The $899 Educational iMac

Valthan writes "Macsimum news has just released news about a new version of the iMac that is being touted as an educational machine. It seems to be a nice setup, and has the cheapness that us university students strive on, I think they just may have a winner here to get people on the Mac. Now if only JCreator worked on it ..." From the article "Featuring a 17-inch widescreen LCD display, the iMac for education includes a Combo drive for burning CDs and reading DVDs, 512MB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory expandable up to 2GB and hard drive storage capacity up to 160GB. Every iMac also includes a built-in iSight video camera, built-in 10/100/1000 BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet for high-speed networking, built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11g WiFi for up to 54Mbps wireless networking, a total of five USB ports (three USB 2.0) and two FireWire 400 ports."

Comments

Direct info from apple

[morcheeba]

Description on Apple's website
Technical specifications & available configurations

From the Apple Store for Education

[Pinky3]

17-inch widescreen LCD
1440x900 resolution
1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor (1)
512MB memory (2x256MB SO-DIMMs)
80GB Serial ATA hard drive
24x Combo drive (DVD-ROM, CD-RW)
Intel GMA 950 graphics with 64MB of shared memory
($899)

The regular entry level iMac comes with
17-inch widescreen LCD
1440x900 resolution
1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor (1)
512MB memory (single SO-DIMM)
160GB Serial ATA hard drive
8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD±RW, CD-RW)
ATI Radeon X1600 graphics with 128MB GDDR3 memory
Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote
($1199)

You save $300, but give up Apple Remote, bluetooth, ATI Radeon, 80GB of drive space, and the SuperDrive.

Re:Cheap, but not cheap enough.

[geekoid]

is it silent? built in web cam? video editor? A nice UI?
And the dual core out performs the AMD 2.2.

Re:Cash

[samkass]

Try checking out http://www.apple.com/financing/.

You can get what is essentially a Mastercard with no annual fee and an APR somewhere between 13.5% and 22.5% depending on your credit rating, with no interest for 90 days after purchase. If you've got good credit, this pretty much amounts to the same thing you got. If not, good luck finding financing anyway.