Tech Goes Boom

iMac DVR? Um No.

Sometimes I wish I was a senior analyst at some important sounding company so I could spout the same things I spout here, but get paid at lot better for it and sound really important while doing it.

Paul Jackson, Senior Analyst for Forrester Research has declared the new iMac a missed opportunity. I won't dive too far into the particulars, as it's a quick read, but here are the big complaints.

1. No built in wireless, you have to buy the card and build to order to get bluetooth built in.

This I agree with. Apple needs to just start including these in all their products as standard features. While it could be argued that most consumers won't use these features and will resent having to pay for them, the same can be said for optical audio out. Apple also needs to include more standard RAM. To argue for Apple's sake here, the iMac series has always sold on a razor thin margin, and these add ons are what make the unit profitable for Apple and resellers alike.

2. No software option to turn the unit into a wifi access point.

He's of course wrong here, as this feature has been part of the Mac OS since OS 9. The feature is so seamless that it's hard to notice though, so I don't blame him too much. In OS X, it's under the sharing system preference under the internet tab.

3. Apple should have made this into a Media Center Mac. No they shouldn't have. The only market I can see this actually being useful is college students who don't have enough room for a TV and a computer, and will be watching programming alone. People want to watch programming on their TV, not their 17" or 20" LCD. And while you could implement something like a capture program which stores video on the machine, and then something that will stream that content to a modified airport express to output to a TV, you could also just buy a Tivo. Or as Paul points out himself, you can buy something like the eyeTV to do the job. Just because MS is doing something doesn't mean Apple should have to beat them to the punch. MS is developing XP media center for a media center PC that will live in the AV rack. While gateway and a few others have put it into full sized normal TVs, I'd like to see some numbers on how well those actually sell.

This is a weird and emerging market segment, rife with a lot of snares and traps. Granted, Apple broke ground and navigated those same snares and traps with the music business and the RIAA, but that doesn't necessarily translate into video. Normal consumers want a box on top of their TV that is essentially a digital VCR, not a full sized, loud, complicated PC. Those who do want a PC are generally those who want to expand on the capabilities of the Tivo, but those users are generally technically adept and have probably availed themselves of the million current options available to them. I trust that Apple's market research people have looked into this market, and determined it's a path that they cannot make money on. Just like the rumored Apple PDA of the last couple of years (not the newton).