The thing you forget is: Today you get a significantly different computer than you did yesterday. It's not like the price jumped overnight for the same hardware.
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Apple gone too far with new pricing?
- Thread starter Janglo
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The thing you forget is: Today you get a significantly different computer than you did yesterday. It's not like the price jumped overnight for the same hardware.
Is that the price with your tax? Where I am it's 7.5% to 8% percent sales tax, and up to 9.25% percent elsewhere in state.
The basic mini is 729$ CDN! Thats a rip off. Does anyone know how much longer you can buy the old ones?
I said that Apple would hike the prices due to the pound getting weaker, but I didn't expect a hike to £949 for the entry level model. As someone said though, we've been fortunate and somewhat spoiled to get iMacs for as low as £782 until recently, and the very iMac I am typing from right now cost me £929 in 2006 and it's only a 17" Core Duo 1.83GHz.
Depending on when RBS sent the order to Apple, the new model will be ordered at a cost of £743.26, compared to the £612.47 I was due to pay for the previous 20" 2.4GHz model. To some this must come across as a no brainer, but the fact is that I can no longer afford the extra £130 or so. I did have £800 set aside for a new iMac, but with my wife being off work ill and her workplace not paying out full sick pay, I've had to sacrifice some of that money for the mortgage, leaving me with £400.
From my salary I could afford an additional £212.47, but pushing it to £343.26 is too far. That's the cost of an iPhone 3G 8GB brand new, something I've wanted for a long time and been unable to simply walk out on pay day and buy, so it's not going to be any different now because it's a good offer on a new iMac.
There's just so many permutations of this order going wrong that I'd sit here and rabble for far too long.
I think I am destined to remain stuck with this white 17" piece of *****.
Depending on when RBS sent the order to Apple, the new model will be ordered at a cost of £743.26, compared to the £612.47 I was due to pay for the previous 20" 2.4GHz model. To some this must come across as a no brainer, but the fact is that I can no longer afford the extra £130 or so. I did have £800 set aside for a new iMac, but with my wife being off work ill and her workplace not paying out full sick pay, I've had to sacrifice some of that money for the mortgage, leaving me with £400.
From my salary I could afford an additional £212.47, but pushing it to £343.26 is too far. That's the cost of an iPhone 3G 8GB brand new, something I've wanted for a long time and been unable to simply walk out on pay day and buy, so it's not going to be any different now because it's a good offer on a new iMac.
There's just so many permutations of this order going wrong that I'd sit here and rabble for far too long.
I think I am destined to remain stuck with this white 17" piece of *****.
I paid £950 for my 24" iMac from the refurb store in november and they sent me a top spec one which was nice.
The prices now are way to high, they don't seem to have taken into account the credit crunch... but maybe they are forecasting for lower sales.
The prices now are way to high, they don't seem to have taken into account the credit crunch... but maybe they are forecasting for lower sales.
I can buy a significantly (~20%) more powerful Dell quad core (for example), at retail, today for the LESS than I paid for its less-endowed sibling a year ago, in Canadian dollars (about CAD$750 today for 2.93GHz, 4GB, 1TB, vs CAD$800 in Feb 2008 for 2.4GHz, 3GB, 500GB, if you're curious).
Edited: my last-year's quad core is actually 2.4, not 2.66; got it confused with my iMac.
On the other hand, a mini that's likely around 10% faster than the generation released two years ago now costs me 15% more than its predecessor.
So while the price of the same hardware may not have jumped overnight, the cost per "unit of performance" (define how you like) HAS jumped overnight, and has made a significant (for me, deal-breaking) jump in relation to other manufacturers. There's an Apple premium; that's no secret. But a price jump like this on an insignificant hardware upgrade tries my patience.
There are three places you can try: Westworld Computer, MyMacDealer (if you have either of those in your city) or London Drugs. All three are very slow at refreshing their Apple stock after new releases.
Future Shop and Best Buy will probably have the new stuff in short order, since they've got those mini-Apple stores in them now.
