. After reading all the Apple web site page, I sat back and digested the results.
I am of two minds. They are evolutionary, moving Apple forward to technology that should have been in these machines 12 months ago. They are faster, better engineered, and they listened to their customers in bringing back the Audio-in port. They improved expandability and made the machines even easier to use. These are all good things, though I would prefer revolutionary.
It's just too bad that they left all their design sense on the table with the new iMac and eMac. It's as if they had their brains sucked out. This one looks like design by committee, a little of this and a little of that. The case could be compared to Frankenstein's Monster. It looks they had decided to move towards the metallic, titanium look of the Powerbook, and then decided that they could save money by grafting it to the old quicksilver case. What they got was a case only Egor could love.
What's with the vents in the front? Why not use the style of the openings in the rear of the case. Then there's the speaker. I hate the exposed speaker cone. The Quicksilver has it and so does the eMac. Apple knows it's a stupid design idea. That's why they provide pop-in grills with each eMac they sell.
On the other hand, they've speeded up the machines, it's still too slow in my opinion. They can talk Megahertz myth all they want, they can dual processor all they want, the reality is that selling 1.25 vs. 2.53 is a tough deal. I like the expandability of the new case. They dropped the zip bay (why not, I haven't touched mine in months), and replaced it with room for another full size optical drive. There's also room for 4 hard drives.
What will the reaction be? I think people will hate the case design, love the ease of use and be happy to see more speed. People are going to complain that the speed increase was not as much as some speculated. People are going to keep asking the question..."Apple, what is your future CPU strategy?"...because this release does nothing to settle that issue...mj
9:46:53 AM 
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