Why The 24 Inch iMac and Why Now?
2006-11-25
I had been toying with two alternatives to buying the 24 inch iMac now: buying a MacPro now, and buying an iMac with the Santa Rosa chip set when they come out next year.
To justify a MacPro and its accompanying hit on the wallet I would have had to keep it for a long time. It would have offered a great deal of expandability that I would have used eventually, but I would have had a mainly empty, unused computer for much of its life. The RAM is expensive and that is a big put-off. And the future of FBRAM is not one of high volume and falling costs. It appears to be a stop-gap measure to allow large amounts of memory at the expense of latency and the market for that is relatively small. I don't think we will be seeing large price reductions for a while. I would have needed a screen (23") and 4G RAM, plus a fast graphics card. And all that adds up very quickly.
The other possibility was a 24" iMac. The better graphics was a big draw, as was the big screen. The 3G RAM limit is a pain: Apple was asking $575 extra for 3G over 2G. So the solution was to wait for the new version with the Santa Rosa chip set due out early 2007. That chip set will remove the 3G limit and the iMacs will support 4G. But Santa Rosa appears to be delayed, and so it was not worth the nine-month or whatever wait to get something that might appear. The cost of the iMac was about half what I would be spending on a MacPro. So for the same money I could get a new computer twice as often.
Buying now means that I get a fairly mature machine. The Intel iMacs have been around for a while now and the 24" has the most space and the least thermal limitations, so it should be reliable. And buying now means that I get the benefit of the faster machine right now. I can live with 2G of RAM and when prices are reasonable, upgrade to 3G. I got the machine with the biggest hard drive available (750G) because I know I will fill it up and it is not replaceable.
In a couple of years I might want to upgrade. I won't have a highly expensive MacPro that is still half-used telling me that I should really keep it for another couple of years. I will have a slow, maxed-out iMac that is ready for replacement. Another thing to consider is that my Macs get handed down, and it is much easier to hand down iMacs than any other sort of Mac because the screen is built-in. And the recipients of the hand-me-downs don't need the power of a MacPro any way.
To justify a MacPro and its accompanying hit on the wallet I would have had to keep it for a long time. It would have offered a great deal of expandability that I would have used eventually, but I would have had a mainly empty, unused computer for much of its life. The RAM is expensive and that is a big put-off. And the future of FBRAM is not one of high volume and falling costs. It appears to be a stop-gap measure to allow large amounts of memory at the expense of latency and the market for that is relatively small. I don't think we will be seeing large price reductions for a while. I would have needed a screen (23") and 4G RAM, plus a fast graphics card. And all that adds up very quickly.
The other possibility was a 24" iMac. The better graphics was a big draw, as was the big screen. The 3G RAM limit is a pain: Apple was asking $575 extra for 3G over 2G. So the solution was to wait for the new version with the Santa Rosa chip set due out early 2007. That chip set will remove the 3G limit and the iMacs will support 4G. But Santa Rosa appears to be delayed, and so it was not worth the nine-month or whatever wait to get something that might appear. The cost of the iMac was about half what I would be spending on a MacPro. So for the same money I could get a new computer twice as often.
Buying now means that I get a fairly mature machine. The Intel iMacs have been around for a while now and the 24" has the most space and the least thermal limitations, so it should be reliable. And buying now means that I get the benefit of the faster machine right now. I can live with 2G of RAM and when prices are reasonable, upgrade to 3G. I got the machine with the biggest hard drive available (750G) because I know I will fill it up and it is not replaceable.
In a couple of years I might want to upgrade. I won't have a highly expensive MacPro that is still half-used telling me that I should really keep it for another couple of years. I will have a slow, maxed-out iMac that is ready for replacement. Another thing to consider is that my Macs get handed down, and it is much easier to hand down iMacs than any other sort of Mac because the screen is built-in. And the recipients of the hand-me-downs don't need the power of a MacPro any way.
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