Hello everybody I'm valdamear and every now and again I'll let you take a look at what I see through my crystal balls!
The future is iMac'lovable.
The Next generation of iMac's are not that far away. I can feel it in my gut [or was that lunch].
To be affective with their intended consumer target audience the iMac's have to stay one step ahead of the Intel crowd. From what I've seen they'll be doing just that.
New iMac will sport:
* Bus speeds will just dip over 80MHz at last. Also main clock chip modifications are expected but not until late in the year. The beta test I seen in my crystal ball was flying past me at well over 400MHz
* Full administrative networking tools. The iMac is to the Mac world what NC is to the Wintel world, that's another selling point Apple is going to push. Booting from a network and better tools will bundle with the next little multi coloured guys.
* Larger screen, just an inch or two! That iMouse gets a little face lift
* New motherboard will be based more closely on new G3's expected out mid year, this will save costs on multiple designs, Apple wishes to reduce the number of board designs thus reducing costs and concentrating on power and OS issues
* DIMMs memory will replace the expensive SDRAM modules, memory capacity to be increased, talk of boosted L2 cache. iMac with a memory capacity of 400MB is just around the corner, quite possibly due within a four month release date
* IDE internal drives, giving more access to cheaper drives
* Modifications to CD bay, it may even ship with a DVD drive
* Slight external design changes, no more colours promised, but I heard something about a limited edition iMac sort of like the Anniversary beast.
These new iMac's will continue in the vein of fast, affordable, powerful and simple computing. It's all about market share the PR people will keep selling the idea of the iMac more vividly in 1999 to gain the markets share they desperately need. I have also heard a rumour from the den that Apple 'might' release an adjustable keyboard in iMac colours soon.
Next month I might cast my visionary powers over the next three or four Operating System updates , the new G3 PowerBook's or then again I might not.
[If anyone would like tips for the lottery let me know, I also do a nice line in card tricks too!].
