Playing With Expectations

I wish I had a mailbox that could send letters through time. (I’m pretty sure there was a romance film with that premise but I can’t remember the name of it, unfortunately. Something about a lake, I think.) Then, I would be able to plan for circumstances impossible to foresee. Right now I’d like to send a letter to 2013 that asks:

Are PC’s and Macs the same now as they were back in my time?

You see, I’ve just read Marco’s post about the relative value of the iMac versus the Mac Pro. Actually, I read it a while back, but I’ve just now thought of an interesting question. Which system purchase would best prepare you for whatever new, amazing Mac component that Apple pulls out of its R&D department in the future?

I know that the Mac has looked rather stagnant since Snow Leopard - perhaps since Leopard - was released. Since then, Macs have gone from being flagships of Apple keynotes to being pushed to the online store with hardly a peep, sometimes even within a week of a major Apple event. The question is, is Apple doing this merely to promote their iOS devices, or are they playing with expectations, so that the next great Mac technology comes out of nowhere to amaze a baffled world?

If I were to bet on which technology is likely to come to Macs in the future, I’d bet on the Retina Display. Yes, a 5120 x 2880 resolution screen sounds plainly ridiculous and probably requires one mother of a graphics card for decent gaming, but Apple’s been trying to get developers to tune their applications for resolution independence for some time and rolling out a line of desktop Retina Displays would surely convince developers that their time wouldn’t be wasted doing so (assuming 10.7 brings good support for the feature).

This would give a line of systems with much better screens than PC’s can easily use; since Windows developers have been asleep for the past five years, few Windows applications are even close to ready for resolution independence, let alone the OS itself. Imagine obvious pixelation being a thing of the past: maps that you zoom in on by looking closer at the screen instead of clicking a zoom button, photos that look like something out of National Geographic, and text that looks like something fresh off the press. It’s something perhaps more impressive on the desktop than it is on the iPhone.

In this case, the Mac Pro is still the obvious choice - in fact, even more obvious. You’d have to trash the iMac to get a new one with a good display, while you merely have to replace the display and probably the graphics card on the Mac Pro.

But this is only one possibility. What if color E-Ink displays suddenly became awesomely good and the newest OS demanded a graphics architecture that understood CMYK instead of RGB? This is very unlikely, of course, but there are some ideas out there that could potentially render everything obsolete at once. In this case, the iMac would be the better choice.

The difference between the choices is that the iMac saves you $1000 in the short term, but is slower and makes for a fast and expensive upgrade cycle, while the Mac Pro is faster, more flexible and has a slower upgrade cycle, but is also a major investment that will punish you if you need to upgrade quickly.

Of course, since Apple likes its surprises, you’ll have no way of knowing which option is the best one. Just remember that despite making the right decision, you could still lose anyway. Not that buying a Mac is ever a bad decision, of course¹.