Today’s Apple rollout: iMacs, Mac Minis, Mac Pros, pricing, keyboards
Let's have a new Apple everything, shall we? Alex Kidman ponders todays Apple's glut of new products including the new Quad-Core Nehalem Mac Pros and iMacs
Apple's announced new desktop products today. A lot of new desktop products, in fact, as there isn't a desktop range that Apple currently sells that they haven't tweaked, prodded or upgraded.
It's almost as if Tim Cook's waited long enough for Steve Jobs' existing executive orders to expire before shouting "Quick! Let's release everything, all at once!"
How does the value stack up?
Top of the line are the new Mac Pro models. Baseline models offer one or two "Nehalem" Quad-Core Xeon Processors, 3-6GB of memory and 512MB GeForce GT120 processors. Baseline price starts at AU$4,499, but depending on how deep your pockets are, you could spend much, much more.
A fully tricked out Mac Pro with four hard drives, four graphics cards, two Superdrives, two 30" Cinema Displays WiFi and Fibre Channel support ? That'll set you back a cool $35,316.
I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of cash lying around. It'd be nice if I did, but journalism isn't a gig you get into for the money. You may send donations now, if you wish. Make all cheques out to the "Campaign to get Alex a Sweet new mac pro with Haste" (or CASH, for short).
First thoughts on design, price
The new iMacs are also suitably tasty little beasts, although the fact that there's no new redesign leaves me a little sad. The iMac design is quite nice, although I'm happy to state that I did prefer the "lampshade" iMac a little more.
It probably shouldn't be a shock that the new models cost more than the old ones did, what with the Australian dollar currently being worth only fractionally over the value of the plastic it's made from.
Likewise the Mac Mini, and at least -- and finally -- Apple's updated the tiny little box. Yes, you CAN build your own PC for cheaper, and nobody's going to contest that. As an all-in-one solution, though, and with the elegance of OS X, it's a tough product to beat.
Other quirkiness – the keyboard
The desktop refreshes have made all the big headlines, but Apple's also thrown in a few little quirky changes around the sidelines at the same time. Take, for example, the keyboard on the iMac.
Now, I'm not a great fan of Apple's desktop keyboards. Sure, they look pretty, but they're basically just notebook keyboards on slabs of aluminium, and I'd rather a keyboard with a bit of travel in its keys.
That aside, the standard for the new iMacs is a keyboard sans numeric keypad, which makes it even more like a notebook keyboard. But -- and this is where it gets weird -- if you do want the older, number pad enabled keyboard, that's available as an option as well. For free. Well, free once you've bought the iMac, anyway.
It's not like Apple to give stuff away for free, and I've got to wonder at the economics of having two separate SKUs for keyboards with no pricing difference in them.
Dual-Channel wireless
Airport Extreme and Time Capsule also get refreshes as well, with dual-channel 2.4 and 5Ghz networking, and the option of a "guest" network with Internet-only access available.
That's a pretty sweet idea, actually, and I'm keen to get my hands on an Airport Extreme and see how well it actually works.
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