After a bit of a delay, Apple announced the new iMac. It's essentially the same specs as the last model but the form factor has returned to the kind of all-in-one concept of the original '98 iMac. Basically, they chopped off the front of an eMac, pushed the speakers down and under the unit, put the CD drive in the upper left corner, and then put the whole thing on a fancy aluminum stand.

I remember watching Steve Jobs unveil the "old" iMac (i.e., the iLamp model that I'm writing this on) a couple of years ago and he went through a bit of the design detail involved in redesigning from the original gum drop shape. In fact, he showed some slides of a design that essentially lopped off the back of the gum drop in much the same way the newest iMac does to the eMac. At the time, though, Jobs pointed out that Apple didn't like the idea for reasons such as the CD would have to be vertical (instead of the usual horizontal orientation) and vertical CDs couldn't spin as fast (I assume therefore lowering read/write speeds). According to Jobs, Apple kept returning the idea of letting the CD be a CD, letting the monitor be a monitor, and so on. I thought it was a pretty elegant way of thinking and it resulted in a really neat form factor. I still love the way the monitor on the iLamp model still seems to "float" in space. And it swivels. I love the swivel because though you don't use it every day, when a swiveling monitor would be nice right about now, you can just swivel.

Anyway, the new iMac, with its lopped off look, has the CD in a vertical orientation. Perhaps the engineers figured out a way to minimize or counteract whatever problems they ran into a couple of years ago, but I thought it was an interesting "flip flop" (hehe) that's not been mentioned.

Anyway. Back to the chores now.