Why am I not surprised?

Honestly?

On top of lax security patching, inflated prices and its fan's everest-sized martyr-complex (as well as any other fruit related idiocy in the past couple weeks) now there's inferior monitors.

Wait... Why do I care? I don't own a single piece of their hardware and I only go near their temples to grab a bit of free wi-fi.

Sooo...

...Apple are having a bad week then?

Happy April

happy april everyone?

mines the one with the applesauce stains....

Finaly

The thrue comes out of the bag... Mindless Drone Mac users finally confronted with reality: Mac is pure crap,

get your self a nice custom built PC and install linux (if you don;t like Windows) and get real bang for your buck. witch is impossible with a Mac Canned PC that is more restricton the the chinese regime.

Give it a few more years and Apple will just be another PC maker.. RIP free BSD... heu i mean Mac OS (or is it CrapOS?)

Why Here? because she have the IQ of a typical Mac user.

So glad someone is sueing them

Mine is crap and taking it back to Apple they do not seem to care when I say the colours are flat.

Hope they have their arse dragged through the court then I will take mine back and wave the court order in front of the guy behind the till.

I brought one of those macs

I brought the new iMac and I can say I couldn't care less. I love macs and since we got one, no one has used the windows. We got this new iMac to replace the little used Windows (custom built) and it works a charm. As far as I can see it looks better than the old iMac screen (which I also have). It may be April fools day, but Windows users, your the fools 'cos you haven't or don't use the power and greatness that is mac.

PCs are awful. I have had 3 of them and I got frustrated and hated each one. The last one broke 7 times in 6 months. I now have 2 macs and I love 'em. Never had a single problem, they both work well with windows and I have no problems sending files to and from windows.

No April Fools

Sadly this story is true.

@ AC - Cheap screens

I'd wager that most people posting are using TFT screens, not twisted nematic (STN/DSTN), they're very uncommon now. Please don't spread horseshit just 'cos you love Apple so much.

no comment

after all, were it not for inflated claims, misleading statements and downright lies, there would be absolutely no need for advertising executives (or indeed politicians for that matter). Now then, where's that fat free invisible donut gone that the nice man sold me this morning?

Glad I bought the previous one

Thanks people, I feel far better at having bought the previous version a couple of months before the new one came out :)

As for the uber geeks on here - get a life!!! its an operating system on a peice of machinery - it enables you to do something and depending on what it is it will do it slightly better or worse than the rival system.

After years of shit windows machines crashing and freezing up, I have now been a mac user for around 10 months and am very, very pleased.

Having said that, some windows machines are great/reliable/cheaper.

But who really gives a fuck? No seriously come on? why do you care so much? Explain Phreaky explain!!!!!

Macs are good for creative work...

not anymore if they have crap screens.

Mac Screens

Oh dear.

My 'doze PC which I've been faithfully rebuilding with new motherboard/cpu/memory every other year for as long as I remember has finally got to the point where it needs yet another refresh (Damn commodity components on motherboards don't last long these days).

As a Unix convert of many years I figured it'd be an interesting experiment to have a go with a Mac pro. After all, you get the best graphical interface around, combined with 'nix under the hood. Have just ordered a dual quad-core xeon machine with raid card and multiple drives. I'm interested to see how Leopard turns out, as FreeBSD is my OS of choice. I mean, what the heck - if it turns out to be a big pile of shite, I can pretty easily nuke Apples OS off it and install the real thing - thats the price Apple pay for their switch to the more ubiquitous PC architecture :-))

...But now this article has got me worried about the one component I thought I could rely on as being reasonably decent - the 23" Apple Cinema screen.

...oh, and after another fairly recent article on El Reg, I'm holding my breath to see what drives they ship with it ('enterprise class'? yeahhhhhh right). If they've used those rubbish Hitachi (ex IBM) death-star drives (Or worse - Maxtor!), I might send the whole lot back under the 14-day mail order consumer protection clause and write it off as a very bad decision.

C'mon Reg - You're posting articles about Apple every other day now - wheres the Evil/Saint Jobs icons? Even better, wheres the "Acid-trip Jobs" icon :-))

Apple Cinema Screens

Apple Cinema Screens are mostly from the same factory as Dell monitors, the 20 inch iMac may be an exception.

