Mountain View Computer Users Group

For over a year now I have wanted one of the revolutionary new G4 iMacs, with the white dome base and flat panel display. After the sale of our Florida house closed in early January, I was finally able to afford one.

The San Francisco Mac Expo that month brought no revisions in iMac features or prices, so I followed my own advice and waited. Then, on February 4, the announcement came. The G4 iMac line had been revised and prices lowered. Instead of the previous four models, there were now only two.

A 15" flat panel display, with a Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) was priced at $1299, and a 17" display with a SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) at $1799. These were essentially upgraded versions of two previous models, with a $200 reduction in price.

Again, following my own advice, I shopped around on the Internet to see what kind of a deal I could find. ClubMac offered the 17" model for $1794, along with an extra 512MB of memory for a $40 installation charge. An Epson Stylus C42UX inkjet printer was an additional $79.95, but two rebates would reduce that cost to zero.

When I let my salesman know that I was also checking out prices elsewhere, he reduced the price of $1955.46, including shipping, to $1900. He also let me have Apple Care Protection Plan, extending the warranty to three years, for $150, a $19 price reduction. The final price, after rebates, for the computer, memory upgrade, printer, Apple Care, and shipping will be $1980.

So, how does the iMac I bought after waiting for my financial condition to improve, and the prices to lower, compare with what I would have gotten right after the new iMacs were introduced just over a year ago? For the same price, I got a 17" instead of a 15" flat panel display. The power was increased from 800MHz to 1GHz, the memory from 512MB to 768MB (both of these include the available upgrade at the time), the hard drive from 60GB to 80GB, and the graphics processor from an NVIDIA GeForce2 to an NVIDIA GeForce4.

Of course my new iMac comes with the much-improved software Apple has issued over the last year. This includes Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" and the iLife Applications: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. In addition, the new SuperDrive burns DVDs at a 4X speed, rather than the previous 2X speed.

But, while we are comparing Apples to Apples, how is my new iMac an improvement over the one I've been using? Three years ago I bought a G3 iMac DV Special Edition for $1499. (To be accurate, I bought it for $1699, including a printer and a scanner, but $200 in rebates reduced the cost of those two peripherals to zero.)

Because my G4 iMac has a 17" LCD display, the equivalent of a 19" CRT, and the old computer had only a 15" CRT, the new display is nearly two-thirds larger. The new screen has a ratio of 16:10, accommodating widescreen DVD movies. If you've ever watched a DVD on an LCD screen, you may want to throw out your old TV. Incidentally I recently saw just a 17" LCD TV monitor (no tuner, DVD player, etc.) for $1300, which gives you an idea of how expensive these displays are.

The processor speed on the new iMac is 1GB compared to 400MB on the old, meaning it's 2 1/2 times as fast. The old iMac came with 128MB of memory, compared to 768MB on the new (though 256MB is standard). The hard drive has gone from 13GB to 80GB, an increase of over six times.

By now you're saying to yourself, "OK, it plays movies beautifully, is faster, and can hold a whole bunch of stuff, but what can it do the old iMac couldn't?" The fact of the matter is it can't do anything entirely new. I could have spent a few hundred dollars to increase my memory (to a maximum of 512MB), bought the new software, and even added an external hard drive that would have given me lots more Gigabytes of storage.

But I still would have had an older, slower, smaller-screened computer. If my only purposes for the new iMac are to use it for word processing and Internet surfing, then I've wasted a couple of grand!

My plan is to fully explore and utilize the potential of iLife and other applications:

• To store all my CD music in MP3 with iTunes, and then to mix and burn the music onto new CDs. Some day I'll get an iPod to store all of it and have it available wherever I go.
• To scan, store, and sort many of our photographs, as well as to upload shots from my new Cannon PowerShot S230 digital camera, and then organize these into slide shows, accompanied by scores provided by iTunes.
• To digitize and store many of our home videos, to produce them into films, again with music, perhaps with narration and sound effects, through iMovie, and then to burn them onto DVDs for other people's enjoyment.
• To produce some presentations with Keynote, Apple's new program, again with musical backgrounds, etc., and to burn them onto DVDs.
• Eventually to have a Website full of photos, films, presentations, recipes, ideas, articles, etc. that will be available to those of you who might be interested in accessing it via the Net.

And, again, if I don't actually make an expanded and more creative use of my computer, then I'll certainly have blown a big hunk of change! But, after all, at least I'll have a great way to view those Hollywood movies.

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