Should I Have Bought The Newest iMac?
 

Yesterday, I ordered a refurbished iMac G5 from Apple's online store. This was the top-of-the-line iMac before the recent refresh. Specs are 20" screen, 1.8GHz G5 CPU, 600MHz bus, nVidia 5200 GPU, 160GB hard drive.

The price was $1400, or about $400 cheapest than the current top-of-the-line iMac, whose specs are 20" screen, 2.0GHz G5, 667MHz bus, ATI 9800 GPU, 250GB hard drive.

I'm not mentioning the bundled DRAM for either machine, since I'm going to add 2GB of DRAM anyway.

Now I am having buyer's remorse (before I've even received the thing). Should I have paid the full $1800 for the current model?

Intended uses are: digital photography (scanning negatives, manipulating, and printing), light gaming, webbrowsing and email, iTunes.

It'll be fine.

The differences in performance are not going to be night and day, in fact you'll probably not notice.

I use my G4 laptop for more intensive stuff, (3d rendering, gigabyte image files) than you'll be doing and I'm fine.

Scott

John,
You made the right decision to add that additional DRAM, you'll be fine!

As long as you have a superdrive, you'll be fine. I guarantee no one can tell the diff between a 1.8 and 2.0ghz machine. RAM will make much more of a difference.

Man, I didn't even realize apple sold refurbs... I need to check that out. I'd love to have a stack of minis...

Thanks for the reassurance, everyone.

Bryan, I looked and they didn't have refurb'd Mac minis. Probably not enough are being returned, and since they haven't refreshed the model yet there aren't store display units to sell off.

I guess it is "work on the computers" week. I just finished reassembling the iBook after installing a 100GB HDD. I need to upgrade it to Tiger next. The new iMac comes soon.