So How Does Apple Fill Product Gaps?
January 11th, 2010When you don’t know what’s going on with Apple, it’s perfectly reasonable to look over their product lineup and see what gaps might be filled. That, alas, can be a double-edge sword.
Take the desktop lineup. Three models, but no affordable expandable model. The Mac Pro is simply too rich for most Mac users, and, despite its incredible number-crunching capability and the loads of expansion opportunities, most owners never go beyond adding RAM or maybe a second internal hard drive. Indeed, my last two Mac Pros were outfitted in just that fashion, although I did upgrade from the stock graphics card during the initial purchase, since those cards tend to be rather underpowered for such a costly product.
So looking for opportunities, some Mac authors (including your humble author) posited a midrange minitower or perhaps a headless iMac that would offer essentially the same performance as Apple’s mainstream desktop but afford additional opportunities to add stuff internally. This harkens back to the legendary Mac IIcx and its successors, which were quite compact for what they offered.
