Wanted: the sub-$1500 headless iMac

Having gotten an almost shocking amount of use out of my original (Core 1 Duo) MacBook, I've been in-between main development Macs for quite a while now. However, I'm feeling a little constrained with the paltry disk space afforded by notebook drives in general, as well as the integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics "card" specific to the MacBook, so I've been poking around a bit and trying to figure out what would be the best desktop Mac choice for me.

And it doesn't really exist.

I have to be realistic on a few fronts. One, while I have no problem paying a premium for Apple hardware in order to run OS X, I'm not made of money. Two, I do a bit of everything (motion graphics, 3D, Web design, Flash, and—oh, yeah—writing), but I don't necessarily need a quad-core Mac Pro to deal with the heavier stuff. Let's face it—I'm not exactly modeling Gollum or anything like that out here. The Mac Pro is a nice machine, and it definitely has more juice than I really need, so I'd be able to coast for three years or more on it. The problem is that it's a bit pricey. It starts at $2500, and while that can be configured down a bit, once you get extra RAM for it and add another hard drive (from other vendors, of course; Apple's RAM and HD prices are ridiculous), you haven't budged much from the starting price. Realistically, processors are at a point now where even business class machines are fine for just about everything, provided you have enough RAM, enough HD space, and an appropriate video card. The iMac pretty much fits the bill just on specs, but I don't care for an all-in-one limiting my upgrade options. I'm also doing fine for LCD monitors, thank you very much, so the iMac is sort of a non-starter, though it's in the ballpark as far as specs go.

Now, I'm not the first nor the last to decry the gaping hole in the Apple product lineup, but if Steve and Co. were to put out a Core 2 Duo (or equivalent) mini-tower Mac with 4 RAM slots, (at least) 2 drive bays, and a few PCI Express slots and priced it at under $1500 ($1200 sounds about right), I'd pounce in a heartbeat. We can haggle on specifics (love to see eSATA ports across the board, for example), but a user-upgradable (RAM, HD, Graphics, add-on cards) mini-tower running OS X? Now we're talking. I'm not holding my breath, though, and it'll be me and my surprisingly trusty MacBook for a while longer yet.

Posted at 11:00AM May 11, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple  |  Comments[0]