On another thread a few weeks ago I cautioned against buying an iMac as new models were due.

They have now arrived. So, get the latest spec or if you're not fussed get the old model cheaper.

Cheers.

Darren

Quite impressed with the new ones. Better price / performance ratio and lovely IPS screens. Massive resolution on the 27" too.

A new Mac is on my shopping list for xmas. Do'nt seem to be any difference in price whatever store I see them for sale but I can get 8% discount from Apple.com as my daughter is a student, is this the best deal I can expect?

Just about - educational is the route to go for a decent deal. They certainly keep their supply chain pretty tight, and discounts aren't exactly plentiful. IIRC there's a few Apple Store employees on here; not sure what they can do, if anything, on any nice deals...

Steve

is this the best deal I can expect?

As Wardy says above + you may be able to get a bargain if you go to a physical (non Apple) store with some of the old models in stock, or get a refurb from the Apple store (bottom RHS of store homepage).

8% is pretty good; doubt you'll beat that anywhere. They sometimes do 'Buy iMac - get free printer/iPod/etc' deals for students a bit closer to Xmas. Might be worth waiting a bit?

Edited 28 October, 200916 yr by The Ors
left hand & right hand mixed up - doh!

Have you already checked MacWarehouse - Your number one UK Mac reseller ?

Sorry, if that's obvious but I don't do Mac stuff at all, so just trying to think of other avenues

Steve

Had a look at them yesterday and they are loooooverleeeeeeey. The 27 actually looks less imposing than the old 24 did, probably due to the 16:9 ratio meaning it's no taller, and the chin being smaller. I can't wait to damage my credit card after Xmas for one.

Can I ask what on earth the church of jobs does to people to make them pay such high prices for the hardware?

Gives them a warm fuzzy feeling inside? :P

Can I ask what on earth the church of jobs does to people to make them pay such high prices for the hardware?

:confused: Don't know what this means. But thanks for everyones advice, I'll hang on for a few weeks and see what freebies are on offer, or maybe the price will go up instead.

It means Mac's are commodity PC hardware inside (albeit some of it custom boards, but nothing out of the normal) and when you look at what you can buy the same spec for outside of apple land, the apples look really really expensive.

I have ordered a 27", but Apple have fubared the order and it's like banging your head against a wall talking to customer services.

Ordered a i7 core with 8GB RAM, they have built a core i5 4GB and sent it (according to the order dispatch).

Phoned Apple twice and not got the promised phone call back to advise on what has happened, emailed my sales guy at apple twice and no reply. When it lands it getting sent back and they can stick it up their pooper, lovely machine but really poor customer service. I get the impression that they are doing me a favour by selling me one :(

It means Mac's are commodity PC hardware inside (albeit some of it custom boards, but nothing out of the normal) and when you look at what you can buy the same spec for outside of apple land, the apples look really really expensive.

They may have generic components these days but the design and quality is great and OS doesn't ask you stupid questions like " Are you sure you want to delete this"

and keeps locking up like Windows. Also OS systems are improved upon rather than new windows packages keep appearing and some are utterly useless like Millenium.

Or have I got that wrong again?

They may have generic components these days but the design and quality is great and OS doesn't ask you stupid questions like " Are you sure you want to delete this"

and keeps locking up like Windows. Also OS systems are improved upon rather than new windows packages keep appearing and some are utterly useless like Millenium.

Or have I got that wrong again?

Yes

hth

I have ordered a 27", but Apple have fubared the order and it's like banging your head against a wall talking to customer services.

Ordered a i7 core with 8GB RAM, they have built a core i5 4GB and sent it (according to the order dispatch).

Phoned Apple twice and not got the promised phone call back to advise on what has happened, emailed my sales guy at apple twice and no reply. When it lands it getting sent back and they can stick it up their pooper, lovely machine but really poor customer service. I get the impression that they are doing me a favour by selling me one :(

Just refuse delivery and get them to send it back to apple. That way it becomes not your problem

They may have generic components these days but the design and quality is great and OS doesn't ask you stupid questions like " Are you sure you want to delete this"

and keeps locking up like Windows. Also OS systems are improved upon rather than new windows packages keep appearing and some are utterly useless like Millenium.

Or have I got that wrong again?

Hahahahahaha, you're in for a shock then. Have you ever heard, that you never buy a Gen1 apple product if you want reliability.

Design great, yes, talk to all the time-vault owners about that one. They might look nice, but looking nice isn't the only part of design. Just ask alfa owners.

I can't remember the last time windows locked up on me, when it wasn't due to me doing something silly with drivers in kernel space. I'd expect that to cause a lock up on any OS.

Millenium and MacOS 7/8 if you want to go on about OS X then keep it to NT based comparisons.

The asking things comment.

a) you can turn it off.

At least you can do things and your computer doesn't know better than to let you see it!

OS updates come thick and fast from apple too. I have a PPC Mac Mini and there were just as many there.

Oh and once again on the useless upgrades, just talk to people who logged into their guest account after upgrading to snow leopard.

Old Steve J must have himself a whole chain of brain laundrettes to have people believe that their addition to the commodity parts allows a doubling of price.

I understand your comments but find it is strange that every Mac user I've come across never have a bad word to say against it. I've only had brief use of friends mac's and I am impressed with them so that's what I'll be going for.

I did visit a customer who had one of those original macs, must be 13 or so years old, the one which looks like a portable CRT in orange and grey, and browsing the web was as quick as my 2 year old Panasonic Laptop. I don't do games or use it for work, just digi photos and browsing the web and thats about it.

I understand your comments but find it is strange that every Mac user I've come across never have a bad word to say against it. I've only had brief use of friends mac's and I am impressed with them so that's what I'll be going for.

