How does everyone feel about the Macless Macworld?

[rubaiyat]

No it won't be endless because all we are trying to do is not buy on the wrong side of a product upgrade.

Much of the rest of what you say is unsubstantiated assertions of what will prove in the end to be wrong. To backdate your assertions, "iMacs won't ever ship with upgradeable Video cards nor 2nd monitor support, that's what Mac Pro's are for" and Time Machine will have a hard time backing up reliably to a drive that is not necessarily connected or turned on.

iLife does ship with new iMacs and the existing versions have flaws one can only hope will be fixed in the next upgrade. I never said iWork gets sold with new Macs, but my son would be buying it with his proposed iMac and simply doesn't want to then in short order have to pay all over again for the next version.

The computer my son is aiming to buy is the shipping iMac 24" with video card upgrade. But that computer will be cheaper and/or better speced in the due upgrade.

To repeat myself, he is trying to avoid the extremely expensive upgrade to Leopard, iLife and iWorks because he will want those, and knowing Apple it will also freeze out certain features from slightly older Macs. Best not to have those just before a major change.

Seems quite obvious to me, I don't know why you are struggling with this, unless when you shop with Apple you just open your wallet and ask Apple to help itself, because it is all going in a good cause. ie Steve Jobs' backdated options.

[rubaiyat]

I previously mentioned my G4 AGP. Within 3 weeks of my purchase it was superceded by a model that had Gigabit ethernet, as well as usable keyboard and mouse. Its AGP slot was the slowest version ever and proved both expensive and difficult to upgrade to another card that would support 2 monitors.

I think it came with only the bare minimum RAM as well. To rub soap in the wounds it crashed straight out of the box and proceeded to progressively become more unstable until I couldn't boot off the hard drive. Took me over a year to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt its problems were due to instability from overheating.

I bought it because I had been waiting years for Apple to finally upgrade their line to something worthwhile. I am not going to repeat that mistake again.

[Lt Major Burns]

i think that, while yes, there is always the 'what if...' factor, there is every possiblity that you could be waiting around for a long time. there is always something cool on the horizon, and always has been. at the moment, it's Leopard, and Blu-ray. a year ago, it was the first Intel macs, a year before that, the 3ghz G5, and a G5 Powerbook, Tiger, a year before that etc.

apple has never shown much trend between their software and hardware releases - i mean it took at least 7 months or so for the mac mini's (which were shipping with Tiger) to even get 512mb RAM as standard. anyone who uses tiger knows that even 512mb is the bare minimum. i don't think that apple will release updates specifically for Leopard, only releases that needed doing anyway, regardless of leopard, it doesn't go hand in hand.

[rubaiyat]

Well it all depends how big a distraction the iPhone has been. It obviously took away resources from Mac projects and was Steve's Lieberskind.

Unfortunately this is one of the consequences I predicted back when the Intel announcement was made. Progressively the Mac will fade as the star of Apple's business as the iPod takes over and Apple will assign less resources to it.

Steve I am sure will have plenty more shocks in store for his loyal Mac users. Like God's testing of Job in the Bible, this Jobs is testing his power over his customers to see how far they can be afflicted before renouncing their devotion to the Mac.