You people kill me. We get a substantially better chipset, 5 times better video performance, the ability to use the gpu with OpenCL (16 cores anyone?), at least 4 gb RAM (and probably 6, perhaps 8), dual display support, the ability to drive a 30" display at native resolution and you still bitch and moan. The revised Mini is exactly what was expected. Anyone who thought otherwise either had their head in the sand or are ignorant of how Apple does things.
The new Mini is an excellent update. I will be buying one as soon as Snow Leopard is available.
Debatable.
Whether the chipset and graphics are actually worth the upgrade can't really be known until someone does speed reviews. Whether it's relevant is questionable, since the processor speed change is less than 10% on the low end (0% on the high end), and gamers don't buy minis.
Nor, I would posit, do people who want dual displays or 30 inch monitors, which makes both of those much less relevant than you're making out.
The 4GB RAM limit is nice, but I'm still peeved that it was artificially capped at 3 in the last rev; THAT is just Apple doing what they should have done last time around, as far as I'm concerned.
That's what happens in a credit crisis, things get too expensive...
The "sales" we've seen are nothing more than marketing gimmicks trying to shift old stock.
You make an extremely valid point - based on current exchange rates Mac product pricing has drawn closer to parity when comparing the US and UK.
By the way, since you invited corrections; the ex-VAT price for the £949 iMac is in fact £825.20 which equates to $1163 ex-VAT using $1.41=1 GBP.
Yes, I was bored
Unfortunately now is not the time to moan about price variations between countries using exchange rates as the primary comparison method. However, it does irk me somewhat that Apple still insist on pricing iTunes songs so differently between countries. Please correct me if I am wrong... but such digital purchases can hardly be argued to carry the same geographic variations in cost of production as hardware, nor are they subject to the same variations in customs tariffs.
CPUs are becoming less important in Macs. The bulk of the work will eventually be shifted to the gpu, starting with Snow Leopard.
I'm sure some will.
What are you talking about? It wasn't artificially capped at 3 gb - that was a real cap.
Yes. And in two years, when applications that do that are common, I'm sure I'll care. However, Leopard is the current OS, and it's going to take some time for apps to take advantage of the new architecture. It's quite likely that these minis will be quite obsolete by the time all of that infrastructure is in place. These machines are not powerful enough to be that forward-thinking. (Which is perfectly fine; they are what they are. Just saying... if you're buying a mini for apps you'll be running in 2011, you're probably buying the wrong computer)
I'm sure some will.
Some, yes.
That's a strange thing to say, since PCs using the same chipset could support more.
$599.00 US = $776.00 CDN
You have it cheaper than we do in the US. (not by a huge amount though)
BTW, how cheap were the minis in the past in Canada? The basic mini now has superdrive, which it should have had a long time ago, but $729 CDN can't be all that bad for what you get, right?
Call me crazy, but looking at the configurations and speaking purely in US dollars, there seem to be some "ok" deals to be had. You can configure the 3rd tier of iMac to be packed with an ATI HD 4850 for an extra $200.
So for $1999 US you get:
24" of screen real estate
2.93 C2D
4 GB ram
640 GB HD
ATI HD 4850
That doesn't sound like tom foolery to me.... but maybe I'm not seeing something.
So for $1999 US you get:
24" of screen real estate
2.93 C2D
4 GB ram
640 GB HD
ATI HD 4850
That doesn't sound like tom foolery to me.... but maybe I'm not seeing something.
I suppose the entry level Mac Mini isnt TOO bad when you compare it to previous versions.
I suppose you could see it as Apple dropping the ComboDrive version which sold for £399 and making the £499 version the new entry level Mini and then adding another version above that. So if you compare it to the old superdrive version, its not bad.
What is a bit disappointing though is that the cost of getting a foot into the world of Apple computing had been steadily increasing for a few years. When the Mini was first released you could pick one up for £339.
