Should I wait or Buy?

[Zelnaga]

Ive been considering this for a while now, but Im looking to buy an iMac for the first time. Im selling my PC to a friend for £450 which leaves me without a desktop soon enough, but I have a laptop to tie me over.

What am i going to use iMac for?

Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Team Fortress 2
Surfing Web/Music etc ... Everyday tasks
Anime watching - Alot of it
Parellel XP or Windows 7

Should I wait or buy? The only reason Im asking now is because I work in the education industry and one of the apple reseller stores are knocking £200 all iMacs, and so high end is £1024 and the high end 27 i5 is £1436. But they said the deal wouldnt be there for the refresh (i take that comment with a pinch of salt as they might, but judging on the new mac minis and ipads there wouldnt be a reduction in price), but its still a good deal. But would a C2D and current graphics card on the current 21.5 be good enough for what I want to do? Id consider i5 but it might be too huge for me. Im still pondering though.

[Hellhammer]

High-end 21.5" does those fine but a new one would do it better, especially gaming. 200£ off sounds like a good deal so it's up to you.

[davidw]

Do you really want to play games that are coming out in 2010 and 2011 with a graphics card from 2008? Do you want to play those games on a super high resolution, 27" screen?

The current iMac graphics card is an ATI 4850, which premiered in August of 2008. Undoubtedly, the next iMac will feature a far better GPU.

I'm going to be playing Diablo 3 and Civilization V on my next iMac, and knowing how much even Civilization IV slows down my 2.8 GHz C2D 2007 iMac (Geekbench scores in the 4000s) I know I need the best system possible.

The decision is obvious.

[mrmarts]

Ive been considering this for a while now, but Im looking to buy an iMac for the first time. Im selling my PC to a friend for £450 which leaves me without a desktop soon enough, but I have a laptop to tie me over.

What am i going to use iMac for?

Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Team Fortress 2
Surfing Web/Music etc ... Everyday tasks
Anime watching - Alot of it
Parellel XP or Windows 7

Should I wait or buy? The only reason Im asking now is because I work in the education industry and one of the apple reseller stores are knocking £200 all iMacs, and so high end is £1024 and the high end 27 i5 is £1436. But they said the deal wouldnt be there for the refresh (i take that comment with a pinch of salt as they might, but judging on the new mac minis and ipads there wouldnt be a reduction in price), but its still a good deal. But would a C2D and current graphics card on the current 21.5 be good enough for what I want to do? Id consider i5 but it might be too huge for me. Im still pondering though.

I decided buy an iMac 27 as I was tired of vista for 3 and half years iam going to use my iMac for starcraft 2 and diablo 3 otherwise the rest the same if you are going for the 27 inch go for it if it's a 21 you better brave it out as it only has a 256mb video card it also depends what you had it in your old pc.

[bruinsrme]

As someone else mentioned you have to look at whats inside.

The imac seems to have the body of a sports car with the engine of a economy car

If it was me, I would wait for a more update graphic sub assembly.
1 year in the graphics area is 10 in human years, let alone 2 years

[Gregintosh]

I would definitely wait for a new one. It hasn't been updated in quite some time (quite a few days over the average now) so it is really going to happen anytime now.

I doubt Apple will let their flagship consumer product go without updates a year or longer when competitors update their computer line ups every 3 months (if not more frequently).

I do not care for the video card so much as I am not a gamer, but it would be nice to have an update anyway just for future proofing. The biggest change I can see that would benefit everyone is a move to making i3's, i5's, i7s, standard across the board.

Since I do some video and audio encoding, if I can improve my speed by 30% to 50% for those tasks, the wait will have been worth it.

Plus, even if you don't need anything and the machines out now are 100% fine for your needs, you're still better of waiting. This way you can buy them on clearance at a discount and save a cool few hundred bucks on top of any savings currently in place.

[TMRaven]

You won't be able to max out Starcraft 2 with a mobility 4670. Either get a 27 inch with the mobility 4850, or wait for an update.