What would you get with a budget of...

[Corrosive vinyl]

what happened to me when buying my iBook was I got my airport card and 512 mb of RAM for the same price as no airport card and the 256 MB of RAM. Later on they offered 512 MB of RAM, Airport card, and bluetooth for the base price. I wonder what will happen with end of life macbooks or minis?? only time will tell!

 

[dougnewman]

Does apple discount the previous generation items when it's coming out with a new update?

Usually they seem to wait to run out of the old stuff before they start selling the new.

Retailers, however, tend to still have old stock left over, and these "leftovers" are usually discounted, but often the discounts don't pay off. For example, I wanted to buy my mom an iPod shuffle and found that the cheapest option was a "leftover" first-gen 512KB, but a first-gen 1GB and a new 1GB (which cost the same as the old 512KB did when new) were the same price! The older one had a big discount but it only brought its price down to the price of the equivalent new model. The same goes for Macs sometimes, too - if, for example, the new low-level model has the same RAM and HD spec as the old mid-level model, the old one, comparably equipped, could wind up costing exactly the same amount as the new.

 

[QCassidy352]

well, given that I have a macbook, I'd get an imac.

With my edu discount, I can get a 17" c2d imac and bump the processor to 2.16 Ghz. $1189. If I have to include tax then I guess I go over. (going to 2 GB RAM instead of the processor bump doesn't work because it pushed me over $1200 even before tax.) Would make a lovely complement to my macbook cd.

 

[Sensfan67]

Well, I don't know. I'd either save my money, or build a kick ass gaming PC, and dual boot it with OSx86.