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80,000 copies of the original egg-shaped original iMac, which spawned a thousand imitations, were sold in Q4, according to Apple's most recent quarterly statement. To put that in perspecitve, that's several thousand more than the PowerBook G4. Not that the CRT iMac and PowerBook compete in the same market space, of course. The PowerBooks and iBooks have recently had substantial upgrades and a big speed boost for the high-end PB G4. Meanwhile, the ever-faithful iMac languishes with a 500MHz G3. Almost forgotten by Mac buyers, and certainly not regarded with the same awe, and minus the rarity value of the Cube, the iMac plugs along with a 600MHz G3 and, oddly, no CDRW or DVD option now. You can have any optical drive you want, so long as it's a CD-ROM. Even that royal-pain-in-the-butt for third-party retails - rainbow colors - are gone. Instead, you can have any color you want. So long as it's snow white. According to the AppleStore's page, iMacs are really only differentiated by the amount of RAM they come with. $799 gets you one with a mere 128MB RAM. Then there's a 256 and 512MB one (you can currently 'Double Your Memory' for $40). All three have 40GB drives. Of course, you can always add an Airport card if you want to think really different. Will iMacs boot only in X come January? If so, it will run fairly languidly on a 600Mhz G3 and an increasingly-outmoded ATI Rage 128 Ultra chipset. For the 512MB model, you're looking at $914 with the current promotion. Only a mere fistfull of dollars below the current $999 iBook, which gives you a vastly superior Radeon 7500 (16MB VRAM) graphics card, a 700MHz G3 CPU If Apple really wants to keep the iMac pitched at schools as an budget-priced, entry level Mac, it doesn't need to upgrade the spec; it needs to practically give them away. After all, Apple's done that before, with the IIgs, which kept cheap Apple IIs in schools probably long after their use-by date. For schools which couldn't afford LCs and LCIIs at the time, the IIgs plugged the gap. And when they did get an LC, an Apple II card plugged right into the PDS slot, letting all the Apple II software run on the Mac. As Dell and other PC makers increasingly eat into Apple's core education market, Apple needs to drop iMac prices back to $699 or even $599. iMac R&D costs have been amortized years ago. Sure, Apple would rather sell a school an eMac. But when it comes to a choice between iMac or NoMac, we'll bet they'd prefer to sell an iMac. Even at less than $600. It still a good, basic computer, with excellent networking capabilities, FireWire, USB and an outstanding software bundle. But it's just not worth $799. Not now. Not in these days of commodified, $199 white-box PCs.
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