Will Apple keep the Classic iMac around?

Bye-bye...

while supplies last...

I'd believe they are going to keep it around as long as inventory is available.....

once it's gone....

I agree with eyelikeart...
It will be here for a while... but as soon as the inventory starts running low and not worth restocking, bye bye.

Also, the new iMac will become a new symbol through time and the original will pass from our minds (at least until it's 10 aniversary or something comes up and they reintroduce it for that classic appeal.)

I will kind of miss it... but if it means being replaced with better products, well, I would rather have the better products.

Tomasz

iMac 1 is here for a while..

Apple has already said quietly that the old iMac will stay as long as they have educational orders for it .. where price is the bottom line and some schools would rather have less adjustable more stationary equipment.. not to mention the old imac prices are now as low as they've ever been with all models <$999. It will be the bottom end iMac for a while.. until LCDs reach price parity with CRTs probably. They are still for sale on Apple.com and will probably remain so for at least this year.

name for iBook...

Name suggestion for the 600Mhz iBook.. How about "Booker"..

booker seems appropriate.

Sub-$1000,00 iMacs

Indeed, Apple needs to keep (and will) some type of entry level device priced under $1000.00. It took them a while to get there, and blowing off so many potential customers (especially education) would be a dreadful move.

By the way, on Fred Anderson's conference call Wednesday (where Apple's Quarter earnings were announced) it was mentioned that the new iMacs have the highest preorder level Apple's seen since the introduction of the original iMac.

It was also stated that CRT iMacs will stick around until such time that Apple can get an LCD version wedged in there to take over the sub-$1000 price point, though there's no indication when (or if) that'll be possible.

Scott

I spoke to my insider today and he said with the fresh order of CRTs coming in, the answer here would be a resounding yes!!

not everybody can afford the new imac so the key is to have all income levels be able to afford an apple machine, even if it means keeping the old imac around for three more years and charging $399 for a CRT model

emachines sells plenty of their $399 dollar machines and they are #3 in the pc retail business behind compaq and hewlett packard

well...

no doubt it's a good idea to keep a very low priced system on it's roster while it still can sell them.....maybe this will be the way Apple stays afloat with the emachines and such? The educational factor also makes a lot of sense.....

so I guess why get rid of a good thing completely?

Originally posted by GigaWire
I spoke to my insider today and he said with the fresh order of CRTs coming in, the answer here would be a resounding yes!!

Click to expand...

GigaWire, why the "mad" faces over such good news?

we can't be elitist even though we know we have better machines than the pc world

we don't want to pull a lambroghini and price ourselves out of existence and have a chrysler/daimler (microsoft) buy us out eventually

iMac Classic - staying power

I think that so long as Apple can keep dropping the price on the iMac Classic, they will sell quite a few of them. I predict that they'll stay in the lineup for at least another year, eventually topping at 1Ghz and hitting a price point close to $500.

Apple certainly can't ditch them until the new iMac has reached something close to the Classic's current price point.

The old iMac will probably live a life similar to the "Mac (Color) Classic I/II", for those of you who recall.

I wwork in eduation and sit on a purchasing committee. Apple must keep the CRT until they can get the iMac under the cost of an educational PC.

Educational PC's cost about $1300-1500 canadian. (I know you can get them cheap or build your own for cheaper, but the cost of ownership on those is way to high. You need a more expensive PC with better quailty parts or else you have to pay too much in labour in fixing the cheaper PC's)

Currently the new iMac is $1850 educational canadian (not yet available.)

The CRT iMac is about $1100 and $1450 educational Candian.. a great deal when you consider the lower thna PC cost of ownership.

On another point all new Macs ship with OSX as start up. we have to immediately turn back to OS9 since OSX is incompatible with windows NT (unless you are using ONLY carbon apps...NO classic). This error in OSX has annoyed MANY IT managers in education. Almost all of these IT mangers hate Macs, and these people also sit on the purchasing committees. Until Apple fixes this problem, they are going to loose millions in sales and loose even more market share in eduaction!!!

There are some solutions but it requires third party software, long setup times and even then there are problem. If you are on Win 2000 or and apple server then this problem does not effect you. However, most schools run on NT.

How to link to NT

Originally posted by Buggy
On another point all new Macs ship with OSX as start up. we have to immediately turn back to OS9 since OSX is incompatible with windows NT (unless you are using ONLY carbon apps...NO classic). This error in OSX has annoyed MANY IT managers in education. Almost all of these IT mangers hate Macs, and these people also sit on the purchasing committees. Until Apple fixes this problem, they are going to loose millions in sales and loose even more market share in eduaction!!!

There are some solutions but it requires third party software, long setup times and even then there are problem. If you are on Win 2000 or and apple server then this problem does not effect you. However, most schools run on NT.

Click to expand...

I use a great program called Sharity, I believe, and it took 2 seconds to install, 2 seconds to type in the Workgroup name (I do not use a Domain but you can) and straight away you can see all Windows machines on the network w/o any special, hard to use applications. You can also use it for free with one connection, I think, and pay for it if you like it to allow more connections.

iMac

Actually, i could see the old iMac selling around 500,000 a year if it keeps below around 700. People would buy them because of the price and the OS so i am sure that apple will not kill it anytime soon. Also school's need it bad and that is one of the main revenue streams for apple so it probably aint going anywhere for some time.

OS X has probs, yes, but if you really want to fix them get under the hood, get dirty and fix it. It is so expandable it isn't funny and therefor it is possible to connect to NT. In fact, scrap the stupid NT machines that i am sure are running slower than anything and get some nice happy MAC OS X servers. They work will ALL computers!

While OS X will be standard on all computers that Apple ships starting sometime in the next few weeks, I have a 450 mhz G3, and it runs OS X fine, and all available iMacs are faster than that, so this should not be a problem. they should keep the CRT iMacs for education markets, and so my parents can buy one.