I did visit a customer who had one of those original macs, must be 13 or so years old, the one which looks like a portable CRT in orange and grey, and browsing the web was as quick as my 2 year old Panasonic Laptop. I don't do games or use it for work, just digi photos and browsing the web and thats about it.

Those machines you call "original macs" were nothing of the sort. They were the first of the iMacs, but there were generations of Macs and NeXt machines before that.

I agree that the old PPC machines were good, but what you have now are just PC's in a different design, with OS X and a nice price tag.

The only positive comments really tie into my launderette comment, but if people want to spend their money on them, then it's not my place to say don't.

What I dislike is the mac's are great, steve is a god, we are so lucky to have the latest iThing attitude shown by many Mac zealots.

I have pretty nice discounts on everything Mac via university. If anybody wants to order anything I'd be happy to do it for him with the discount (you have to be physically present in Portsmouth, though).

it's like banging your head against a wall talking to customer services.

Are you talking to the girls in Ireland? Whenever I've had problems they've been as good as gold.

I have to say, the last time I phoned was about 7yrs ago, so may have changed since then.

Are you talking to the girls in Ireland? Whenever I've had problems they've been as good as gold.

I have to say, the last time I phoned was about 7yrs ago, so may have changed since then.

I'm not sure where my salesman is mate, I have spoken to an American guy called Dan in Ireland and he said he can see there's a mistake and he will put an urgent escalation on it to get it resolved and would contact me later that day by phone or email (that was last Wednesday) and then my actual sales bod is a guy called Paul Symes [email protected] and I have sent him 2 emails to look into it and sort it and not gotten a reply. He could be away from the office but surely they have an out of office capability on their messaging system.

Even the DDI for Paul's number goes to an unknown extension, so I am guessing this guy is maybe new and not to sure of the system ..... who knows.

I'm only getting it because someone else is paying for it the company I make distance learning vids with in Germany are totally apple based and their bespoke software is for OSX only so they offered to buy me a new Mac so I can do stuff from home without jumping on a plane to Hamburg. The iMac looks like a really good spec save for the 3rd world graphics card and the 27" screen would give me plenty of real estate on the desktop and I can plug my Windows 7 gaming rig into the iMac and use the screen for games

I just want to get the issue resolved and am having a poor experience with apple so far

That sounds a lovely machine Fluff; hope you get all the red tape sorted out... and pronto

Steve

To the Mac-bashers - I use both platforms professionally, and ergo for personal use I will only use Mac based on my experiences over a great many years. WRT the price, you have to consider longevity into the equation. In our design studio we recently replaced all our G4 Quicksilvers for shiny new Intel Mac Pro's. They were all still working fine, apart from the odd DVD writer failing (Pioneer), and only software requirements forced the upgrade after 8-9 trouble-free years working 24/7 362 days a year. No servicing, no maintenance, no failures, no tinkering or upgrading anything apart from each OS update. They just go on working and working and working ! Our fleet of 40+ office Dell Windoze machines however are on an 18 month replacement cycle, are filled to the hilt with anti-virus protection yet still get attacked, fail regularly enough for us to employ an on-site PC geek to keep them running, after a fashion, and all they do is send e-mails, a bit of word processing and the odd spreadsheet. the Macs are constantly processing terabytes of data to produce magazine pages for print, but in a comfortable, friendly, easy and un-frustrating, effortless way. My own 10yo G3 Pizmo Powerbook still runs faultlessly, albeit it struggles with its slow processor these days, hence my desire to replace it with a 27" Quad. As for not saying a bad word, here it is, I am holding back until they sort the Flash video issues with the new machines, which I'm sure will be in the next OS update. I have no doubt your PC experiences have been wonderful over the years,but mine haven't. I liken having to use them to dragging fingernails down a blackboard, unpleasant, irritating and frustrating. Personal choice, I have mine, you have yours, we differ and I doubt either will change as a result of these discussions.

Filled to the hilt with AV Protection? they are doing it wrong then. What's the price of a Dell "Windoze" machine compared to the MacPro's.

I've said it before ..... and here we go again, but when you have total control over the hardware platform, then writing a stable OS should be easy (I use multiple platforms and an MBP for when I am on the road).

With quality components my Windows machine at home has never failed, never been hacked, never had a trojan or a virus and is completely stable. I even have the freedom to play with the hardware and overclock it and make other tweaks. I can easily stream content to my 360 without fuss. If it breaks, I can repair it, I can fit new hardware without taking it to a specialist.

When Mac's become more popular, they will be hacked and exploited to. To be honest, the Mac Fanboys put me off going any further with the Mac platform "it just works ..........., windoze .........." etc etc

To top it all the clueless customer service I am getting so far is getting me ever closer to the Cancel Order button on the apple store.

"edit" All that said though, I do enjoy using them, my MBP is my Vag-Com machine, I use an iPhone 3Gs, I'm not a Mac basher, but they are not perfect and some people seem to be unable to accept any criticism of Apple.

Edited 3 November, 200916 yr by Fluffmeister

To the Mac-bashers

.....

...... Personal choice, I have mine, you have yours, we differ and I doubt either will change as a result of these discussions.

I have no problem with the old PPC hardware and yes it did and does run for years without a hitch. (I still have one)

The problem is that the new ones are just generic hardware, with all the same issues as low cost generic hardware that are not encased in the white shrine.

You can tell that apple have gone for style over function in a few cases recently:

http://timecapsuledead.org/

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=800987

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10373064-260.html

Edited 3 November, 200916 yr by cheezemonkhai

My old HP desktop i fear is on it's last legs now, 9 years old and takes 20mins to start up, was free from work so I can't complain, so it's time for a change.

I'm still looking at yer normal Windows PC's but really fancy something completely different, any suggestions?