The £649 Mini isn't great value though...unless you desperately want a small desktop, you could get a white MacBook for what £60 more?? And for that £60 you get a display, keyboard, TrackPad (Mouse) and some usable internal speakers, battery - and the advantage of being able to take it anywhere
I suppose you could see it as Apple dropping the ComboDrive version which sold for £399 and making the £499 version the new entry level Mini and then adding another version above that. So if you compare it to the old superdrive version, its not bad.
What is a bit disappointing though is that the cost of getting a foot into the world of Apple computing had been steadily increasing for a few years. When the Mini was first released you could pick one up for £339.
The £649 Mini isn't great value though...unless you desperately want a small desktop, you could get a white MacBook for what £60 more?? And for that £60 you get a display, keyboard, TrackPad (Mouse) and some usable internal speakers, battery - and the advantage of being able to take it anywhere
The Calistoga memory controller is 32-bit. That's why there's the 3.3 gb limit.
Right. The choice of a 32-bit memory controller makes the cap artificial, since Apple could just as easily have used a 64-bit controller to go with the 64-bit CPU and 64-bit chipset (and 64-bit OS). Using 32-bit was a conscious choice, one of the direct and obvious results of which was a memory cap at 3GB.
Most of the people here are advanced Mac users and also know what the PC world is up to as far as CPU/GPU and hard drive space.
Because of that, we always seem to be a bit behind, but if we were up to the top PC bleeding edge, the prices of the Macs would go up. We can't have the better design, added durability, better service, and better OS, too and keep up dollar for dollar with Dell. Apple is also a very small company by comparison.
Because of that, we always seem to be a bit behind, but if we were up to the top PC bleeding edge, the prices of the Macs would go up. We can't have the better design, added durability, better service, and better OS, too and keep up dollar for dollar with Dell. Apple is also a very small company by comparison.
No, it wasn't. At the time of the release of the Mini (and iMacs and MacBooks and MacBook Pros) only Core Solo and Core Duo cpus (32-bit Yonahs) were available, and there were no 64-bit mobile chipsets. Calistoga was the only choice for Apple. Santa Rosa (with its 33-bit memory controller) came some time afterwards. Apple apparently decided that when SR became available that the Mini was not to receive it, which would have required reengineering. This also coincides with the rumors that Apple had decided to EOL the Mini, only to later change their mind - which leads us to today's updated Mini.
Your logic makes sense only with the "10% faster" figure that you made up based on nothing. How about waiting for some benchmarks?
There are three Calistogas that support Core 2 Duo processors: 945GMS, 945GM/E and 945PM, with 945GM/E and 945GMS being the only two with the GMA950 graphics. All three, by the way, were released at the same time, in January 2006 (well in advance of the last-generation mini's August 2007 release date).
945GMS supports a maximum of 2GB of memory
945GM/E supports a maximum of 4GB of memory
Furthermore, an Intel chipset with a 3GB maximum does not exist.
The 2006 mini supports a maximum of 3GB of memory.
So. Either Apple modified the 945GMS to somehow support an amount of memory that a 32-bit chipset cannot natively handle, or it used a modified 945GM/E and capped the maximum RAM at 3GB. In either case, the 3GB cap is entirely artificial. And, contrary to what you said earlier, there is absolutely no reason that the minis could not have had a 4GB maximum, like every other 64-bit computer in the world.
Prices are too high!! They will alienate their audience in the UK!
Here in the UK a Mac Pro used to go for £1700 for an 8 core and now we will have to pay £2500!!! It is outrageous! Specially due to the fact that we are in the middle of a recession.
Apple always had the culture of matching prices of previous versions, but now they have increased by a large margin.
Here in the UK a Mac Pro used to go for £1700 for an 8 core and now we will have to pay £2500!!! It is outrageous! Specially due to the fact that we are in the middle of a recession.
Apple always had the culture of matching prices of previous versions, but now they have increased by a large margin.
As explained earlier in the thread, this difference is a result of the difference in exchange rates. You shouldn't expect Apple to eat a $1000 price decrease just because the pound has dropped 30% versus the US Dollar.