By chance, I was looking at Mac Minis in the UK online Store this morning (GMT), and the price of the lesser-spec'ed unit was £391. Now the price of the new lesser-spec'ed unit is £499.
It's a good thing the economist runs its purchasing power against burgers and not Apple hardware! Although that would be interesting for its own reasons.
You're getting screwed by the GBP exchange rate plunge. (some might say: correction, and having lived in the UK during times of the €1.50 pound, I'd tend to agree) Euro prices have stayed the same. And yes, ordering Apple gear via the UK store or UK Amazon was a bargain for mainland Europeans for a while because Apple only seems to adjust for fluctuations when they update products. Shows you what kind of mark-up they're using to be able to afford to do that. On the plus side, you'll be able to get cheap Apple gear from the continent if the pound picks back up.
Without wishing to belabour the point, the prices for the same unit (the lesser-spec'ed Mac Mini) also seem to have gone up in the Irish and German stores (to pick but two), from €499 to €599.
I just checked amazon.de and you're absolutely right, sorry. For some reason I thought the old minis were €599, too. 166MHz and 40GB more, the nvidia chip, and losing the remote are worth €100? Hmm.
Nevertheless, around 50% of the GBP 392->599 increase is down to correcting for the new exchange rate. Not that that helps you at all.
My thoughts exactly. And I've been a mac user for 22 years (since I was six).
I was hoping to see something new from the iMac line. Anything. A second display. Upgradeable hard drive. Consumer grade Raid 1 (y'know, like you'd see on a $1500 DELL tower.)
Very little to see here. And a high end iMac makes no sense. At that rate, you're almost buying their quad-core tower.
(But I suppose at the very high end, people don't buy Mac Pros as often as they do Mac Books, because they're usable for very long periods of time.)
Can't you daisy-chain two (or more) external drives in the FW800 port? I do that with FW400 on a PPC iMac. Doesn't OSX support RAID? I am quite sure the server version does.
And, you know, that Dell box will have Windows pre-installed. OSX is so much nicer.
Most iMacs support "Display Mirroring". Yup. Two monitors, in proximity (basically next to each other) showing the exact same thing. Very useful.
(Note: Apple tends to change this every hardware revision. So basically -- every OTHER revision of the iMac supports dual displays.)
I hadn't considered software FW RAID. I don't know if it would be better/worse than SATA RAID chipsets on modern PC motherboards these days. I have a feeling (being software RAID) that it would be slower than hardware RAID 1. And still, saying its capable to jury rig RAID (i mean, c'mon, for an additional fee, I could just buy a FW RAID array and just attach that.) is different from saying it supports it out of the box, like its price-competitive PC counterparts do.
Yes, OS X is nice. But the premiums on the hardware are looking a little dated considering everyone is slashing margins during a recession. OTOH, my Mac Book Pro is doing so well, I don't feel the need to upgrade, so I can afford to wait and buy used.
AFAIK, the display mirroring limitation hasn't existed since the switch to Intel. MacTracker indicates that every Intel iMac so far has supported extending the display in addition to mirroring.
That's good to know. Apple is always doing something stupid with one of its product lines. Its current MacBooks dropped firewire. So, a university I know (worked there) won't be ordering new MacBooks because they own so many Firewire only camcorders, and they let the students check out a camcorder and a macbook to make videos for class. Because people are complaining, it will probably come back next incarnation.
And then, after that, it'll probably be taken out.
It's been known to happen. The 15" PowerBook G4 came with a FW800 port, but was removed when the 15" MacBook Pro came out. Bowing to public pressure, Apple restored the port to the 15" when they upgraded to Core 2 Duo.
That mirroring thing is really weird. I remember having extended desktops on the G5 iMacs and I assume no meaningful features were droppped (perhaps HD playback on external monitors).
As for software RAID vs. hardware, current processors are usually so much faster than spinning disks that I suppose hardware RAID exists currently only on very high-end systems. As for the low-end systems, they make the processor do a lot of work, so, that more or less evens the playfield.
Macs also have a much longer useful life. I still use a G3 iMac that has been serving me flawlessly since it left the factory.
First, aesthetics are not negligible. The iMac has at least two fewer cables, is more easily shifted around, doesn't require finding space on the floor for a tower, takes up very little desk space, and is very quickly packed up for overnight or weekend trips. For people who need to take their computers with them a few times a year, but don't want to make the sacrifices or pay the higher costs for a laptop, it's useful. Just speaking for my own category.
For those outside the US, there's a significant price rise (In Australia, an iMac is now 25% more expensive than it was yesterday) with very little to show for it. I've got some friends who I've told to hold off buying because there was an update due soon, but this is just embarrassing.
