@Ronald Lindeboom

Ronald: "I couldn't agree with you more, Tim, that IF YOU ARE DOING VIDEO ONLY a tower does not seem necessary nor advantageous. But for those of us who work in many types of media, there is still an advantage to desktop towers"

And on that, *I* couldn't agree with *YOU* more. :-)

I do think that the irony of all this is that, a) FCP was the first NLE to work really, really well on laptops, and b) video editing itself is more pipe intensive than processor intensive, and one cool thing about Thunderbolt is that it extends pipes pretty cheaply. There are a ton of them at the show.

I don't think that Apple is out of the "fastest stuff we can weld together" business. iMacs and Airs aren't enough for what we're talking about with print production and other truly processor intensive tasks -- but it's not like Apple took the lowest road out either.

I look at something like the Z1 that looks like an iMac and has twice as much RAM, internal RAID, user-upgradable components including the GPU -- add some slick IO, and you could be in business for serious-er computing than you can get on an iMac today. COULD be.

But it's quite clear that there's no way you can get very far with print-grade Photoshop and InDesign on an iMac. And to HP's credit, as much as the Z1 is a dramatically more powerful beast than the iMac, they STILL refer to it as for photography and "entry video" only. They have a REAL beast for the rest.
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Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou