Sell the iMac, buy the parents a Mac Mini?
January 16, 2005 - 11:28pm — bmann
My 3-year old iMac 800 is still (according to EveryMac) worth $1000US. I paid $1800 for it new. Somehow, with a $499US Mac Mini waiting in the wings, that seems a bit crazy.
Of course the iMac has a 15" flat panel monitor, Apple Pro Speakers, and keyboard and mouse. And it's upgraded with an extra 512MB of RAM.
Still, I'm thinking of selling/trading in the iMac rather than passing it on to the parentals. It might end up being cheaper that way.
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make a mac mini grid
I wonder what a million $, 2000 units? worth of these all hooked together would be like :-)
Mac Mini and iPod Photo 40 same price
This is quite interesting: The iPod Photo 40 and Mini (base) are within $20 CDN of each other. I'm surprised Apple would ever "cross the streams" and provide a dollar-for-dollar comparison like this between two products quite different in nature. I wonder if somebody will do a "GiPod", cross-breed an iPod with a Mini and a small LCD to make a G4-powered portable device?
The other thing I noticed - Apple includes the iPod option on all Mac computers, but for the Mini. One would think they go hand-in-hand?
Sell, get two Minis, one for each.
You could get the two Minis, and give one as a gift, keep one for yourself, fix up the parents with an inexpensive mouse/kbd/monitor setup, and get the Benq for yourself.
With the prices both Simply and WestWorld quoted on trade-ins, I never recommended people trade in their machines, always try to sell because it's more difficult, but you get maximum value for your effort and for your hardware.
With your parents, they don't need the Apple kbd/mouse, they just need the equivalent Kensington Mouse-in-a-box that looks and handles the same, so you save a lot of $ by avoiding Apple's peripherals, and go with an inexpensive monitor, be it LCD or CRT.
Depending on how 2005 shapes up, I might just consider the Mini and a KVM switch to get back to having access to OSX and turn the PC into what it's good for: SuperNintendo.
One of my buddies at work was really amazed today when he found out you don't have to reinstall OSX every 6 months when performance becomes really sluggish and you can do a cold-install as easy as a warm install, no partitioning considerations needed. I'm never doing that with this PC, though it was amazingly easy nonetheless since it was a cold install in the beginning.