Nando Times Larry Blasko Calls G4 iMac, Cute But Pricey

by , 12:00 PM EDT, May 28th, 2002

Everyone is not going to like the G4 iMac. It's style is radical, to say the least, and it is something that some folks will never warm up to. But that's not what is bothering Larry Blasko of the Nando Times, in a recent article titled ' LARRY BLASKO: The powerful, pricey new iMacs', he compares the new iMac to a Dell and concludes that the iMac is too darn pricey. From the article:

The new iMac looks like the offspring of a picture frame and a basketball. The result is a circular footprint just 10.6 inches in diameter. Like the original iMac, this one doesn't include a 3.5-inch floppy drive. The top-of-the-line model goes for $1,899.

For that you get an 800-megahertz Power PC G4 processor, a very adjustable 15-inch LCD flat screen, NVidia GeForce2 MX graphics and a DCD-R/CD-RW drive. (That's Digital Video Disk Write/ CD-ROM Read-Write in English and means you can both play and copy DVD movie disks as well as audio and data disks.) Speakers are included.

You also get a programmable keyboard, an optical mouse, and a built-in 56k modem and 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet ports. Not to mention five USB ports that can transfer data at 12 megabits per second and two FireWire ports that will do it at 400 Mbps.

The hard drive is 60 gigabytes and the system comes with 256 megabytes of RAM. Both OSX and OS9 are loaded. But speaking of loaded, if you don't happen to be, a similar Windows-based system from Dell comes in at $1,628 with an Intel Celeron processor clocking at 1.6 gigahertz, a clock speed almost twice as fast as the iMac. And yes, clock speed is just one component of overall performance, but ...

Mr. Blasko goes on to support his reasonings and concludes:

All that said, will Existing Wife get the new iMac? It's a long time until Christmas, and if she's naughty enough - and Apple does a sensible thing and drops prices for the holidays - yeah, probably.

Stop by the Nando Times and read the whole article.

The Mac Observer Spin:

The obvious error Mr. Blasko makes is comparing the G4 to a Celeron processor. Any reasonable comparison of processors from the Intel and Motorla camps will match the G4 with the P3 and P4. A better comparison for Mr. Blasko to make would have been between a G3 and the Celeron.

We are also amused that every pundit that says the iMac is too expensive fails to mention that Apple was hardly able to keep up with demand. In fact, Apple is still working on supplying the retail channel.

We're not even going to talk about the floppy drive issue, or his suggestion that his wife must earn the new iMac. We suggest that, after reading Mr. Blasko's article, you stop by AAPLTALK and get a more accurate comparison.

LARRY BLASKO: The powerful, pricey new iMacs