My mom came so close to buying the lowend iMac today at CompUSA but held off and said that she would get the 17 inch iMac in a few months. Would it just be better for her to get the low end Powermac instead or should she stick with the 17 inch iMac?
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1,499 Powermac OR 1,799 iMac
- Thread starter Frozone
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what all does she plan to do?
would you have a screen ready to plug the powermac into?
at this point, the baseline powermac is single 1ghz right? it's hard to give a good reason to get this over the imac... there are some things... graphics card, bus speed (i forget if this is still a difference), hard drive size (not sure about that either)...
i think the key is the monitor. and i don't think the bottomline pmac has superdrive.
ok, so i just checked out the 2 on the apple store....
the choice seems obvious to me. imac gets you:
same chip (less cache i believe)
same amount of ram
same graphics card
20 gb more hd (same speed- 7200 rpm)
superdrive
appleworks
17" screen
pmac gets you:
expandability
firewire 800
so i guess the question is. how important are expandability and firewire 800 to your mom?
also, the powermac will allow for a higher max RAM...
would you have a screen ready to plug the powermac into?
at this point, the baseline powermac is single 1ghz right? it's hard to give a good reason to get this over the imac... there are some things... graphics card, bus speed (i forget if this is still a difference), hard drive size (not sure about that either)...
i think the key is the monitor. and i don't think the bottomline pmac has superdrive.
ok, so i just checked out the 2 on the apple store....
the choice seems obvious to me. imac gets you:
same chip (less cache i believe)
same amount of ram
same graphics card
20 gb more hd (same speed- 7200 rpm)
superdrive
appleworks
17" screen
pmac gets you:
expandability
firewire 800
so i guess the question is. how important are expandability and firewire 800 to your mom?
also, the powermac will allow for a higher max RAM...
She has an old monitor that came with her Compaq that she bought in 98', but it's about time for it to go. She will use iPhoto with our digital camera, Lot's of web browsing, iTunes, Word Processing, Maybe a lil video editing, watch DVD's, and I will use it for games like the Sims, WarCraft III, and mabye UT2K3.
But she won't be buying it until this fall so she can get a few bills paid off first.
But she won't be buying it until this fall so she can get a few bills paid off first.
sounds like the imac to me, but big things may be in store for later this fall...we may be looking at a whole new ballgame then...
I'd say go with the iMac. I don't see a use for FW800 for you and your mom, and for expandability....it's nice......but I think I read somewhere that a really high percentage of people never upgrade their systems, even though they can.
I'd go with the iMac, for these reasons, plus it looks cool.
I'd go with the iMac, for these reasons, plus it looks cool.
Get the iMac. Period. For a home user it's just better. Quieter, smaller, and with an amazing screen.
The emacs not a bad machine either...cheaper but with a CRT instead of the flat screen. Depends if you want sexy hardware
We have already bought an eMac. That was our first and to this date only Apple computer we bought. It was sorta a test run since we had never even used the OS. But now my mom wants the iMac and we are phasing out our 2 PC's and getting Macs.
Its good to start getting information early but if you are not planning on buying until Fall I do not think you should make any hard and fast decisions.
We have no idea what will happen in the coming months, this is truly one of the biggest turning points in Apple's history (intro of PPC was the last turning point of this scale) and although we have info about IBM's PPC970 and new G3s with altivec and fast FSB we really have no idea how/when Apple is going to deploy all these new technologies.
I would guess that at least some of this new stuff will hit market by the time you are looking to buy so keep in mind that the situation will very likely be very different than it is today, and that it is hard to predict right now what the best buy might be.
We have no idea what will happen in the coming months, this is truly one of the biggest turning points in Apple's history (intro of PPC was the last turning point of this scale) and although we have info about IBM's PPC970 and new G3s with altivec and fast FSB we really have no idea how/when Apple is going to deploy all these new technologies.
I would guess that at least some of this new stuff will hit market by the time you are looking to buy so keep in mind that the situation will very likely be very different than it is today, and that it is hard to predict right now what the best buy might be.