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Apple product upgrades
Mar. 4th, 2009 07:41 amSo last night local time, Apple released "upgrades" to the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro and Airport Extreme. I imagine if you're in the US, it's not too bad. If you're in Australia, it's made of suck. Because of our exchange rate changing from AUD$1 = USD$0.90 to AUD$1 = USD$0.65, they've had to reprice.
Which means that for the iMac, all they've done essentially is to drop the AUD$1549 2.4ghz config, leaving pretty much the same AUD$1849 2.66ghz config there was before, except it now supports up to 8GB RAM, and has an nvidia 9400M graphics setup, vs the Radeon HD 2600 the old one did. I'm not convinced the graphics change is an "upgrade" either, but I'll defer on that to others. One "plus" is that it now has mini DisplayPort on the back instead of mini-DVI. Which means you can run a 30 inch Cinema display off it, but you're SoL if you want to plug it into something via composite or svideo.
The Airport Extreme Base station also got a 15% price hike, as well as some neat feature upgrades, and the Mac Mini is now AUD$949 (for the only processor choice - the offerings from Apple are differentiated based on RAM/HDD). For the record, the price at introduction for the G4 Mac mini in 2005 was AUD$749, meaning this entry level system is now $200 more than it started out at. On the plus side, it's pretty beefy, but not $949 of PC beefy.
The Mac Pro has always been expensive, and this has not changed, but it's only an AUD$100 price rise on that, since there was a USD$300 price drop on it too. The slight case revision looks cool.
So yeah, making the entry point for your consumer box more expensive = suck. I understand why they did it, but still, the end result is that stuff is now even more expensive, and that's not a good way to get people to buy it, however you spin it.
Which means that for the iMac, all they've done essentially is to drop the AUD$1549 2.4ghz config, leaving pretty much the same AUD$1849 2.66ghz config there was before, except it now supports up to 8GB RAM, and has an nvidia 9400M graphics setup, vs the Radeon HD 2600 the old one did. I'm not convinced the graphics change is an "upgrade" either, but I'll defer on that to others. One "plus" is that it now has mini DisplayPort on the back instead of mini-DVI. Which means you can run a 30 inch Cinema display off it, but you're SoL if you want to plug it into something via composite or svideo.
The Airport Extreme Base station also got a 15% price hike, as well as some neat feature upgrades, and the Mac Mini is now AUD$949 (for the only processor choice - the offerings from Apple are differentiated based on RAM/HDD). For the record, the price at introduction for the G4 Mac mini in 2005 was AUD$749, meaning this entry level system is now $200 more than it started out at. On the plus side, it's pretty beefy, but not $949 of PC beefy.
The Mac Pro has always been expensive, and this has not changed, but it's only an AUD$100 price rise on that, since there was a USD$300 price drop on it too. The slight case revision looks cool.
So yeah, making the entry point for your consumer box more expensive = suck. I understand why they did it, but still, the end result is that stuff is now even more expensive, and that's not a good way to get people to buy it, however you spin it.
