Having had some time to reflect on my experience with the flat-panel iMac at
Macworld, I have come up with five ways to improve the product which
range from the impractical to the irresistable. Here they are:
- Make the very bottom of the base, where the ports lie, rotatable.
You don't want your ports in the back? Fine. Rotate them to the front.
(It might be easier to make the split just below the Superdrive, but
it'd look awful. Or maybe RoadTools wants to expand into
desktops....)
- Provide Pro speaker mounts on the sides of the monitor and run
jacks down through the neck.
- Include in the box a package of PostIt™ notes and a package
of screen cleaner to clean fingerprints off
the frame. (I've not purchased one yet - do they already come
with something like that?)
- Make the monitor port a true second monitor port which can serve as
an extended desktop instead of just a mirror. Use an ATI video card,
though, so you don't hurt Power Mac sales.
- Give the keyboard a snappier response. Apple hasn't make a decent
keyboard since the old Extended Keyboard; everything else is squishy. I
want a nice solid click, and I don't care if it's noisy. I actually
went to the effort of trying out a bunch of third-party keyboards, but
they're all squishy clones. That's one of the reasons I love my old G3 MT; it has an ADB
port.