To AC, theres been no reports of the 23" having issues, so i doubt you have much to worry about. Cnet and other review sites have reported no issues with those screens. If anything the standalone Cinema screens still hold themselves to good repute.

That said, it is quite dodgy of Apple to put in such a low quality monitor into the 20" iMacs, i wouldnt blame people for suing them over it. Hopefully its a lesson they'll learn from.

A company taking advantage of its customers.......

.....WOW, I DO NOT BELIEVE IT.

Remember: 'A Computer is a tool for a purpose, whereas a fanboys purpose is to drool over the tool, is blinkered by the tool and cannot see the beauty of other tools'

They are all the same, some do some jobs better than the others. Simple and to the point.

Almost 24bbp

Had a quick google and found this article:

http://lowendmac.com/musings/07/0521.html

Apparently they can say it's millions, tenuous as it is.

Don't agree with the blog's parting comment though. As in the Reg article, if you're editing 24bit images, some different colours may be displayed on screen as the same colour. Not good really.

Yeah, but they are special *APPLE* colours...

262,144 iColors, that "Just Work", and are therefore waaay better than 16,777,216 shitty M$ PC colours. So there.

Aaaahh.....

I was nearly taken in by the exploding sociology teacher, but *this* one is the April Fool one, designed to induce apoplexy in the fanboys, and I claim my five pounds.

Less said about the grammar the better

The only entertaining aspects to these stories are the fanboys of whatever flavour in the comments. A good example from the above: "I love macs and since we got one, no one has used the windows. ... they both work well with windows and I have no problems sending files to and from windows."

Hmmm... looks like a solid case of selective memory.

I dispair of some people, I realy do

A studio grade monitor for image editing can easily cost more than an entry level iMac. These people are complaining that a £800 entry level home machine isn't suitable for profesional grade image editing because the colour isn't accurate enough?

For those idiots complaining about the Mac screen looking washed out, go read up about Gamma curves. Apple defaults theirs to 1.8. PCs use 2.2 (more contrasty). You can adjust either OS to either curve (like turning the cuntrast up or down on your TV). Using 6 bit colour does not reduce the richness of the colour, it reduces the accuracy.

As for Mectron, are we taking bets on how close to age 12 he is?

@ Steve Todd

Thanks, Steve, you're right on the money in terms of colour intensity vs. fidelity. A low-bit-depth monitor will not look "flat", it will have posterized gradients.

I know what I'm talking about; I'm prepress journeyman with 20 years experience, using a Mac Mini with a pretty decent (but *not perfect*) Samsung 24" widescreen that cost under $500 Cdn last fall. I wouldn't use this display in a demanding professional environment (I'd stick with CRTs still if colour REALLY matters), but at home it's Jim-dandy.

You are all April fools!

Funny how the truth is now out on April fools day? Funny how you never see any Macs in skips outside offices? Nuf said!

Neck-bearded fools

Look-

While I'm disappointed that Apple is using fuzzy math to describe the capability of the 20" iMac display, I grow even more tired of the "because-you-can-build-a-$200-PC-out-of-commodity-parts-clear-silicone-and-duct-tape,-your-Mac-is-an-overpriced-POS" douche's that seem to thrive in various blogs, web forums, etc.

I built a hackintosh PC with commodity parts, used good ones, and guess what? It cost me nearly $1000.00 USD to do so. The only advantage (and I consider it a small one given the cost and availability of good external drives) to a comparable iMac system is that I have room for extra optical drives and hard drives. But guess what -- it doesn't "just work" (sorry for the cliché) like all of my real Macs do. It took considerable tweaking to get it where I'd consider it a viable system- until the next software update breaks something.

Trying to explain the Mac's benefit to the FOSS/Linux or Windows drones is like trying to describe the color blue to a blind man. Mostly futile, and somewhat irritating.

While your still trying to compile drivers for your wifi, and figuring out how to get DVD playback to work, I'll be *getting actual work done* on my Mac(s).

@ Steve Todd

Quote: "...(like turning the cuntrast up or down on your TV)."

The WHAT?

so

since when has the quality of the hardware been an issue, fitting a crappy screen can easily be compensated for with some uber kool advert.

bring it on i say, thinking is for loosers with too much time on my hands.

p.s. when will apple start telling me what to wear it would save soo much effort

smily face: as lights are on on by no one is at home

How did Apple make such a blunder?

