Thought these upgrades were fair, although the Mac Mini’s price could have dropped a little. But, it seems Apple is selling lots of units at those price points, so who could blame them for keeping the same prices? The Mac Mini is still a superior value, and better yet, so is the iMac.

Our company abandoned Mac development because the OS kept changing too much which required expenses on our side to keep up with those changes. Plus Apple didnt give us the support we needed. We spend a bunch of money on G5 optimizations only to find now that we’re now on Intel. The support we got from PC vendors was tremendous on getting us up on our feet with .NET developement. Cost isnt everything. There are business standards to adhere to and cost of support.

When you change from G4 to G5 to Intel processors and force users to pay for software upgrades over and over again (as in quicktime Pro), then it sure looks like it costs more. Our software that ran on original Pentium still runs fine on Pentium4 and dual core and AMD. It just works. All our Mac software required upgrades.

You aren’t forced to buy a new Mac, and you can’t fault Apple for wanting to build faster computers. As to software updates, well, this depends. If you have Classic software (Mac OS 9 and earlier) it won’t run on an Intel-based Mac, but we’re talking of products that or usually six or seven years old now, or even older. As to the G4 and G5, they will mostly “just work” in Classic mode, although you obviously get better performance and more features with the newer version.

Peace,
Gene

When you change from G4 to G5 to Intel processors and force users to pay for software upgrades over and over again (as in quicktime Pro), then it sure looks like it costs more. Our software that ran on original Pentium still runs fine on Pentium4 and dual core and AMD. It just works. All our Mac software required upgrades.

We get great educational discounts from Dell (these arent listed on their website of course). Apple does have educational discounts but it doesnt compare to what we’re getting. Macs are more expensive for us.

Have you contacted Apple’s educational people directly to get a price?

And, also, are you comparing Apples versus Apples here, in terms of the features? Dell can ship a stripped box, but Apple has a bottom-line and that’s as far as you can go in terms of the feature set.

Peace,
Gene

Those gaming benchmarks arent too encouraging. Frame rates are lagging so slow. My XBox goes faster than these.

They aren’t designed as gaming machines, of course.

But you can upgrade the 24-inch model to include an NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT, which gets 100fps on Doom 3 and 70fps on Quake 4, but they don’t say at what resolution. That seems decent enough, but a dedicated gaming machine will always have the best bang for the buck.

Peace,
Gene

We get great educational discounts from Dell (these arent listed on their website of course). Apple does have educational discounts but it doesnt compare to what we’re getting. Macs are more expensive for us.

Those gaming benchmarks arent too encouraging. Frame rates are lagging so slow. My XBox goes faster than these.

Geez, 24″ iMac. Great. However, readers note you’re probably better off with a laptop and getting a separate non-Apple LCD for big screen real estate when you need it, or simply use your existing 42″ flat panel HD TV.

Cool new products.

“Business” is very generic term. Small business would certainly find iMac attractive. Corporations on the other hand, wont. Although hardware cost is comparable, you still have to buy another license of Windows in order to use boot camp. On top of that, its a corporate no-no to run beta versions of anything, namely boot camp.

Also, users using boot camp for running Windows natively will find it’s a hassle to reboot to switch back and forth. They end up staying in Windows which is what they already use today. A lot of business apps just arent available in Mac OSX. Plus custom developement is harder to come by in the OSX platform.

Expensive? Yes, the flat panels are rediculously expensive, and also adding Airport (used to be $99) is expensive compared to the $19 wireless card I can get easily for our PCs.