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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

The iMacs very much aren't their main seller. A couple of key demographics use it though:

* Families with a shared computer in a common room. Super simple to setup, no fiddling, low price. In the video Apple showcased this use case. My parents have an M3 imac and it works great. They had their last iMac for ten years.

* Businesses buy these for reception areas and customers see the Apple logo on the back. Easy solution for a business with no IT department, great marketing for Apple.

Apple will probably always sell an iMac option as long as businesses buy and display them.

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My daughter's orthodontist has one of these behind every chair. Our dentist has them too.

HN honestly is a terrible source of information for

1) What sells

2) What might sell

I have been to a on orthodontist office which didn't have any iMac.

I wouldn't apply this observation to judge if the product makes sense

That's fine, but personal anecdotes are also a hugely misleading source of information too. In the time since the iMac redesign was released, I've seen 10x more of the old models than I have seen of the new ones. My local barber even uses an Intel iMac in Target Display mode to run their Windows small-form-factor PC.

HN is disillusioned, but so are a lot of the west coast product designers that expect businesses to buy these on day 1. The majority of businesses are going to buy whatever is cheap and effective - their realistic choice is between a Chromebox and a Mac Mini.

When I think cheap and works out of the box, Mac is the last thing on my mind.

Apple ain’t cheap.

Windows 11 (literally) will not work out-of-the-box if you don’t have internet access.

Linux isn’t cheap unless your time is free.

I say we should just bring back IRIX.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

The sell but Apple makes around twice as much from services as they do from Mac. Wearables are even bigger than Mac. And within Mac, 90% of sales are laptops. I don't think Apple focuses that much about desktop Macs.

Ironic that you're also professing what to sell right above and that you're also doing it on HN.

+1 for the business front desk. This is by far where I see them the most. They're very easy to deploy, and most of the software you're going to need it to be running works in a browser. A windows all-in-one PC is another option... but the chance of something going wrong/being annoying in the interim between "plunk it on the desk" and "open salesforce in chrome" is definitely higher.

My parents have had an iMac in their living room sitting quietly doing stuff (web apps, mainly) for 9 years now. Still works fine for all their use cases and the 5k screen remains a delight to behold.

i know a few people who have an iMac in their living room like that, with the same logic as the people who still have landlines - the laptops and cell phones get put away when you get home (or stay in the home office), so you can be present with your family. but sometimes you still need a computer for stuff, like controlling the music or quickly looking something up on google. but if it's not your computer, and it's not signed in to all your stuff, you're going to quickly do the thing you need doing and then get off it again.

iMac is perfect for that. it looks pretty, it's small enough that it can be put in a corner, and it's powerful enough that you can buy it, leave it there, and not think about having to upgrade it for a decade.

It's surreal for me how something so expensive can be thought as "perfect" for this usecase. I'd say in cases like this having a cheap laptop or even a cheap all in one desktop computer is good enough. Why spend $2000 to browse the internet?

Being honest, I would bet the archetypical family that can prioritize "putting the phone away and being present" definitely skews more affluent than you may expect.

Eh, they start at $1300 (I suspect pretty much all non-commercial purchases are the base-line one) and last roughly forever (like, a decade is not an exaggeration; you see old ones around a fair bit). There’s a market, there.

Not sure what it’s like these days, but last time I checked cheap PC laptops were basically disposable; in an old job we had plastic Dell laptops for non-eng roles, and I’d be surprised if the median lifespan was much more than a year. They just broke _all the time_. Possibly things have come on, I suppose; this was a while back.

The long support length lowers the effective cost. We only upgraded my parents' computer after ten years due to software support. It was so old it was soon going to lose even Google Chrome updates. But it ran like new.

The total carrying cost over ten years is quite low. And my parents have needed much less tech help with a mac. The day to day ease matters and is worth money.

Long support length? For money!

> Why spend $2000 to browse the internet?

Not having to manage windows and its bullshit, most likely.

Macs usually require way less maintenance than windows machines. Just install all the upgrades and you're 99% fine.

Sorry for the 2000 price mark, seems like the base version costs 1300$.

In my personal experience, my parents (not super tech savvy) always had a windows laptop and never had a specific windows issue due to updates and whatever. If they did, it's more app specific, not necessarily os specific.

In general, I (personally) disagree with the statement that macs require less maintenance than windows or Linux, I use a mac for work, and I have a fair share of app related issues just like I would on a Windows or Linux machine. It's just my opinion.

I love the iMac as the main driver for my family of 5

* We want a dedicated space in the house for a family computer, so portability is no concern

* It has a very small footprint

* It looks the most like "furniture" out of all the options I've seen; pretty color & form factor, and no mess of cables. If you're male, think "wife approval factor".

* It does everything the family needs from it; runs Steam, documents, spreadsheet, browser, school, photos/videos, etc

* High interoperability with our family iPhones/iPads

Yeah a family friend PC that can end up on a desk or in the kitchen, or on a milk crate as a media player in an apartment, as a family computer they get years of use over time by different people in a family. From work to life to play.

Same here. I provide tech support to my father, on the condition that I pick the hardware, always an iMac

Education as well. Main reason why that headphone jack has stuck around I suspect.

Low number of cables has also been one of the points of appeal for the iMac, to the point that it was a focal point of marketing for the original model. For the average person's setup the current model only needs a power cable.

It's an optional extra (of course), but you can plug an ethernet cable in to the power adapter and deliver power + network over the same cable.

> For the average person's setup the current model only needs a power cable.

Even if you use wireless input devices you'll need to charge them occasionally

Of course, but those cables (or more likely, just one cable) can be stashed away in a drawer 99% of the time. The bundled keyboard and mouse/trackpad can go months between recharges, especially with lighter less frequent use that something like a living room or kitchen machine might see.

OK, I want to partly take back my comment. The business use case is brilliant.

Upgraded my father to one when the M1 came out. Perfect size and screen for him, more performance than he'll ever need (browsing and occasional word processing/spreadsheets).

He's very happy with it.

If you just want a family computer in the living room or somewhere, it's perfect. A place where you can just sit down and do some stuff. We have an iMac there without a login requirement.

>low price

???

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