Analyst: New iMacs Delayed For Chips, Snow Leopard

Delays in shipping Apple’s new iMacs are due mostly to “business reasons,” Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told clients Monday.

Chief among the reasons are decisions on which chip to use in the iMacs and the timing of Apple’s release of its upcoming Snow Leopard operating system.

“Apple is in the midst of figuring out whether to power the new iMac line with Intel quad-core processors or more high-powered dual-core processors with larger caches,” Wu wrote in his report.

If Apple chose Intel’s recently-released quad-core processors, the move “could cannibalize the Mac Pro,” the analyst reasoned. Wu’s thinking could be flawed, accoording to Apple Insider. The site pointed out Apple acting CEO Tim Cook last week said desktop sales were “primarily iMac.”

The chip issue seems to confirm a Digitimes report which said Apple was waiting on Intel’s new quad-core to release new products.

Another potential delay, according to the analyst, is holding the iMac to coincide with the release of the upcoming version of OS X, code-named Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard “takes [the iMac] to the next level” with enhanced chip and graphics support, Wu wrote.

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Wu also pointed to a potential delay as Apple modifies the iMac’s case to accommodate new cooling technology that would handle the increased heat generated by multiple-core processors.

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Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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http://www.macpcworkshop.com Dave Taylor
IMHO Shaw Wu is probably full of crap. I concede that he does not estimate a release date, but even if it’s within the next month or six-weeks, there is no way that Apple is “in the midst of figuring out” what processor they’re going to use. Any device they build that is shipping within a month has been “done” for at least 2-3 months, remember time to build and securing supplies, advertising, etc.
Dave
Lucas
1. i’m not sure i want to trust some stock analyst giving his expert opinion on what’s going on inside apple.
2. if apple could make a stronger imac at the same or just slightly above current prices and add it as a 3rd 24inch model, that might not be a bad thing. or even just as the top of the line model and drop the lowest 20 inch set up for the one above it (at the same price).
3. increasing the power of the imacs doens’t have to ‘canabalize’ the pro or even the mini depending on how Apple moves on those models.
http://tourismmedical.org Kate
I thought Kaufman is a screenwriter