Late last week Apple quietly snuck out price reductions on their remaining range which is almost unheard of. Typically Apple will only change a products price when a replacement comes out. For example- when the new iMacs were announced, one of the 27″ models came in below the price of the 24″ it replaced. This is due to the strong $Aussie. So Apple was able to reprice the Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook pro lines and the iMacs recently, leaving the Xserve and Mac Pro with a huge price disparity against US pricing. All fixed now, so ask us for a quote on those machines you want to install over the holidays……. you could save $110 on a Mac Pro or $1200 on an Xserve!
The bad news is that manufacturing for 27″ iMac Core i5 and Core i7 machines has been pushed back to late January/ early February. Rumour is that a problem with the video card is at the heart of the issue. Not surprising- my next hackintosh build includes a Radeon HD4870 card (same as in some iMacs) and this thing is a monster. It takes up 2 slots and requires substantial cooling. Apple’s engineers must have thought they could bend the laws of physics to fit them in an iMac. (update- we managed to get all backorders for these into stock before Christmas!)
Good news is that shipments of the Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server (to give it the full name) are flowing nicely. Not surprising since you can get the machine with software for $1399. The software alone was $1199 for 10.5 server. I really think these machines will do well in the small workgroup (up to 10 users) market. And they’re cheap enough that you could sandbox by running more servers but each with fewer services. So for instance if your web box goes down it doesn’t take your file server with it.