Where’d the Ambition Go?

Khoi

20 years ago

My initial thought on Apple’s new iMac, which was announced today at Apple Expo in Paris, is that it’s a nice bit of engineering, but unfortunately it amounts to little more. That the product team seems to have jumped through some nontrivial technical hoops in fitting a G5-based CPU on the back of an LCD screen seems insufficiently impressive to me — I wanted something more groundbreaking. The form factor of the iMac line has, since its inception in 1998, always represented the vanguard of Apple’s consumer thinking; both the net appliance cutesiness of the original and the elegant, sunflower-like articulation of its 2002 successor were new ways of thinking about consumer computing.

Below: the downside of the new iMac. It’s actually quite amazing how much a photo of Apple hardware looks like a Mac OS X icon.

All the Way

This year’s model is not that. Proof of this shortfall can be seen in the lamentably accurate design predictions worked up by fans over the past several weeks. Many of them are dead on, which is a unique event — Apple has always surprised us in the past, and to see it release something that’s nearly a forgone conclusion suggests a worrisome dearth of imagination.

What’s frustrating is that Apple seems to have headed down a road that suggests so many possibilities, but they seem unwilling to fully commit to the path. The company’s marketing pitch posits that “the display is the computer,” making its stand nearly superfluous — but the computer is still wedded to the stand, apparently. Making it removable — and easily wall-mountable — would have required a little bit more effort, but even then it would have only been half of a good idea.

The logical next step after cramming a computer inside of an LCD case is to make it truly portable, to give it the qualities of a laptop and/or a tablet computer. I realize that adding this kind of functionality requires not only hardware but software innovation — no mean task — but isn’t this a challenge that Apple seems ideally suited for? The answer to that is ‘yes.’