Apple's most profitable and loyal niche markets are in the creative industries. Many films and journals are edited on Macs, and it's the designer's tool of preference.

It's just about impossible to do effective work in any of those niches using a 6:6:6 bit colour monitor.

Metatarsals, meet buckshot. Buckshot, these are metatarsals.

@ Thomas Reynolds

"PCs are awful. I have had 3 of them and I got frustrated and hated each one"

I tell you what - real guitars suck, I had one for 2 years and I got frustrated and hated it, it would always break down and I would need to replace the strings.. it was hell!! Then I got guitar hero 2 - and now I'm a guitar rock legend, and I've only had it 3 months - we even got a second recently that was even better, called Guitar Hero 3. Soon I'm going to be an awesome drummer and front man too in my very own band, thanks to Rock Band. Real guitar owners are idiots!! :)

I'm not one for defending Windows, but all your statement tells me is that you really suck at using computers at any decent level.... sounds like it's just the marketing making you feel slightly better about your lack of skillz! :p

w**k

the fact is apple are totally wank - more so than microsoft ever were

anyone who defends them must be some sort of sado masaochistic fruitcake

defend them at yer peril!

"Macs are good for creative work"

WHAT!!!! Is this because they fit into your middle class utopian dream fairy tale fantasy land with there marketing techniques and product design that match your recumbant bicycle. Can you tell me exactly what a predesposed overpriced poorly supportable platform has over an infinatlety configurable PC platform? idiot, Jobs deserves your money!

Millions? no. Thousands? no. 189 colours. That's all

6-bit colour flat panels can display a whopping total of 189 real colours. Everything else is done by combination of these 63 shades of red, green and blue (plus black of course). Don't believe me?

Use a magnifying glass...

Jolyon

@LJSeinfeld

"While your still trying to compile drivers for your wifi, and figuring out how to get DVD playback to work, I'll be *getting actual work done* on my Mac(s)."

Yes yes, thats fine. Please help me find a unique and creative way to check my email, that by paying the jobs tax that I am unique and creative and I can show it off. Thats what macs sell you on right? and that its based off a bastardized form of *nix. Also my ramshackled duct tape PC that is strung together with fishing line is still having no hardware support issues given whatever turd OS I throw at it.

Ya know, computers are really getting lame. I think I am just gonna go outside and

feed a penguin an apple and decide where I want to go today with a little devil.

Screw you guys, im going outside

@ Adam

You make a few points that I'd like to address...

1. Thomas Reyonlds is the problem between chair and keyboard with respect to his self-built Windows box. I do not disagree. I doubt that Tomas Reynolds has reason to disagree either. The conclusion remains the same. He solved his problem by using a Mac instead. There may be other solutions, such as getting an expert to build the box or getting training to build the box, but the simplest/quickest solution in this case seems to have been to use a Mac instead.

In a similar situation for other people, the simplest/quickest solution to figuring out how to get a Mac to work would be to build their own PC instead.

2. Getting the most out of a Mac is more than using iLife. I dispute this. A Mac may have been bought purely to run iLife for organising photos or purely to run Garageband. That user would very much be getting the most out of his Mac.

To argue that this is not true is rather like suggesting that a designer who only uses her PC to run autocad is not getting the most of it. If that's what she bought it for, then that's what she bought it for.

My mother-in-law gets the 'most' out of her MacBook. She runs Mail, iPhoto, Safari and NeoOffice, occasionally scans something and occasionally prints something.

3. This "typical Windows power user" thing is a red-herring. What does 'power' mean ? It's not CPU usage. Someone encoding a DVD in iLife or watching soemone falling over on Youtube is likely using more computing power than someone who spends all day writing code. Typical 'Power' User then is not Typical User. It's a user who needs an atypical level of control. An atypical user.

This it requires special skills to be an atypical (Power) user on a Mac should not be a surprise. And the tools are there for you. So to be a typical 'power' user on a Mac is no more difficult on Windows. In some cases OS-X would be a better choice. It's a genuine certified UNIX, after all.

And they look pretty too, which is a nice bonus.

As for the topic of the thread, I think this is a perfectly valid class action. Regressing the spec of the display and not making it clear is a pretty shitty underhand thing to do.